The expansive artistic practice of artist, scientist, and self-taught cultural anthropologist Beverly Buchanan (1940-2015) defies categorization. Over the course of her career as an artist, she engaged in various ways with abstract expressionism, post-minimalism, land art, and feminist art. Her later “Shackworks,” the assemblages for which she is best known, are sometimes equated with the vernacular traditions that inspired them. Iconographically, stylistically, and materially, Buchanan’s work addresses personal, historical, and geographic memories, the racially burdened histories of the places where Buchanan lived and worked, and the passage of time.

Buchanan was born in Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina and was raised by her great-aunt and great-uncle in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Her uncle served as the Dean of the School of Agriculture at South Carolina State University; she often accompanied him on visits to tenant farmers around the state, and the inventiveness of the homes and other structures these individuals constructed from whatever materials were available to them made a lasting impression on the artist. While she often said that her passion for “making things” commenced during her childhood, Buchanan initially pursued a career in medicine. She earned a bachelor’s degree in medical technology at Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina, and received master’s degrees in parasitology (1968) and public health (1969) at Columbia University in New York City, then worked as a public health educator in New Jersey for several years. In 1971, Buchanan enrolled in a class taught by abstract expressionist painter Norman Lewis (1909-1979) at the Art Students’ League. Several of Buchanan’s early abstract paintings were included in a group exhibition and then a solo show at Cinque Gallery, co-founded by Lewis and painter and collage artist Romare Bearden (1911-1988) to promote the work of emerging Black artists; both Lewis and Bearden became her mentors and friends. In 1977, after more than a decade living in New York and New Jersey, Buchanan turned down an opportunity to attend medical school and returned to the south, to Macon, Georgia, to focus on her art rather than becoming, as she said, “a doctor who paints.”1 She subsequently moved to Atlanta and then Athens, Georgia, and in 2003, to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she spent the remainder of her life.

Painted during or shortly after her studies with Lewis, Buchanan’s Honey, c. 1971-76, is exemplary of her investigation of abstract expressionism. Comprised of all-over, gestural marks and swaths and daubs of color, some carefully outlined, Honey suggests the organic vitality of the process by which this sweet substance comes into being. The painting’s energy emanates from its midpoint to its edges as the honey-colored yellows, oranges, and browns that fill the canvas radiate outward from the painting’s center. While living and working in New York and New Jersey, Buchanan also incorporated the visual effects of architectural deterioration and the material detritus of demolition sites into her abstract paintings.

By the late 1970s, Buchanan’s exploration of the aesthetics of architectural decay took the form of abstract sculptures that are materially imbued with social resonance. Using molds that she made from fragments of found stone and brick salvaged from architectural demolition sites, she cast these forms in cement mixed with locally sourced clay and ground stone. In a nod to minimalism that is complicated by these objects’ references to histories of the built environment, construction materials, and social processes, she arranged them as sculptural assemblages on the floors of the spaces in which they were exhibited. Her relocation to Georgia is marked by her shift to oyster shell tabby as the substance from which she cast these architectural fragments. The place-based historical memory of enslavement is materially embedded in these works, for, in the coastal south, enslaved builders employed tabby as a construction material, made from oyster shells that were heated over a fire; crushed; mixed with sand, water, ash, and broken shells; and formed into structural elements.

Untitled, c. 1980, made from tabby, invokes this history as well as the impact of time on the vernacular architecture of the rural south. Its eroded geometric brick and wall forms suggest abandoned and crumbling architectural structures, as well as the weathering process Buchanan evoked in the environmental sculptures she began making following her return to the south. Buchanan intended these site-specific, land-based installations to decay over time, often titling them as “ruins” in anticipation of their decomposition. She completed her first large-scale environmental sculpture, Ruins and Rituals, on the grounds of Macon’s Museum of Arts and Sciences in 1979, and in 1981, with funding from a Guggenheim Fellowship, constructed Marsh Ruins.2

During the 1980s, returning to the rural vernacular architecture that drew her attention as a child, Buchanan began depicting home-built shacks in exuberantly gestural and colorful oil pastel drawings and assemblages she built from repurposed wood and other found materials. These drawings and sculptures pay homage to the southern rural Black women who create “something out of nothing” when constructing their homes, an architectural tradition Buchanan said has been too often overlooked in the south.3 They also honor self-taught artists such as Nellie Mae Rowe (1900-1982) who fashioned the often-astonishing yard art that Buchanan also found inspirational.

In a 1986 interview with Judith Wilson, published in Essence magazine, Buchanan said, “A lot of my pieces have the word ‘ruins’ in their titles because I think that tells you this object has been through a lot and survived—that’s the idea behind the sculptures…it’s like ‘Here I am; I’m still here!’”4 Across multiple artistic genres and conceptual and stylistic approaches, Buchanan’s work bears witness to the creativity and ingenuity of the makers and builders whose work inspired her, to processes of decomposition and regeneration, and to the persistence and survival of objects and people, against all odds.

Melanie Anne Herzog