(L to R): Dionne Lee, Castings (detail), 2022. Gelatin silver prints, 5 x 7 inches. Courtesy the artist and Petra Bibeau, New York; Beverly Buchanan, photographs of cast concrete works left by the artist on the grounds of JOB AME Church, Juliette, GA, August 27, 1982. Box 3, Beverly Buchanan papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Divination: Beverly Buchanan & Dionne Lee
About
Divination: Beverly Buchanan & Dionne Lee foregrounds Beverly Buchanan and Dionne Lee’s explorations of the myths, majesty, and dispossessions embedded in the American landscape. The exhibition is the second in a series organized by Senior Curator Rebecca Matalon to bring together artists across generations as a way to open up new interpretations of their work. The show follows the 2021 exhibition Wild Life: Elizabeth Murray & Jessi Reaves, which similarly presented an exchange between intergenerational artists.
Divination pairs materials from the late Buchanan’s archives, including photographs, journals, writing, and ephemera, with a selection of videos, photographs, and sculptures by the Columbus-based Lee. While Buchanan (1940–2015) and Lee (b. 1988, New York City) are from different generations, both artists explore relationships between Blackness and land, mining racialized histories of the American landscape and its dualities as a site of sanctuary and displacement, sustenance and deprivation. The two artists share an interest in survivalist practices, and each thinks of land as not only a physical place or substance to be encountered, but an accumulation of ever-shifting material and psychic entanglements.
Over the last decade, new scholarship has brought renewed and much deserved critical attention to Buchanan’s profound but underrecognized contributions to the history of land art and environmental sculpture, works that range from cast concrete slabs (“frustulas”) to her later small-scale “shack sculptures” that memorialize the architectural styles of Southern homes and their owners. This exhibition aims to delve into lesser-known aspects of the artist’s practice, for example her placing of small cast concrete works in graveyards of enslaved peoples across rural Georgia; her “auto-archival” use of photography to document these covert actions, major public works, and herself; and self-published calendars, sketchbooks, and ephemera traditionally considered minor or marginal. Divination places Buchanan’s work in dialogue with Lee’s photographic and filmic examinations of what it means to tend to, seek out, and honor the land on which we live, including its hidden and darker histories. The exhibition positions their practices as forms of divination–making visible what all too often remains unseen.
Organizers
Divination: Beverly Buchanan & Dionne Lee is organized by Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and curated by Rebecca Matalon, Senior Curator.