Beverly Buchanan: Ruination and Regeneration

Born in North Carolina and raised in South Carolina, Beverly Buchanan (1940–2015) left a successful career in public health at the age of thirty-seven to devote herself fully to art. Under the mentorship of Norman Lewis at the Art Students League in New York, she developed an abstract mode of painting rooted in weathered walls, fractured surfaces, and the accumulated textures of the city. What began as an investigation of painted surfaces gradually expanded into an engagement with the places she inhabited and observed, from the weathered streetscapes of New York to the gardens, rural roads, and coastal landscapes of Georgia.

Ruination and Regeneration is structured around key works in Buchanan’s career that trace the evolution of her artistic ethos across a breadth of media. A presentation of photographs and archival materials foregrounds documentation as an essential part of Buchanan's artistic process. She photographed, annotated, collected, and revisited the places around her, creating an archive she continually reworked in her art. For Buchanan, places were never simply observed; they were reimagined through art.

The exhibition includes formative paintings from the mid-1970s, including Brick Church Wall, shown in Buchanan's first museum exhibition at the Montclair Art Museum in 1976, alongside Morning and early works on paper. These works reveal how Buchanan transformed walls, façades, and eroded surfaces into a distinctive visual vocabulary that informed everything that followed.

Buchanan expanded this inquiry through cast concrete sculpture and ambitious site- specific installations when she relocated to Georgia in the late 1970s, and a rare group of cast concrete works, originally installed in the gardens of Buchanan's Athens homes, form the core of the next section of the exhibition. Two hand-painted signposts, evoke the setting in which they were originally displayed. A garden drawing, a flower study, and Polaroids of the surrounding landscape illuminate the relationship between Buchanan's art and the environment she carefully cultivated. Terracotta architectural constructions, a work from the Seagrass series inspired by the marsh grasses of coastal Georgia, and photographs documenting weathered vernacular structures encountered during her travels through rural Georgia—many annotated with locations including Bishop, Bogart, and Lamar County—demonstrate how observation and artistic invention remained inseparable throughout Buchanan’s career.

A section is devoted to Buchanan's iconic shacks, bringing together her landmark wooden shack sculptures from the late 1980s and early 1990s, a painted foam-core construction, and expressive oil pastel drawings, including an expansive work on paper from around 1993. This richly composed work on paper, with its cluster of vividly colored shacks seen from multiple viewpoints, exemplifies the imaginative breadth that characterized Buchanan's production during this period. The wooden sculptures likewise reflect Buchanan's shift from painted surfaces to the natural grain and warm tones of reclaimed Georgia heart pine, allowing the material itself to become an essential expressive element. Two sculptures—a pair of carved wooden figures and the large-scale assemblage Untitled (Wooden Figure Group)—further expand Buchanan's exploration of vernacular architecture by making explicit the human presence her buildings so often imply.