Patching-Up
Cedar, acrylic, and glue
9 1/4 x 8 x 11 7/8 inches
2009
Work on loan: The Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg, Pennsylvania
As Exhibited in:
Our Own Work, Our Own Way: Ascendant Women in the Johnson Collection, The Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg, Pennsylvania, 2025
Elevation from Within: The Study of Art at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, 2019–2024, TJC Gallery, Spartanburg, South Carolina, 2019; Richardson Family Art Museum, Wofford College, Spartanburg, South Carolina, 2021; Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee, 2022, Florida A&M University, Tallahassee, Florida, 2023, Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland, 2024
At the mid-point of her life, Beverly Ann Buchanan left behind a successful public health career in New York to become an artist rooted—aesthetically and geographically—in the American South. Never one to adhere to a single style or medium, she is best-known for her sculptural “shacks”—loose interpretations of the dilapidated cabins that punctuate the Southern landscape. For Buchanan, these shacks represent the identity of place, the persistence of memory, and serve as a testament to human resilience in the face of poverty and racism. “My work is about response and memory,” the artist said. “It is a process of creating objects that relate to the physical world through perception rather than reproduction.”
Born in Fuquay, North Carolina, Beverly Buchanan was raised by her great-aunt and uncle in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Her adoptive father, dean of the school of agriculture at South Carolina State University, encouraged her ambition to attend medical school. At Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina, Buchanan earned a bachelor’s degree in medical technology and subsequently enrolled at New York’s Columbia University to obtain advanced degrees in parasitology and public health. She found work as a medical technician at the Veteran’s Administration in the Bronx and then as a public health educator in New Jersey.
In 1971, Buchanan began taking courses at the Art Students League with Norman Lewis, and, through Lewis, met Romare Bearden. After a few successful exhibitions, she relocated to Macon, Georgia, in 1977. It was there that Buchanan conceived her “ruins,” cement slabs or clay molds often rubbed with ground rocks or tabby concrete. The site-specific earthworks—arranged in rows and stacks and displayed in situ on low platforms—succumb to the forces of nature, underscoring the relationship between landscape and memory.
Roots/Routes: Mobility and Displacement in Art of the American South, 2023, Richardson Family Art Center, Wofford Collecge, Spartanburg, South Carolina
Other works by this artist