Beverly Buchanan

Ruins and Rituals

Brooklyn Museum

October 21, 2016—March 5, 2017

The most expansive survey dedicated to the late artist Beverly Buchanan’s overlooked career is a must-see. Featuring two-hundred objects, among which her minuscule size renderings of Southern architecture remain her best known works, the ambitious exhibition also includes her writings documenting her life until the final days in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she maintained a studio. While her amusing architectural pieces hold traces from Minimalism and Land Art, North Carolina-born and South Carolina-raised artist’s status as a feminist icon is indisputable. 

“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!’,” said Buchanan on her psychological association with sculpting not only as an artist, but also as an African American woman artist making art since 1970s. Honored by the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship as well as other numerous awards, Buchanan’s genre-defying body of work seems to find the perfect venue with this Brooklyn Museum exhibition curated by Jennifer Burris and Park McArthur.