‘splinter to the heart of the world’: Beverly Buchanan’s shack works

Abstract

For 30 years of her art practice, the black queer land artist Beverly Buchanan (1940–2015) researched and reproduced, though aslant, subsistence housing in the South. Here, the author treats Buchanan’s shack works as an expanded aesthetic project, one explicitly embedded in the forms of indebtedness and indenture extracted from the black household after Emancipation. Buchanan’s shacks spanned sculpture, bric-a-brac assemblage, drawing, portraiture, writing, and oral history. The author argues that, by holding and withholding, giving and taking, building and grounding, the shacks make several interventions in the architectural afterlife of slavery – and dwell, explicitly, with those forms of mutual aid which subsist beneath, and ultimately exceed, the propertied household.