As a curator, he has helped push both museums and academic institutions toward greater diversity and inclusiveness. Together with Jane Livingston, he organized the landmark 1982 exhibition Black Folk Art in America, 1930-1980 for the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which revealed the extraordinary creativity among African Americans who were economically, educationally, and politically disadvantaged in the Jim Crow era. In 1987, Beardsley and Livingston organized Hispanic Art in the United States: Thirty Contemporary Painters and Sculptors for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which showcased the remarkably diverse talents of Latino artists, both tutored and self-taught, ranging from descendants of Spanish settlers in the Southwest to recent emigres from Latin America and including, among others, Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, and Puerto Ricans. In 2002, again for MFAH, this time with curator Alvia Wardlaw, Livingston and Beardsley organized the celebrated exhibition The Quilts of Gees Bend, which featured the exceptional, improvised abstract-patterned quilts made by the women of a small, virtually all Black town in Alabama.

Over the same years, Beardsley pursued a deep interest in environmental art and landscape architecture. In 1977, for the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., he curated what was only the second major museum exhibition of land art, which led to the book Earthworks and Beyond: Contemporary Art in the Landscape (1984). This book went through four editions, the most recent in 2006. In 1997, he was invited to curate an exhibition of site-specific installations entitled Human/Nature: Art and Landscape in Charleston and the Low Country, for the Spoleto Festival USA, which included the work of both artists and landscape architects. At times, his interests in landscape and outsider art coincided, as in the book Gardens of Revelation: Environments by Visionary Artists (1995). He has since written extensively on contemporary art, landscape design, and the art of the self-taught, including, most recently, the book James Castle: Memory Palace (2021).

Beardsley’s interest in the art and design of landscape led to invitations to teach in the departments of landscape architecture at the University of Virginia, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard, where he was an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Design from 1998-2013. He also served as director of Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard’s institute for research in the humanities in Washington, D.C., from 2008-19. He continues to serve as consulting curator for visual arts programs at Dumbarton Oaks. From 2019-2024, he was the inaugural curator of the Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize for the Cultural Landscape Foundation, Washington, D.C.

Trained as an art historian, Beardsley received an A.B. from Harvard and a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. He lives in Virginia. View CV here.