Beverly Buchanan (1940–2015) was born in Fuquay, NC, and raised in Orangeburg, SC, on the campus of South Carolina State University, where her father served as dean of the School of Agriculture. She earned a bachelor’s of science from Bennett College, a master’s of science and master’s of public health from Columbia University, and took classes at the Art Students League before leaving the public health profession in 1977 to pursue art full-time. For much of her artistic career, Buchanan lived in Georgia—first in Macon from 1977–85, then Atlanta from 1985–87, and in Athens from 1987–2010 (split between Ann Arbor, MI and Athens from 2003–10). In her lifetime, Buchanan received major honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and her work is held in leading institutions such as the High Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her retrospectives include
Shack Works (1994–96), which originated at the Montclair Art Museum, NJ; and the posthumous exhibitions
Ruins and Rituals (2016, originated at the Brooklyn Museum) and
Weathering (2025, Haus am Waldsee, Berlin).
Judith McWillie (b. 1946) was born and raised in Memphis, TN, where she earned her undergraduate degree in painting at Memphis State University, followed by her MFA at Ohio State University. In 1974, she moved to Athens, GA, to teach painting at the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art. She began recording videos with yard artists in 1984, and donated her vast videography to the Southern Folklife Collection of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2011. The author of numerous essays in arts and culture publications including Public Art Review, Visions Art Quarterly, Metropolis, and Artforum, she is coauthor with Grey Gundaker of
No Space Hidden: The Spirit of African American Yard Work, winner of the 2007 James Mooney Award of the Southern Anthropological Society. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens; the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, GA; and Christian Brothers University in Memphis.
Mo Costello (b. 1989) is an artist, educator, and independent archivist in Athens, Georgia.
Katz Tepper (b. 1987) is an artist and writer who plays with video, text, and other materials in Chicago, Illinois.
Costello and Tepper co-curated the 2026 exhibition
Beverly’s Athens: Beverly Buchanan in Athens Georgia at the University of Georgia’s Athenaeum, with support from the Teiger Foundation; a catalog is forthcoming from Institute 193, with support from the Graham Foundation The exhibition, which received reviews in
Art in America,
The Brooklyn Rail,
Flagpole, and
Hyperallergic, was featured in the
Georgia Review Winter 2026 Issue, where Costello and Tepper’s curatorial essay, “Medical Arts: Disabled Kinship as Methodology,” was published alongside essays by Patricia Ekpo and Bryn Ashley Evans.
