Beverly Buchanan’s exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, perfectly titled “Ruins and Ritual
Beverly Buchanan’s exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, perfectly titled “Ruins and Rituals,” was among the best exhibitions of 2016. The show situated Buchanan as a genre-bending, endlessly inventive, bitingly funny figure, who fused the sculptural idioms of post-minimalism and land art with a deep concern for history and racial injustice, in conjunction with prodigious output in writing and photography. I’m especially drawn to her photographic practice, which she often used to document her experimentations with concrete forms in nature, in public, and in the studio. These objects captured here are part of Buchanan’s early material investigations casting concrete from molds made of bricks and milk cartons—forms that reference the dilapidated urban architecture of New Jersey, where she was living at the time. Park McArthur, a curator of the exhibition and a brilliant artist in her own right, “rediscovered” part of Buchanan’s photographic archive at the Whitney Museum a few years ago. “The images I opened were ones that she had sent to her then-gallerist, Jock Truman, when he wanted to propose a show,” she says. “It was work just making its debut outside of the studio. Black-and-white photographs that she had taken of her own sculptures; small concrete cast objects that looked like ruins or rubble or parts of a chimney of a burned down house.” These photographs capture the subtle brilliance of Buchanan’s practice, the way she mastered earthen materials to create totemic forms, activating the spaces they occupied with memory, meditation, and even critique. It’s a strange mix of thrill and horror to encounter an artist whose practice has been overlooked precisely because of its extreme, conflictual relevance to a number of canonized movements. I’ve been thinking about her and her work for months.Beverly Buchanan, Untitled (Slab Works 1), 1978-80 -- source link
#beverly buchanan