Born in Fuquay, North Carolina, Beverly Buchanan (1940-2015) grew up in South Carolina. By the late 1960s, Buchanan had earned several university degrees in the sciences, and was working as a public health worker and educator in New York City and East Orange, New Jersey.
In 1971, Buchanan enrolled at the Art Students’ League, where she studied with Harlem Renaissance painter Norman Lewis. From that time on, Buchanan devoted her time to making art. In the 1970s, she considered herself an abstract expressionist painter and completed a series of “Wall” paintings which were exhibited at the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey in 1976.
In 1977, Buchanan moved back to the South. From 1979 to 1986, Buchanan made a series of public stone sculptures across the American Southeast, which she allowed to decay over time and become part of the surroundings. Most notably, in 1979 she completed Ruins and Rituals (also the title of the Brooklyn Museum retrospective from 2016-2017), and in 1980 Marsh Ruins, with funding from a Guggenheim Fellowship. Some of these works can still be found, while others have withered away. They contemplate the idea of “ruination” and commemorate the history of Southern Black communities.
By the mid 1980s, Buchanan was exploring Southern vernacular architecture through her practice. She created a series of makeshift sculptures known as “shacks” in which she paid tribute to the improvised and self-built homes of Black communities in rural Georgia. Often attached to her sculptures were hand-written or typed narratives, which she referred to as “legends,” that gave voice to a cast of characters, some remembered and others imagined.
Buchanan’s later work is intimately linked to her natural surroundings and folk art. As a native Southerner, she drew on memories from her childhood as well as the lush Georgian landscape and yard art of local self-taught artists. A passionate gardener, Buchanan produced vivid oil pastel flower drawings and small assemblage works.
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.
