Beverly Buchanan's playful portraits of hardscrabble houses and churches create a dramatic dialogue with the ordinary.

By Brenda Coates

In the 1970s, when Beverly Buchanan, an African American artist born in North Carolina in 1940, was beginning her career in New York, she was one of a group of young artists who turned their backs on Abstract Expressionism, Pop and other forms of modern art.  This art, they charged, had become nothing more than a commodity to be exchanged for goods.  

  Such rebels as Robert Smithson, Judy Holt, Michael Heizer and Richard Long sought new forms divorced from commerce and began making art that could not be sold in galleries: earth art,  performance art and conceptual art.  Like them, Buchanan still believed in the social significance and function of art.  Her early sculptural works were site specific and consisted of large black blocks resembling outcroppings.  They recalled Stonehenge and primitive spaces for rituals whose meanings have been lost.

 Although she was gaining recognition in New York, Buchanan moved to Georgia in 1977, where she revisited her childhood and began to reflect on her past in playful works that created a dramatic dialogue with the ordinary.  In a recent interview, Buchanan remembered that her decision to come back to the South met with negativity from her New York peers.  "My artist friends told me that if I returned to the South no one will ever hear your name again and you are going to get worms," she said with characteristic humor.

  She received encouragement, however, from the North Carolina-born artist Romare Bearden, a close friend and mentor, who told her, "Enjoy yourself, life is an adventure."   The return South proved productive for Buchanan, where she began to draw inspiration from Southern vernacular architecture.

  By the mid-1980s, she was creating a series of sculptures and two-dimensional pieces evoking rural houses with names as pragmatic as their inhabitants: single pen, double pen, saddlebag, dog trot.  These Southern shacks were close friends to Buchanan, who saw them all around in the towns of her childhood.  She was adopted by her uncle and aunt, Walter and Marian Buchanan, and toured the countryside with her  father when he consulted with farmers in his position as dean of the School of Agriculture at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg.  After she began her shack portraits, she learned that Walter Buchanan's thesis at Ohio State University in 1929 had been on "Negroes As Tenant Farmers In South Carolina."  In 1988, she visited a weathered schoolhouse near Lillington, N.C., where her grandmother taught Indian children.  Both discoveries strengthened her attraction to the soulful magic of Southern shacks and their tenants.

 Buchanan's paintings - minimal constructions of flattened shapes painted in cheerful primary colors - might evoke the tired gibe, "My child could do that."  This overlooks the difficulty a sophisticated artist chooses when she abandons her adult judgment and good taste to enter her childhood and memories.  The reality of poverty and other hardships faced by minorities flows through all Buchanan's pieces, both early and late.  She reveres the creativity of everyday "folk," a word she says she reserves for people from the South, where her kinship lies.

 In "Shanty Town," "No Doors No Windows" and "Liberated Shack," three of Buchanan's mixed media works from the 1980s and 1990s, the artist takes up her childhood materials of oil pastels and markers.  With a minimal outline of the shacks she identifies their ancestry and completes their portraits through energetic marks of intense colors.

Buchanan's current work extends the shack series to religious edifices she encountered on every street corner on a 2008 trip through south Florida.  Located in old store fronts and in abandoned or decrepit structures, with additions of found wall fragments and materials left over from past hurricanes, the buildings are collages of textures and multiple bright colors.   Their names - Soul Fighters for Jesus Ministries, Church of the Return Ministries, First Newborn Holiness Ministries - suggest these buildings are as pragmatic as the earlier shack styles.   They refer, not to a specific denomination, but to salvation in hard times in predominately black neighborhoods.  

In such mixed media pieces as "Hoping Hands, House of God #2," "Haitian Ministries"  and "Hurricane House," the artist conveys the sense of helplessness she shares with the people in these neighborhoods.  They are constructed of foam core and other low cost materials and painted in island colors of cerulean blue, lime green, turquoise and hot pink.  These religious edifices reflect the "make-do" sensibility of their worshipers and speak to the vitality of the folk in whom Buchanan continues to be grounded.


Brenda Coates is a sculptor who teaches  art history at Western Carolina University.