Three Families (A Memorial Piece With Scars)
Artist
Beverly Buchanan
(American, 1940 - 2015)
Date1989
MediumWood with paint, charcoal, and metal
Dimensionsoverall three shacks: 17 × 32 × 10 in. (43.2 × 81.3 × 25.4 cm)
ClassificationsContemporary art
Credit LineGift of David Henry Jacobs, Jr.
Object number99.29.1
Terms
- Shacks
- Poverty
- African-American Artist
- Red
- Green
Collections
On View
On viewLabel TextBeverly Buchanan American, 1940-2015 Three Families (A Memorial Piece with Scars), 1989 Wood, tar and clay Gift of David Henry Jacobs, Jr. 99.29.1.1-.3 Beverly Buchanan builds on her own memories when making these crude, yet compelling sculptures. She makes very powerful statements about destitution, inequality, and personal triumph. Often Buchanan's shacks symbolize an angry defiance as they address and challenge sociological problems of our time-racism, social injustice, civil rights-issues that have torn apart this country for nearly four centuries. In Three Families (A Memorial Piece With Scars), she confronts these concerns: Like burnt clothing, remains carry the smell of danger past and present. Covering or patching (houses or garments) does not remove the memory. Theses structures, after being painted, were set on fire, left to burn, and to be extinguished by friends. These shacks are a metaphor for what, then as now, was a tactic for enforced despair…despair from without. Those of us up in Greensboro in 1961-62 faced a different force. Instead of fire and blood, there was wood and bats-with-nails-sunk-into-flesh. There was blood-and-flesh and wood. These are a tribute to the still strong spirit and to memories of that spirit in spite of blood and flesh and wood and fire. Her works are not icons of hopelessness, but rather elegies that salute the integrity, resilience, and resolution of the shack-dwellers. Written By: Edited By: DS Edited Date: 10/19/2005 Approved By: MHM Approval Date: 10/19/2005
