When she was a kid, Beverly Buchanan visited tenant farmers and sharecroppers across the American south-east with her dad. There in the fields she saw shacks and sheds, shanties and shotgun houses. More than 100 years after the abolition of slavery, she saw in this rough improvised architecture a symbol of survival and perseverance, of a people making their own way against the odds.
Buchanan spent the rest of her life – a life marked by multiple chronic illnesses before she died in 2015 – translating that architectural heft into art. This show at Spike Island is filled with ramshackle, half-broken, semi-dilapidated little sculptures, each one based on the buildings of the south. There are houses made of scrap wood, churches made of cardboard, tiny barns hammered together and splashed with paint or covered with buttons. The one large sculpture here is great, a shed seemingly on the verge of collapse, but Buchanan’s physical condition forced her to work on a smaller scale as she was often stuck at home for long periods.
