“Beverly Buchanan: I Broke the House,” gta exhibitions, Zurich, 2024

The work of Beverly Buchanan (1940–2015) feels strangely consoling. Brokenness and fragility are met by the artist with a tongue-in-cheek acceptance: “Coming apart at the seams – NOT,” Buchanan wrote under a self-portrait consisting of two Polaroid pictures that she photocopied together, creating an image of a fractured self. As in the rest of her expansive oeuvre, the seams and places of fracture in both human and architectural bodies are at the center of the works on view at this exhibition.

Outside the exhibition space – a single large and airy room nestled on the ground floor of the ETH Zurich Department of Architecture – a wall displays enlarged black-and-white photocopies of one of Buchanan’s many artists’ books. In it, Buchanan wrote practical advice for surviving in the art world. On page after page, she jotted down her tips with a black felt pen in capital letters:

DRESS WELL. GALLERIES NO LONGER OPERATE ON THE ‘IF HE’S IN RAGS-HE MUST-HAVE-MONEY’ LOOK IN PATRONS – SO THROW OUT THAT TORN JEAN JACKET AND SHIRT. (UNLESS OF COURSE, YOURS IS A RALPH LAUREN SHIRT).

Buchanan’s humorous reference to the superficiality of the art world touches upon the issue that how one is perceived by others is determined by surface-level details. And while a change of clothes can shift attitudes, another aspect of the self cannot be changed: the skin – that which holds the body together and is perceived first when entering into contact with the outside world. It also registers as a marker of difference. Buchanan’s interest in architectural surfaces is always connected to the bodies who built and inhabited them. Her oeuvre’s focus is on the decaying process and ruinous state of architecture, which Buchanan herself likened to the experience of being in a body: “A lot of my pieces have the word ‘ruins’ in their titles because I think that tells you this object has been through a lot and survived – that’s the idea behind the sculptures … it’s like, ‘Here I am; I’m still here!’” [1]

“Beverly Buchanan: I Broke the House,” gta exhibitions, Zurich, 2024

In the exhibition hall, a shack, representing the more well-known part of Buchanan’s work, takes on the function of a spatial and thematic center for the exhibition. Made out of found old wood boards, it looks like it was put together hastily, taking on the basic form of shelter, and at the same time, with its size being slightly too small to actually house grown bodies, retaining a certain model character. Its inside is so tiny that the sink and a makeshift table have been placed on the outside of the four walls. On the one hand, this further stresses the shack’s inability to be an adequate dwelling, and, on the other, it blurs the boundaries between inside and outside, which are already fundamentally fragile because of the precarious construction. The roof is almost symbolic; one might just as well be outside. In this sense, the shack is neither a self-contained sculpture, closed off from the viewer’s space, nor a functional walk-in installation. When Buchanan returned to the rural South where she had grown up, the shacks she visited were mainly in ruins, and her own constructions emulate this state. While referencing these modest houses which had mainly been inhabited by Black people, the work’s simplicity transcends this specific geographical and cultural context, evoking favelas or other improvised forms of architecture. Unsurprisingly, most of these constructions have a relatively short lifespan.

From the undated series of works she calls Frustula, inspired by the Latin term for fragments, only one Frustulum is physically present in this exhibition. The sculpture consists of two pieces of cement, a few handbreadths high, covered in black and blue paint, and unfittingly stacked together. On the column next to it, a different Frustulum is presented only in the form of a framed black-and-white photograph. On the back of the same column, we find a photocopy of a text Buchanan wrote about the genesis of these sculptures. This type of fragmented display is paradigmatic for the exhibition, mirroring the fragmented nature of the works themselves.

The architecture department to which gta exhibitions belongs, is, if not opulent, internationally acclaimed and well-funded. However, the frictions arising from showing Buchanan’s engagement with architecture in disrepair at this site are not being smoothed over. “We did not want to simply import the work into this context, but to truly engage with it and introduce people to it,” insists Niels Olsen, one member of the curatorial team. In order to mediate (certainly not bridge) this gap between the ETH Department of Architecture, which has brought forth some of the worlds most renowned architects, and the modest shacks, fragmented walls, and ruins that make up Buchanan’s oeuvre, language is needed and was brought in in several ways: in a seminar on critical forms of exhibiting architecture the co-curators taught at Harvard, students created artists’ books which can be consulted in the exhibition. A symposium on the occasion of the exhibition opening and a lecture by Jack Halberstram at its closing opened up a space for deepening exploration of some of the subjects arising from the works. Language is also present everywhere in Buchanan’s work – in the form of notes, artists’ books, and photos with text in a conceptual art style.

“Beverly Buchanan: I Broke the House,” gta exhibitions, Zurich, 2024

Spread out around the shack, a selection of works is displayed, dating back to the early 1970s, when Buchanan, then age 40, made the decision to leave her career in the medical field in order to become a full-time artist. Early works include abstract paintings, which only appear to be far removed from the subsequent two- and three-dimensional representations of shacks. In fact, they deal with the outermost layer of architecture: the outside walls and facades of New York. In the Black Walls series (1977), white irregular lines or scratches texturize the black layer of acrylic paint. The lines do not look like brushstrokes but rather resemble the types of marks that appear on Sam Gilliam’s drape paintings or Max Ernst’s frottage and grattage works. Beyond the idea of mark-making in modern and postmodern painting, the comparison of the Black Walls paintings with the works of these other artists serves an additional purpose: at the beginning of Buchanan’s artistic career, there was a clear-cut color line between abstract expressionism and what was considered “Black art.” Buchanan, a fan of the former, was fully aware of the expectations placed upon her to make figurative work. In that sense, her experience was similar to that of Sam Gilliam, whose color field paintings have only become canonical in recent decades. While she was always represented by a gallery and had a number of mostly gallery exhibitions, it seems like the art world was not fully able to recognize the complexity of Buchanan’s oeuvre until after her passing in 2015. The Brooklyn Museum retrospective, which introduced Buchanan to a wider public, opened in 2016 and, according to gta exhibitions’ curatorial statement, laid the groundwork for the present show.

There is an unfortunate tendency to construct narratives around female artists in the years after their passing – think for example of Francesca Woodman, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Hilma af Klint, or Claude Cahun – when they are no longer able to tell their own story. Institutions present themselves as the discoverers of some outcast pioneer, in the guise of giving them the platform they deserve. [2] “I Broke the House” resists this storytelling: instead of presenting the artist as a newly identified long-lost treasure, it highlights Buchanan’s community and collaborations. [3]

The curators have included artworks by Senga Nengudi, Ana Mendieta, and Kazuko Miyamoto, who were Buchanan’s contemporaries, and have extended invitations to a group of writers and curators to think alongside them in the show’s programming. [4] Works by contemporary artists Cameron Rowland, Aria Dean, Alicia Henry, Park McArthur, and Devin T. Mays illustrate the relevance of Buchanan’s practice for younger generations. Out of these works, Mays’s installation Reference Material (2024) stands out, quite literally: made from plywood, cardboard, solid wood, wood panels, MDF, plasterboard, tape, corner braces, ties, screws, and staples, Mays’s posts are each 2.65 meters high and tower over all the other works in the exhibition, almost reaching the wood-paneled ceiling of the room. The poles divide and structure the space, and reference Buchanan’s interest in surfaces and seams. The unpainted, lightweight materials contrast the expected supporting function of an architectural pillar and draw the eye to the exposed hinges and partially unfinished-looking elements. But most importantly, like Buchanan’s installations, they emphasize space.

While these efforts successfully show Buchanan’s art as a practice that is part of a network rather than existing in a vacuum, one wonders, given the relatively small number of works by Buchanan herself in the exhibition, why so much space was given to other artists.

“Beverly Buchanan: I Broke the House,” gta exhibitions, Zurich, 2024

An array of vitrines display photographs documenting some of Buchanan’s works that cannot be brought into the exhibition space. In one of the images, rock-like formations evoke the aesthetics of land art. The Marsh Ruins (1981), paint- and tabby-covered organic-looking blocks of cement, mark a historical fracture at the site where they were installed. In a text accompanying the photos, Buchanan describes how studying the location of the marshes dating back to Antebellum times led her to a largely forgotten building material that was specific to the region:

After having seen the old, old ruins of a former slave hospital, I revised my drawing of the sculpture to be placed in the marsh. The hospital was for ill slaves. What was such a thing? […] I then looked at the rubble left from a burned mansion. Piles of brick in neat stacks. – Tabby bricks. TABBY BRICKS!! I was overwhelmed. I thought – stronger. It has to be strong, like all these magnificent ruins around here. [5]

By recreating tabby, a historical cement-like material consisting of burnt oyster shells, sand, ash, and water and originally introduced to Georgia by British colonists, Buchanan draws attention to disappearing (architectural) evidence of the history whose repercussions for racialized people have not disappeared, thus making visible the seams that hold together place, history, nature, architecture, and the present.

The connection between the fragility of architectural and human bodies becomes apparent after having spent some time with the works and the texts. Medicine Woman (1992), an assemblage piece mainly consisting of the containers of Buchanan’s many pills she picked up at her local pharmacy over many years, is present only as a photograph. The medicine woman, of course, cannot make the always already fragmented body whole again. Like Marsh Ruins, Shacks, Black Walls and the Frustula, the body was never made to last. Or, in Buchanan’s own words: “Things are reminders of what it took to survive.” [6]

“Beverly Buchanan: I Broke the House,” gta exhibitions, Zurich, March 6–May 17, 2024; Carl Van Vechten Gallery, Fisk University, Nashville, September 24, 2024–March 30, 2025.

Aïcha Revellat is an art historian specializing in contemporary art, image theory, and photographic media. She is a member of the eikones Graduate School at the University of Basel, where she is writing her dissertation on the work of Swiss artist Hannah Villiger.

Image credit: Photos Annik Wetter