Beverly Buchanan. Untitled (Double Portrait of Artist with Frustula Sculpture), n.d.; black-and-white photograph with original paint marks; 8.5 x 11 in. ©Estate of Beverly Buchanan. Courtesy of Jane Bridges and the Brooklyn Museum.

A comprehensive and long-overdue exhibition of Beverly Buchanan’s work kicks off A Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum—a yearlong program of ten exhibitions celebrating the first decade of the museum’s Elizabeth Sackler Feminist Art Center. In a time when voices of misogyny and white supremacy are gaining renewed validation in national political discourse, exploring assumptions around feminism and what feminist art can be is more vital than ever. Buchanan’s work highlights unmarked and under-recognized histories of African American life in the rural South. Her practice is redemptive and recuperative at its core—each piece a poignant gesture standing in resistance to the currents of history-writing that prioritize white male voices. Beverly Buchanan—Ruins and Rituals is a rewarding exhibition to see, for in addition to giving a much-undersung artist her due, it also reminds us that expanding access to the national historical narrative is a deeply feminist gesture.

Born in Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina, Buchanan spent a lot of her upbringing on the campus of South Carolina State University, where her great-uncle was the dean of the School of Architecture. She went on to earn master’s degrees in both parasitology and public health from Columbia University before working as a public health educator in New Jersey. While in New York, she studied with the painter Norman Lewis at the Art Students League, and found a mentor in Romare Bearden. Buchanan was a visible and known figure in New York’s art scene throughout the ’70s and ’80s until she felt drawn back to the South and resettled in Macon, Georgia.

Her practice traverses sculpture, earthworks, photography, and drawing. While certain bodies of work bear formal and conceptual connections to Post-Minimalism and Land Art, others share more in common with outsider and vernacular art that have drawn inspiration from Buchanan’s native rural South. Despite the range and resistance to classification, a clear through line is the artist’s commitment to testimony: her need to record, mark, and memorialize sites in the U.S. landscape that are embedded with suppressed or little acknowledged legacies of racism, violence, and neglect. Ruins and Rituals reminds us of the thousands of stories that remain untold in our national consciousness—some lost forever.

Beverly Buchanan. Untitled Slab Works 1, circa 1978-1980; black and white photograph of cast concrete sculptures with acrylic paint in artist studio; 8.5 x 11 in. ©Estate of Beverly Buchanan. Courtesy of Jane Bridges and the Brooklyn Museum.

While still in New York and New Jersey, Buchanan began casting sculptures she called Frustula, meaning “fragments.” They were largely inspired by the detritus of destroyed buildings she encountered in her work in public health. These “ruins” were minimalist gestures in their early stages—formal material experiments resembling blocks or slabs. It wasn’t until Buchanan returned to Georgia that she took this studio practice of casting concrete out into the landscape, placing the works as markers on sites where she learned of pivotal moments of local history.

One-third of the Brooklyn Museum exhibition is devoted to these Frustula sculptures and includes video documentation of their installation in specific locations. A trio of stones, titled Marsh Ruins (1981), is placed near St. Simons Island in Georgia, where a group of Igbo people who were sold into slavery collectively drowned themselves in 1803. Buchanan included an outer layer of tabby (a cement made of lime, gravel, and oyster shells) in each stone, a material that had been used to build plantations in the region. Nearby, a historical marker sits on the site where the confederate soldier Sidney Lanier wrote his famous Reconstruction era poem “The Marshes of Glynn.” Another Frustula work, titled Ruins and Rituals (1979), is composed partially of concrete from a nearby railroad bridge, and is placed in view of the relocated and restored Kingfisher Cabin, the site where Harry Stillwell Edwards wrote his 1919 pro-slavery novel Eneas Africanus. Both Marsh Ruins and Ruins and Rituals incorporate local materials tied to the historical suppression of Black life, while sitting in contrast to the official markings and historical preservations that keep Lanier and Edwards’s legacies permanently visible. Buchanan’s works will age, erode, and integrate into the landscape, reminding us how much these sites have absorbed forever, and how the recovery of these stories is a project without end.

Beverly Buchanan. Low Country House, n.d.; wood, 17.75 x 16.75 x 13.25 in. ©Estate of Beverly Buchanan. Courtesy of Jane Bridges and the Brooklyn Museum. Photo: Adam Reich.

Buchanan is best known for her shack sculptures, which make up another third of the exhibition: small scale constructions inspired by a range of architecture the artist researched and encountered during her travels through rural Southern towns. Many are named for the traditional forms they represent—low country house and shotgun house, for instance. Others are given the names of specific people and paired with texts referred to as “legends”—amalgams of different stories inspired by a range of individuals who lived in shacks just like these. Each sculpture is carefully crafted and specific, yet stand as a monument to a way of life inhabited by many. In the performance Out of Control (1991), Buchanan lit a shack on fire and left it for her friends to extinguish. The weight of this single gesture is hard to hold: within it are a thousand stories of violence by fire committed against Black communities. Buchanan’s work offers a way to begin to comprehend the enormity of that loss, and to question if reconciliation with it will ever be possible.

Beverly Buchanan—Ruins and Rituals, installation view. Photo: Jonathan Dorado.

The final section of Ruins and Rituals is devoted to the artist’s archive. Research was clearly integral to the artist’s process: Copious polaroids of herself, postcards, journal entries, and photo documentation of the sites, structures, and people she met are laid out in cases for careful inspection. This is a bevy of rich material, and underlines what Buchanan understood so well in her life’s work: the need to bear witness to what has been lost, and the inability to learn from what we choose not to remember.

Beverly Buchanan—Ruins and Rituals will be on view at the Brooklyn Museum through March 5, 2017.

Beverly Buchanan. Untitled (Double Portrait of Artist with Frustula Sculpture), n.d.; black and white photograph with original paint marks; 8.5 x 11 in. ©Estate of Beverly Buchanan. Courtesy of Jane Bridges and the Brooklyn Museum.

Born in Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina, Buchanan spent a lot of her upbringing on the campus of South Carolina State University, where her great-uncle was the dean of the School of Architecture. She went on to earn master’s degrees in both parasitology and public health from Columbia University before working as a public health educator in New Jersey. While in New York, she studied with the painter Norman Lewis at the Art Students League, and found a mentor in Romare Bearden. Buchanan was a visible and known figure in New York’s art scene throughout the ’70s and ’80s until she felt drawn back to the South and resettled in Macon, Georgia.

Her practice traverses sculpture, earthworks, photography, and drawing. While certain bodies of work bear formal and conceptual connections to Post-Minimalism and Land Art, others share more in common with outsider and vernacular art that have drawn inspiration from Buchanan’s native rural South. Despite the range and resistance to classification, a clear through line is the artist’s commitment to testimony: her need to record, mark, and memorialize sites in the US landscape that are embedded with suppressed or little acknowledged legacies of racism, violence, and neglect. Ruins and Rituals reminds us of the thousands of stories that remain untold in our national consciousness—some lost forever.

Beverly Buchanan. Untitled Slab Works 1, circa 1978-1980; black and white photograph of cast concrete sculptures with acrylic paint in artist studio; 8.5 x 11 in. ©Estate of Beverly Buchanan. Courtesy of Jane Bridges and the Brooklyn Museum.

While still in New York and New Jersey, Buchanan began casting sculptures she called Frustula, meaning fragments. They were largely inspired by the detritus of destroyed buildings she encountered in her work in public health. These “ruins” were minimalist gestures in their early stages—formal material experiments resembling blocks or slabs. It wasn’t until Buchanan returned to Georgia that she took this studio practice of casting concrete out into the landscape, placing the works as markers on sites where she learned of pivotal moments of local history.

One-third of the Brooklyn Museum exhibition is devoted to these Frustula sculptures and includes video documentation of their installation in specific locations. A trio of stones, titled Marsh Ruins (1981), is placed near St. Simons Island in Georgia, where a group of Igbo people who were sold into slavery collectively drowned themselves in 1803. Buchanan included an outer layer of tabby (a cement made of lime, gravel, and oyster shells) in each stone, a material that had been used to build plantations in the region. Nearby, a historical marker sits on the site where the confederate soldier Sidney Lanier wrote his famous Reconstruction era poem “The Marshes of Glynn.” Another Frustula work, titled Ruins and Rituals (1979), is composed partially of concrete from a nearby railroad bridge, and is placed in view of the relocated and restored Kingfisher Cabin, the site where Harry Stillwell Edwards wrote his 1919 pro-slavery novel Eneas Africanus. Both Marsh Ruins and Ruins and Rituals incorporate local materials tied to the historical suppression of Black life, while sitting in contrast to the official markings and historical preservations that keep Lanier and Edwards’s legacies permanently visible. Buchanan’s works will age, erode, and integrate into the landscape, reminding us how much these sites have absorbed forever, and how the recovery of these stories is a project without end.

Beverly Buchanan. Low Country House, n.d.; wood, 17.75 x 16.75 x 13.25 in. ©Estate of Beverly Buchanan. Courtesy of Jane Bridges and the Brooklyn Museum. Photo: Adam Reich.

Buchanan is best known for her shack sculptures, which make up another third of the exhibition: small scale constructions inspired by a range of architecture the artist researched and encountered during her travels through rural Southern towns. Many are named for the traditional forms they represent—low country house and shotgun house, for instance. Others are given the names of specific people and paired with texts referred to as “legends”—amalgams of different stories inspired by a range of individuals who lived in shacks just like these. Each sculpture is carefully crafted and specific, yet stand as a monument to a way of life inhabited by many. In the performance Out of Control (1991), Buchanan lit a shack on fire and left it for her friends to extinguish. The weight of this single gesture is hard to hold: within it are a thousand stories of violence by fire committed against Black communities. Buchanan’s work offers a way to begin to comprehend the enormity of that loss, and to question if reconciliation with it will ever be possible.

Beverly Buchanan—Ruins and Rituals, installation view. Photo: Jonathan Dorado.

The final section of Ruins and Rituals is devoted to the artist’s archive. Research was clearly integral to the artist’s process: Copious polaroids of herself, postcards, journal entries, and photo documentation of the sites, structures, and people she met are laid out in cases for careful inspection. This is a bevy of rich material, and underlines what Buchanan understood so well in her life’s work: the need to bear witness to what has been lost, and the inability to learn from what we choose not to remember.

Beverly Buchanan—Ruins and Rituals will be on view at the Brooklyn Museum through March 5, 2017.

Beverly Buchanan. Old Colored School, 2010; wood and paint; 20.25 x 14.75 x 18.5 in. (51.4 x 37.5 x 47 cm). Courtesy of Andrew Edlin Gallery.

Buchanan’s unique perspective was nurtured through studies with Norman Lewis and Romare Bearden at the Art Students League, and her work has been shown and collected by some significant cultural institutions. Nonetheless, her work has been seen only sporadically in the past decade and a half, mostly in regional art centers. So her inclusion in a 2014 group show at the Studio Museum was in some way an unveiling to a larger public, and now a selection of her works, ranging in date from 1987 to 2012, is on view at Andrew Edlin Gallery.

Edlin has specialized in showing work by artists ranging from the classic position of outsider—socially isolated or low-functioning individuals, such as the now-celebrated Henry Darger and the less-known yet ineffable Charles Steffen—to highly educated and accomplished fine artists such as Victor Moscoso and Chris Doyle; in between are creative practitioners such as Brent Green and Buchanan, who work more roughly or idiosyncratically.

Beverly Buchanan. Still Life House, 2008; foam core, acrylic paint; 9.25 x 8 x 9 in. (23.5 x 20.3 x 22.9 cm). Courtesy of Andrew Edlin Gallery.

Visitors to Buchanan’s show are greeted with a series of seven midsize works of pastel on paper; the largest is Barber Street (1995). The drawings are hung evenly in a line along one wall of a narrow corridor, leading to a well-lit, airy back room that houses eleven small sculptures of various sizes. The smallest, Still Life House (2008), is made of foam core and acrylic, atypical materials for the artist.

Beverly Buchanan. Barber Street, 1995; oil pastel on paper; 25.5 x 38 in. (64.8 x 96.5 cm). Courtesy of Andrew Edlin Gallery.

The sculptures are primarily made of smaller strips of wood of irregular sizes, mostly unpainted. The entirety is gathered together in a smart yet seemingly casual way on one large plinth in the back room, as if a residential community had been formed by the simple accumulation of individual houses and outbuildings. This shared field of presentation makes each sculpture—though somewhat precarious or contingent in material and construction—feel both less pathetic and less precious than if each was isolated on its own shelf or podium or under a vitrine.

The obvious care with which they were constructed belies the description of ramshackle that might be a default for many initial viewings of the models (and the houses or other buildings that might have inspired them). Buchanan states that her sculptures are not reproductions, though the specificity of many of their forms, and especially their titles, suggest that the artist was inspired by particular examples of “offbeat architecture” in the real world, as she calls them.

Beverly Buchanan. My Shed, 2009; wood and metal; 9.75 x 16 x 8 in. (24.8 x 40.6 x 20.3 cm). Courtesy of Andrew Edlin Gallery.

The titles are simultaneously plain-spoken and evocative, whether in quotation or description of general appearance, location, style, or use (for example: Preacher’s Room, Cook’s Shack, Keep Out, My Shed, Modern House 2). More important for the artist than any verisimilitude in emulating real-world models, it would seem, is the larger idea of the choices that make actual buildings both physical and sentimental bases for humans. Buchanan has long referred to the idea of “groundings” in her process of “creating objects that relate to … houses mainly lived in now or abandoned that served as home or an emotional grounding.”[1]

Buchanan’s occasional use of plastic as windowpanes seems a deliberate choice, to stay in the realm of the model. The addition of small plates of slightly worn copper on a few of the sculptures proposes another abstraction: that of construction material’s worth, not only in monetary value but also in its ability to conduct electricity—a different allusion to the grounding notion.

In contrast to the plainness of most of the house sculptures (though a handful have also been painted), the drawings are bright and multicolored. In the two-dimensional works, most striking is the way that the areas of flora and skies surround the central houses in wide arrays of saturated color, in a manner that suggests late Impressionism as much or more than the realism or expressionism favored by some of Buchanan’s mentors at the Art Students League. Such treatments bring the lone buildings in the drawn images—which seem, as in the sculptural versions, somewhat isolated yet defiantly not forlorn—back into the context of a larger world.

Beverly Buchanan: And You May Find Yourself… is on view at Andrew Edlin Gallery through June 13, 2015.

[1] Beverly Buchanan, “Statement,” accessed June 8, 2015, at http://beverlybuchanan.com/about/statement/.