“My work is about response and memory,” the artist Beverly Buchanan said. “It is a process of creating objects that relate to the physical world through perception rather than reproduction.” The structures depicted in this work, which the artist called her “shacks,” reflect her memory of and deep respect for a type of modest home often built by hand from found materials in the American South—in this case on Dataw Island, one of the Carolina Sea Islands.
Buchanan encountered buildings like these during her childhood in South Carolina, and they became a major subject of her artwork when she moved from New York City to Georgia in 1977. The energetic marks in many colors that Buchanan uses suggest the eclectic patterns of the shack’s surfaces, animating them with the personalities and family histories of their builders. Often passed on through generations, homes like these were disappearing—destroyed to make way for new real estate developments—by the time Buchanan made this work in 1993. However, her monumental drawing stands as a record of the ways of life they once supported.
