Beverly’s Athens
Athenaeum
January 17–March 20, 2026
Athens, GA

While living in Athens, Georgia, from the late 1980s to 2010, Beverly Buchanan (1940–2015) gifted her pulmonologist, pharmacist, neighbors, and friends a variety of impromptu artworks—sometimes out of gratitude and sometimes in lieu of payment. Juxtaposed with her better known sculptures, pastel drawings, and photographs of “shacks,” as she called them—which wrestled with the discrimination and economic disparity inherent in Southern vernacular architecture—the work on view in Beverly’s Athens surprises by showcasing the humorous side of the influential artist. Curated by artists Mo Costello and Katz Tepper for the Athenaeum, a contemporary art center affiliated with the University of Georgia and its Lamar Dodd School of Art, the show primarily sources from the collections of Buchanan’s local friends and community members, bringing together amusing, slapdash works, related ephemera, and a treasure trove of archival materials to offer a more expansive view of her years in the small Southern college town. In doing so, Costello and Tepper, both of whom have spent significant time in Athens, introduce a fresh approach to exhibition-making: demonstrating how lived experiences shape an artist’s process and suggesting that those relationships, circumstances, and spontaneous gestures are often fundamental to the artwork itself.

The exhibition reveals how Buchanan’s strong connections to her community and the alternative economy those ties helped create became essential to her survival as she navigated multiple chronic illnesses in her later years. In a letter to her New York City-based gallery in the early 1990s, Buchanan wrote, “Over the past decade, my health has dramatically deteriorated and many new allergies have cropped up as a result of many medications prescribed to treat these medical maladies.” She often approached her health challenges with self-deprecating caricatures, as in one particularly crude drawing, featured in a sketchbook, portraying herself in bed at Athens Regional Hospital. A quote above her head reads, “Person Ate Weird Food,” accompanied by rough sketches of a nebulizer, insulin, and a monitor displaying MTV. At the bottom of the drawing, she noted, “I was in the hospital. I’m out now. Feeling better.”

A substantial portion of the exhibition serves as a tribute to Hawthorne Drugs, Buchanan’s longtime pharmacy still in operation today, which she described in 1993 as “a social, friendly place, where you can eat lunch while waiting for your arthritis medicine.” In 1992, she crafted a chair from plastic compounding pharmacy spatulas, cut and pasted together in a manner similar to her acclaimed “shack” sculptures, for Andy and Debbie Ullrich, the owners of the pharmacy. (Debbie had given her the old spatulas, figuring she might enjoy working with them.) Hawthorne was a hub for Buchanan, as evidenced in the Polaroids, writings, and even a T-shirt she designed, titled PEOPLE EVERYWHERE COME TO HAWTHORNE DRUG (1993), depicting her trademark “shack” drawings surrounded by reasons why the pharmacy draws a reliable crowd, including, “competent care…clean air…fun people, chicken salad, nasty dogs.” The pharmacy also displayed, at various points, Buchanan’s hodgepodge spirit jugs, cobbled together homes, and lopsided chairs, all small sculptures made from a miscellany of found objects—like buttons, seashells, bobbins, beads shaped as Christmas lights, lag screws, ointment tins, bandage boxes, or a miniature straw sun hat balanced on a painted black silhouette. She was deeply appreciative of Andy and Debbie, who sometimes accepted these works in lieu of monetary payment. A postcard on display depicting one of her “shack” sculptures is cheekily inscribed: “For my pharmacist who I love very much … Yes, his wife knows.”