Beverly Buchanan

American artist Beverly Buchanan (1940–2015) explored the politics of commemoration and place, engaging with the enduring realities of racial violence.

Through her large-scale environmental works — often integrated into and eventually reclaimed by the landscape — as well as her sculptures and drawings of “shacks” — improvised homes in the American South — she engaged with the ordinary, the invisible and the spiritual, to point at that what official histories chose to omit, ignore, or erase. In this way, her work reframes what is typically dismissed as ’empty’ or ‘inadequate’ as forms of intelligence and powerful expressions of resistance, remembrance, and transformation.

Beverly Buchanan – Title unknown (Cabin Landscape) (approx. 1993)
Beverly Buchanan – Marsh Ruins Zine for Guggenheim Fellowship report (1982)

• Fobrux

Inspired by houses and barns that poor communities built by hand, Beverly Buchanan’s ‘shacks’ tell stories of Black culture, class, and heritage in the American South. As many were disappearing due to new real estate projects, Buchanan documented them as a liberating, affective, and spiritual building tradition — one in which people not only created space for themselves, but also for the swamp beneath.

With thanks to Matthew Genitempo