Beverly Buchanan

The winner of numerous honors during her long career, including, among others, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and an Anonymous Was A Woman award, Beverly Buchanan has become best known for her art’s exploration of the vernacular architecture of the American South.

Buchanan refers to the essences of the physical structures and the places where they are located, which, collectively, have become the central themes of her art, as “groundings.” For the artist, each of her depictions of an inhabited or an abandoned dwelling strives to capture its spirit as what she has called an “emotional grounding.” She has stated, “Groundings are everywhere. I’m trying to make houses and other objects that show what some of them might look like now and in the past.”

Buchanan uses wood chips and scraps or sometimes Foamcore to make small-scale replicas of traditional saddlebag houses, cabins, school buildings, churches or barns. Characterized by chunky volumes and sometimes sluggish lines or even semi-abstract forms, and made with layers of wood chips that serve to build up each structure’s walls or roof, the artist’s sculptural works are full of offbeat charm. Her oil-pastel-on-paper drawings portray these same architectural subjects in brightly colored compositions marked by passages of dense, frenetic line work.

Buchanan has shown her art widely at galleries and museums in the United States, including, notably, in “When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South,” a group exhibition of works by contemporary schooled and self-taught artists, which was organized by and presented at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.

Courtesy of Andrew Edlin Gallery