Foundation awards $75K for Athenaeum, UGA Press project

This story was published on Aug. 27, 2024, on the Lamar Dodd School of Art site.

The Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia is thrilled to announce that curators Mo Costello and Katz Tepper have received the 2024 Single Project Grant from Teiger Foundation—a private foundation devoted exclusively to supporting contemporary art curators. Teiger Foundation has awarded Costello and Tepper $75,000 to support the posthumous exhibition, publication, and symposium “Beverly’s Athens,” scheduled for 2026 in partnership with University of Georgia Press and the Athenaeum, UGA’s downtown contemporary art space.

Organized in the city of Athens, GA, where artist Beverly Buchanan lived from 1987 to 2010, “Beverly’s Athens” will situate Buchanan’s expansive practice from this period in the local and lived conditions that shaped her work. Slated for January 2026, “Beverly’s Athens” will emphasize two major, intertwined threads from Buchanan’s Athens years: the artist’s modes of surviving chronic illness in the absence of equitable healthcare systems, and the artist’s multidisciplinary efforts to study and commemorate Black Southern geography, traditions, and forms.

Co-curators Mo Costello and Katz Tepper use immersive research methodologies to holistically reconstruct the larger ecosystem surrounding the artist’s time in Athens. Borrowing primarily from the artist’s local friends, supporters, and caregivers, curatorial selections will group Buchanan’s sculptures and drawings with the artist’s abundance of print media, texts, photography, autobiographical ephemera, and research materials. Buchanan’s extensive documentation of disappearing vernacular architectures – a practice she defines in the title  “Historical Preservation through Art”¹ –  will be further contextualized with materials from present-day initiatives in Athens to recognize and redress the Black communities forcibly displaced by urban renewal in the 1960s.

During the run of the exhibition, Buchanan’s work will also be on view at the local pharmacy and neighborhood luncheonette where Buchanan filled medications, socialized, and exhibited sculptures and drawings. This site-specific engagement renders care, dependence, and place as inextricable from the works centered in “Beverly’s Athens.”

Teiger Foundation advances innovative curatorial practice in contemporary art, supporting projects that further new research, broaden opportunities for diversity and inclusion, and embrace more sustainable practices. This year, the Foundation awarded $3.9 million to US curators at organizations of all sizes to conduct research, mount exhibitions, and host touring shows, and curators at organizations with budgets of $3.5 million and below to realize three years of programming.

Congrats to all of the 2024 #TeigerFoundation grantees!

For any inquiries, please email DoddComm@uga.edu.

Beverly Buchanan Bio

Beverly Buchanan was born in Fuquay, North Carolina and lived in New York City; New Jersey; Macon, GA; Athens, GA; and Ann Arbor, MI. She studied at the Art Students League with Harlem Renaissance painter Norman Lewis. In the 1970s she worked as an abstract expressionist painter. In the late 1970s she moved back to the south where she worked on “Ruins and Rituals” and “Marsh Ruins” from 1977-1980. These works, several of which are still visible today, consider the idea of “ruination” and commemorate the history of southern

Black communities. In the mid-1980s Buchanan created a series of “shacks” or makeshift sculptures which paid tribute to the improvised and self-built homes of Black communities in rural Georgia. In her later work, she continued to link her work to vernacular folk art as he drew on memories of her childhood as well as the lush Georgian landscape to create vivid oil pastel drawings. The winner of numerous honors during her long career, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Buchanan’s work is in the permanent collections of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Metropolitan Museum of Art: the Studio Museum in Harlem: and the Whitney Museum, among others. A posthumous solo retrospective, “Ruins and Rituals,” curated by Jennifer Burris and Park McArthur, was held at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2016-17.

Curator Bios

Mo Costello is an artist and educator drawn to the social life of objects. Costello’s working practice revolves around the maintenance of small-scale, community supported infrastructure for the visual and performing arts. Curatorial projects include J & J Center (2017-Current), The Zero with faggirl for Murmur Media (2018) and NEWSPAPER: ATLANTA with publisher Marcelo Gabriel Yañez (2017). In 2023, Costello organized a house exhibition of the artist Beverly Buchanan. Located a few blocks from Buchanan’s former residence, the exhibition was accompanied by a concurrent installation of Buchanan’s work at her long-term pharmacy. A recipient of recent residencies from Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2022), Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (2024) and Denniston Hill (2024), Costello resides in Athens, Georgia where she currently serves as the interim Gallery Director at the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art.

Katz Tepper is an artist and guest co-curator for the exhibit and publication ‘Beverly’s Athens’ at the Athenaeum. Tepper’s work as a practicing artist has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Atlanta Contemporary, White Columns, NY, Cushion Works, SF, and Laurel Gitlen, NY, and has screened at the Tang Museum in Sarasota Springs, the British Film Institute, and Fluentum, Berlin. Their work has been supported by the Wynn Newhouse Award, the New Jewish Culture Fellowship, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and through residencies at MacDowell and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Tepper’s art writing has been published in Burnaway Magazine and the 2024 Gwangju Biennale guidebook. Tepper served as instructor in foundations and sculpture at the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art from 2022 to 2024. Tepper earned a BFA from the Cooper Union (2010) and an MFA in Sculpture from the Milton Avery School of Art at Bard College (2021).