Beverly Buchanan

Beverly Buchanan called her sculptures and drawings of the small, often hand-built, homes she found throughout the American South “shacks,” a modest term that belies the magic she found in them—and then poured into her own art. Dataw Island, S.C., her first work to enter MoMA’s collection, shows four shacks spread across a grassy landscape, characters in a story rather than static structures in the background. In this frank and funny interview between the artist and curator Eleanor Flomenhaft, Buchanan talks about the evolution of her shacks, how she came to know of and be inspired by them, and how she once followed the legendary artist Romare Bearden into a men’s bathroom.
—Esther Adler, Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints

Eleanor Flomenhaft: How did you become involved with shacks?

Beverly Buchanan: Basically because I like houses. When I was growing up there was a young Black woman in my hometown who wanted to be an architect. I was so impressed with her. When I first started shacks my ideas were re­ally about architecture. There are so many different kinds of shacks and I’m basically interested in structure. I was living here in Athens making stone pieces, which are sculptures as far as I’m concerned. At some point I had to realize that for me the structure was related to the people who built it. I would look at shacks and the ones that attracted me always had some­thing a little different or odd about them. This evolved into my having to deal with [the fact that] I’m making portraits of a family or person which may recall individuals or families I had met, and I would sometimes add traits from other families to a particular structure.

When did you take your first serious step towards creating shacks?

It was after I started making black walls in 1976 or ’77. I was drawing them on paper about one foot squared. I had not really seen a black wall. One time when I was going to a meeting of Women in the Arts, I stopped on Broome Street [in New York City] where the meeting was held. Looking up at a building, there were my black walls. This happens to me all the time. Then I wanted to see what the wall looked like on the other side. So I laid four sheets of paper that were my black walls against each other. Clearly I wanted to make a three dimensional work, but in what medium? I didn’t think of clay because I had no access to a kiln, but cement seemed a logical thing to use. So I started with that.

What was your progression?

I moved to Macon, Georgia, and taught at the Stratford Academy from 1983 to ’85. There I had access to a kiln and I began to add clay to the concrete. I was making sides of walls out of clay, fragments I called “Frus­tulums” after the title of Jock Truman’s show. Then the walls developed into partial shacks. And I would ride around Georgia and photograph shacks usually late in the day when it was getting dark.

Why did you start to photograph shacks?

It was a gradual penetration of my brain. I had been traveling back and forth visiting family in North Carolina and I started to make struc­tures and one day I said to myself, “I’m making barns.” Now when I was a kid I was told that I needed to learn what hard work was. So several summers I worked as a tobacco field hand. Because I was a strong youngster I would help the men load the barns. Talk about hot places. But I think that’s where it started because my early shacks are barns. I named them for family members and for people whose farms I knew until one time I noticed looking at old tobacco barns driving up Highway 301, that the structures looked just like my barns.

What materials did you start with?

The barns were made of paper, foamcore. It was very helpful because I could cut out the shapes I wanted at a certain angle to give them just the look I was after. That was around 1984. Once I started to use clay they didn’t look like barns anymore.

And at this time you were photographing shacks and having a mental dia­logue with shacks?

Absolutely. I would look at a building and it would remind me of a person or a family.

And you didn’t even have to know whose building it was?

Well at first I would know. Since I was a child I knew people who lived in shacks. I may not consciously know I was keeping all this in my brain but I could look at something and say, “No, Mrs. Harris wouldn’t do this or that.” Then after a while I didn’t have to know.

You could feel whose it might be?

Yes. I have situations like that all the time. Once I was bringing some old clothing over to a truck driver who would take it to the collection of­fice and an old man came a little too close to me, and it startled him. I said “I’m sorry” to him. But to the truck driver I said that I probably ruined that man’s day. I went on, “For sure he’ll go home and take a high blood pressure pill.” And then just from that one encounter I was suddenly mak­ing up a scenario. I was seeing his whole life and putting myself into his place and I could even imagine what kind of house he lived in.

So that’s where the legends come from?

Yes.

ln your paintings there seem to be several fields of action, and they interact in a special way. Where do you usually start a painting?

I draw the shacks first. I decide where they’re going. Sometimes the size of the paper or the way I’m standing can dictate it. If I’m close to the edge, the shack I draw is probably going to be larger than if I stood some­where else, or maybe not.

Your shacks don’t seem rooted. They tilt and fly in an abstract atmosphere.

But they are set in something, in their own soup.

Does that mean in their own interior world?

I think it means a middle southern coastal world which is almost like a given. I would expect it to be known without my having to put it there before you. When Marion Buchanan’s mother, who I certainly called my grandmother, would ask what’s for supper I would tell her and I listed everything and I always said rice. About the tenth time she said, “You don’t have to say rice. We know we’re going to have that.” So I don’t want to put in trees. It depends where I am or what I’m thinking about and the trees may be different or the same. If you want to have trees you can have them, but I just want you to see the basic solid stuff. The rice is already there, and I just assume that you ought to know that the trees are already there.

What about the childlike scribbling?

Walter Buchanan had a series of strokes and before he died he started to write letters to his sister, Carrie, who was my grandmother. He was try­ing to say something to her that he considered very important. Some of the words were legible and some were in this kind of script that later I tried to imitate. At first I didn't see any relationship. I was just trying to get this overall textural thing and they were just these marks. But now they are important and I like to think I’ve created a conversational script. Now it’s an integral part of my work.

How do you feel about my calling the marks a scribble?

It’s okay because some of Walter’s words—even though you couldn’t figure out what the words were—some of the designs of the words you could call a scribble. And what I thought about in his scribbling was an in­terior image. It took me a long time to absorb that part of his writing into my work. I guess maybe I’m incorporating what I want to choose from his type of markings, condensed scribble versus not so condensed scribble or a combination of both. And I can also see the relation of his markings to sea grasses, the tall grasses, the marsh grasses that I paint.

I’m interested, too, in what modern artists you feel your strongest kinship to.

Constantin Brâncuși, Louise Nevelson, Jasper Johns, Mark Rothko, Milton Resnick, and for some reason, Betye Saar.

What do you feel?

I’m not sure. I think maybe not so much the objects but I’m going to call it the collective assembly, how she puts what she does together. Nor­man Lewis was a big influence on me. I saw his work before I knew he was Black and I said that to him. Of course Romare Bearden. Do you know how I met him?

I had heard that you once followed him into a men’s bathroom.

Everybody knows that by now. He had done this poster for the David Frost jazz series. Dizzy Gillespie was one of the musicians and a friend of mine knew him. So we went to Alice Tully Hall together. She went to hear Dizzy but I went to get a poster. At intermission there was Bearden sur­rounded by people. He started to walk away and I saw my opportunity because he was by himself. I found somebody selling the poster and then I just kept following him not looking where I was going. When I looked up I saw I was in the men’s room. Backing out I went right into Norman Lewis. I gasped, “You’re Norman Lewis and I’m an artist and I have this poster,” starting to explain what I was doing there. Well later on he told me he wasn’t used to a droopy type looking person coming up to him and saying “You’re Norman Lewis.” But he just took me by the arm and walked me over to Bearden. He said, “Romy, there’s someone who wants to meet you and she’s an artist.” Bearden turned and extended his hand and said “Hello young lady. What’s your name?” And nothing came out of my mouth. Now while Norman Lewis and I were walking towards Ro­mare’s group I told him that I loved his work even before I knew that he was Black. And then I said, “I don’t believe I really said that to you.” So we both howled and became good friends. I stayed in his loft almost every weekend because I took care of his mynah bird, Romy, while he and his wife, Ouida, were away and I studied with him at the Art Students League. At some point he said, “You just need to go home and work.” And I wept.

And you went home and did you ever work! Where are you headed now?

At some point I had planned to go back and do more paintings in black and white. As an artist I really think that’s the way I can tell if my work is successful. I often take black-and-white photos of the brilliant col­ored ones to look at them structurally, to see if I’m only hanging on to color. And since creating Inside Out in 1990, I was forced to think not just of shacks as portraits of individuals, but to think of structure and culture. I have to combine the two methods of thinking about them mentally. It doesn’t take away from the structure as poetry. It just means I’m being more comprehensive. In other words, Miss Mary had a yard. I didn’t in­clude the yard. She had a garden. I didn’t include that. I just showed you her house with the copper roof. But the fence pieces; I actually have a fence with a house.

Why aren’t you leaving the fences to the viewer’s imagination as you did with the trees?

I think the fence is significant. Fences can be wooden or rocks. They can be a path. It’s about separation and inclusion.

What’s inside and what’s outside?

And who decides what’s inside and what’s outside. I don’t think I’ve explored the possibilities of any of that yet. This is just the beginning of something and I don’t know what.

There’s no reference to death in your works. Is that intentional?

The early black series were about death. I began to realize that I have been exposed to so many different kinds of things in life that are unusual, and that doesn’t exclude death. But I want to concentrate on presenting something others might overlook. I want to give people who can neither read nor write but made all the measurements and built their own barns and shacks a different way of looking at themselves. My fascination is with buildings and ruins. But there’s more fascination with life and its positive aspects.

This is an excerpt from three interviews from 1989 and 1993 between Eleanor Flomenhaft and Beverly Buchanan, published as “Shack Portraiture: An Interview with Beverly Buchanan” in the exhibition catalogue Bevery Buchanan: Shackworks, a 16-Year Survey (Montclair, New Jersey: The Montclair Art Museum, 1994). Reprinted with permission. Text © 2024 Beverly Buchanan. Courtesy of the Estate of Beverly Buchanan and Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York

Hyundai Card First Look: Beverly Buchanan in on view at MoMA through spring 2025.