Throughout the decades that Beverly Buchanan lived and worked in the American Southeast, she gathere
Throughout the decades that Beverly Buchanan lived and worked in the American Southeast, she gathered what she termed “groundings”: histories, folklore, transcribed conversations, photographs of unmarked ruins, and models of vernacular architecture. These diverse references—which speak to African heritage as much as to life under Jim Crow and during the Civil Rights Movement—became the source material for extended series of works in sculpture, photography, and text.Some of Buchanan’s best-known works are her shack sculptures. These later works are studies in Southern vernacular architecture and portraiture. Buchan’s shacks combine folk aesthetics with a clinician’s precise examination of culture. Often categorized by architectural style (such as shotgun houses, saddlebags, dogtrots, and elevated low country homes), the sculptures are frequently paired with what the artist called “legends,” patchwork narratives about the structures and the people commemorated. As Buchanan explained, “I think that artists in the South must at some point confront the work of folk artists… [in terms of] being of and from the same place with the same influences, food, dirt, sky, reclaimed land, development, violence, guns, ghosts.” -- source link
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