Beverly Buchanan: Weathering

Spike Island presents the first European survey exhibition of the work of Beverly Buchanan (b.1940; d.2015), bringing together five decades of sculpture, painting, drawing, earthworks, artists’ books and rarely-seen archival material. Rooted in the landscapes and histories of the American Southeast, Buchanan developed a singular practice shaped by memory, materiality and place, exploring the enduring legacies of slavery through the histories embedded in architecture, landscape and everyday materials.

Throughout her career, Buchanan returned to structures as repositories of lived experience and historical memory. She began her artistic career in New York City in the early 1970s, studying with Norman Lewis at The Art Student’s League, while working with communities as a public health educator in the Bronx and East Orange, New Jersey. Abstraction became her first visual language, inspired by the weathered surfaces of derelict buildings in the city. What Buchanan described as the ‘aesthetic qualities of decay’ informed her early series of Wall paintings (c.1975–77), first vividly coloured and later almost exclusively black. Like the site-specific environmental works she would later realise upon her return to the South, these paintings responded to the landscapes they inhabited and the histories they held.

Buchanan embraced impermanence as both a material process and a political proposition. Constructed from concrete blocks or tabby and left exposed to the elements, her sculptural earthworks, such as Marsh Ruins (1981), slowly weather and recede into their surroundings. Quietly imposing rather than visibly commemorative, they honour African American lives and histories through persistence and contemplation rather than spectacle. Her sustained attention to material vulnerability and transformation reveals a profound engagement with both a personal and historical consciousness of survival and resilience, legibility and concealment.

Equally central are Buchanan’s celebrated shack sculptures (c.1985–2005), inspired by the vernacular architecture of the American South. Assembled variously from cardboard, foam core, recycled wood, steel and a multitude of other found materials, these intimate yet powerful works draw on the kinds of structures she first encountered during childhood journeys with her adoptive father, then the Dean of Agriculture at South Carolina State College, when he visited the homes of Black tenant farmers and sharecroppers. Buchanan not only studied these hand-built homes, shanties and shotgun houses, but also their builders and occupants. By the early 1990s, she understood her shack sculptures as forms of portraiture; many are accompanied by short stories, which she referred to as ‘legends’, that give voice to a cast of characters both real and imagined. As Buchanan elaborated, ‘I want to give people who can neither read nor write but made all the measurements and built their own barns and shacks a different way of looking at themselves.’ The exhibition also includes many drawn and photographed depictions of shacks, which similarly detail the precarity and ingenuity of these vernacular forms while pointing to the contours of structural violence and inequality that continue to shape the South.