Beverly Buchanan (1940-2015) was an African American artist whose vast and varied body of work deals with time, memory, and perception through observations of vernacular architecture. Buchanan’s work presents powerful visual narratives informed by her experiences in the rural South, and has attracted great interest among scholars, artists, and collectors.

Her oeuvre – most of which was created while living in Georgia from 1977 to 2003 – encompasses painting and works on paper, site-specific cast concrete sculpture
installations, wood assemblage structures, writing, and photography. 

Born in Fuquay, North Carolina, and reared in Orangeburg, South Carolina, Buchanan studied medical technology at Bennett College (NC) and earned two master's degrees in parasitology and public health from Columbia University (NY) by 1969. Her artistic career,
however, began in 1971 when she enrolled in a class at the Art Students League in New York City taught by Norman Lewis. The next year, Buchanan’s work was featured in a solo exhibition at the Cirque Gallery in New York. In 1977, she moved to Georgia to devote her
full attention to art – first settling in Macon for eight years, then living briefly in Atlanta before relocating to Athens.

During her 25 years in Georgia, Buchanan produced landmark bodies of work, including cast concrete and mixed media sculptures, drawings and books, plus evocative paintings and photographs. “From sculptures that decay and crumble in situ to drawings that act as
both preparatory note and completed work, Buchanan tested the contours of traditional art practice,” according to curators Jennifer Burris and Park McArthur.

Her career—which spanned five decades—focused on “ideas of personal and historical memory, disuse and reuse, monument and gravestone, portraiture and site, and spectrums of visibility and invisibility. Throughout, Buchanan considered the possibility for her work to change and shift over time as fundamental to its existence in the world. These changes could be either the effects of the environment on her site-specific cast concrete sculptures or societal shifts that force into relief new meanings of an older artwork.”

Buchanan was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in sculpture in 1980, was a Georgia Visual Arts honoree in 1997, and received an Anonymous Was a Woman Award in 2002. In 2005, she was a distinguished honoree of the College Art Association Committee for Women in the Arts. Her work has been widely exhibited throughout the United States and is held in dozens of private and public collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, Modern Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. A substantive collection of Buchanan’s artist statements, writings, sketches, photographs, and exhibition
documents is preserved in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

Her work has been described as both representation and abstraction, anthropological and intimate, vernacular/folk and outsider/political. Art critics and collectors associate Buchanan’s work with Norman Lewis and Romare Bearden, with whom she studied. In addition to dozens of her own solo exhibitions at major museums, her work has been included in major group exhibitions alongside Kara Walker, Amy Sherald, Kerry James Marshall, Radcliffe Bailey, Benny Andrews, Thornton Dial, Minnie Evans, Howard Finster, Theaster Gates, and Carrie Mae Weems. 

Although academically trained, Buchanan used the tools often associated with the self-taught artist, such as inserted text, found objects, and loosely applied vibrant color, to create the rich textures of the humble, yet complex, environments and structures of her drawings, sculptures, prints, and photographs. Living in the South for the majority of her career, the artist took inspiration from the natural landscapes that surrounded her, from the salt marsh and fields of tall grass to simple articles of domestic life and rural poverty. 

The gravity of Buchanan’s artwork is widely recognized by private collectors and public institutions. Since her death, the artist's work has been folded into a broader discourse about outsider art and resistance politics, with greater intensity following major posthumous solo retrospective exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, Spelman College Museum of Art, and Studio Museum in Harlem. 

Buchanan’s work strengthens Georgia’s cultural assets immeasurably. The state is host to three of seven important environmental sculpture installations completed by Buchanan: “Ruins and Rituals” located on the grounds of the Museum of Arts and Sciences, “Unity Stones” at the Booker T. Washington Center (Macon), and Marsh Ruins (Brunswick). These installations have received international attention and been studied by numerous art historians. Intended to wither away, these works contemplate the idea of “ruination” and commemorate the history of Southern Black communities. 

By the mid 1980s, Buchanan began exploring Southern vernacular architecture through her well-known “shack” series, including both two and three-dimensional depictions of shacks, in which she paid tribute to the improvised and self-built homes of Black communities in rural Georgia. Often attached to her shack sculptures were hand-written or typed narratives that gave voice to a cast of characters, some remembered and others imagined. These small tabletop wood assemblage structures are captivating objects – deceptively ramshackle works made from humble materials that evoke rich narratives about people and labor in the American South. 

Her sea grass paintings, inspired by salt marshes along the coast, also explore the complex racial dynamics of the rural South. Through her large-scale sculpture commissions, the artist sought out sites where the tall grass would surround and overcome her “ruins” and installed these sculptural works in the landscape to acknowledge important places in African American history that have been forgotten—quietly intervening in the landscape and memorializing sites of racial disparity or violence. 

Throughout her career, Buchanan created enduring and insightful work that was intimately linked to her natural surroundings and folk art. "... 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!'"