Beverly Buchanan

b. 1940, Fuquay, North Carolina
d. 2015, Ann Harbor, Michigan

venue

Ogden Museum of Southern Art
925 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Monday–Sunday, 10 AM – 5 PM

neighborhood

Downtown/Central Business District (CBD)

About the project

Beverly Buchanan’s small sculptures represent talismans of Southern rural Black life. Buchanan grew up in South Carolina; the daughter of a professor of agriculture, she regularly accompanied him on surveys of tenant farmers to document the rural dwellings and lifeways of the American South. These visits were foundational to Buchanan’s lifelong interest in African American vernacular practices of building and storytelling, as well as to her keen attunement to the relationships among site and history. This study materialized in her most prolific and acclaimed body of work, her shack sculptures.

 Roughly assembled from humble materials like wood, cardboard, rusted metal, and painted foam core, these miniature houses are both imagined and drawn from real structures that served as domestic spaces for families and individuals. Though most of the original structures and communities do not survive, in their time, the buildings withstood the violent whims of the natural world, while their inhabitants endured the violent whims of other people in their region. Buchanan’s shacks commemorate places of return, reform, and resistance, and ask us to examine what safely, comfort, and home mean.

About the artist

Beverly Buchanan’s work centers on the character of the dwellings typical of the vernacular architecture of the South, of which she was a native, having been born and raised in the Carolinas. Originally intending to become a physician, Buchanan earned degrees in science and medical subjects. However, after earning dual master’s degrees in parasitology (1968) and public health (1969) from Columbia University, New York, she elected to pursue art rather than medical school. She was drawn to the underlying symbolism of strength and perseverance associated with the “shacks”and ruins that she painted and sculpted. For her, they were not the abject structures that others saw, but rather examples of persistence, presence, and survival. She used rudimentary materials, such as wood scraps, to create semi-abstract replicas of homes, schools, barns, and cabins. Buchanan was twice named a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow (1980, 1990) and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (1980). Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina; and the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia. In 2016 her work was the subject of a comprehensive exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, Beverly Buchanan–Ruins and Rituals.

Beverly Buchanan, 2021. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photo: Jonathan Traviesa