Quotes about Beverly Buchanan and her Art

Beverly Buchanan uplifts and enriches the southern aesthetic by presenting those aspects of southern life that are often forgotten; she brings attention to details through vibrant color and undisturbed formation.

Karen Comer
Gallery Director of City Gallery East, Atlanta, Georgia

Her Shacks are re-interpretations of the fragile structures that dotted the landscape of Buchanan’s childhood. These uniquely Southern structures stand simultaneously as markers of extreme poverty and resilient dignity and fortitude.

Beverly Buchanan gently imposes the architecture of the shack on our consciousness. Her art is not meant as a protest, but as a tribute—a tribute to human imagination, improvisation and the instincts of survival.

Bernice Steinbaum (1998)

As humble and simple as they were, these structures were the homes of a people who survived the scourge of slavery and have profoundly shaped modern American culture. Buchanan, recognizing the importance of these structures to American history, celebrated the lives of her ancestry through art, just as griots did through song.

Darren Hartley

In paintings, sculptures, and drawings of the past several years, Beverly Buchanan has explored the image of the shack – the makeshift, abandoned shelter commonly perched in the fields and along the back roadsides of the South. In her hands the mundane structure becomes an economic and cultural metaphor – an image of a poor but proud rural history. These somewhat forlorn remains are strangely enlivened by a sense of their patched past, traces of human use and the spirit of repair and survival that held them together. Buchanan’s shacks range from those exuberantly decorated in bright colors to those that are a haunting, ghostly white. They are animated with individual l senses of character, as if possessed by the lingering presence of the inhabitants they once sheltered, albeit precariously. For Buchanan these objects represent enduring permanence: they are "memorials to people and places."

Susan Krane (1988)
Curator of Twentieth-Century Art
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia