Афроамерикалық суретші Беверли Бьюкененнің өнері мен өмірі

African American artist

Beverly Buchanan (October 8, 1940 – July 4, 2015) was an African American artist whose works include painting, sculpture, video, and land art. Buchanan is noted for her exploration of Southern vernacular architecture through her art.

Buchanan was born in Fuquay, North Carolina, and was raised by her great aunt and uncle in Orangeburg, South Carolina, where her adoptive father was dean of the School of Agriculture at South Carolina State College—then the only state school for African Americans in South Carolina. Buchanan spent a considerable amount of time with her father on his trips where he would work with rural farmers, advising them in their farming processes. In 1962, Buchanan graduated from Bennett College, in Greensboro, North Carolina, a historically black women's college, with a Bachelor of Science degree in medical technology. She went on to attend Columbia University, where she received a master's degree in parasitology in 1968, and a master's degree in public health in 1969. In the same year, she moved to Macon, Georgia. She "wanted to see what the wall looked like on the other side" and put four walls together in three dimensions. Buchanan is best known for her many paintings and sculptures on the "shack," a rudimentary dwelling associated with the poor. Scholar Janet T. Marquardt argues that Buchanan treats shacks not as documentary elements but as "images of endurance and personal history"; often using bright colors and a style of childlike simplicity, the works "evoke the warmth and happiness that can be found even in the meanest dwelling, representing the faith and caring that is not reserved for privileged classes." Buchanan is noted to have seen viewers sitting on her stone art piece Unity Stones, but let the men remain seated because she did not mind people sitting on her pieces as they contemplated the work and it represented. "The piece serves as a communal place to sit and talk, and do the other things that we do." Scholar Alex Campbell notes in an essay how Buchanan worked in a studio on College Street in Macon, GA which served as an unofficial racial dividing line for the town. It "separated the working and middle class black part of town from the middle class and affluent white part of town". In 1981, Buchanan created Marsh Ruins, a temporal land art sculpture in coastal Georgia near a commentated site known as "The Marshes of Glenn." To the east of the work was Saint Simons Island, where a group of Igbo people sold into slavery collectively drowned themselves in 1803. This work bears witness to the unmarked histories of enslaved peoples. There she planted three concrete forms and covered them with layers of tabby, a mixture used in slave living quarters. Marsh Ruins gradually disintegrated into the marsh. Buchanan captured that erosion process on video. Buchanan said of her work, "My work is a logical progression of my early interest in textures and surfaces and walls. The early "walls" were lonely, freestanding, fragmented things. When I lived in New York I was looking for things that were demolished. That gave them character. I liked to imagine who might have lived in the apartment, and whose home it might have been. Each family that moved in repainted the walls their color. When a building is torn down the various layers of color are exposed. It is almost surgical like looking through a microscope and looking at different layers of tissue and media." In an interview with Angela Son, Son asked Buchanan what her concept of home was and Buchanan responded with, "[Home] means what I've stablished and where I am, wherever that is. And it means South Carolina, where I grew up I consider home as where I grew up." On July 4, 2015, Buchanan died in Ann Arbor, Michigan at the age of seventy four. Buchanan's work was featured at the Independent Art Fair 2017 at Andrew Edlin Gallery's booth. Buchanan has remarked, "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!'" Buchanan's work featured among that of twenty African American artists in an exhibition at the Turner Contemporary, Margate, Kent, UK in February 2020, entitled 'We Will Walk Art and Resistance in the American South'. Buchanan's work is in the collection of the Addison Art Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, Georgia Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia.