Divination: Beverly Buchanan & Dionne Lee

(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 with Virginia “Gina” Templeton, Abandoned Sculpture Off Pea Ridge Road, Monroe Co., Georgia (detail), 1982. Reproduction of one hand-written page and eight photographs mounted to photobook, Beverly Buchanan papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Courtesy the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Add to calendar Google Calendar iCalendar Outlook 365 Outlook Live 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. Support Support for Divination: Beverly Buchanan & Dionne Lee is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Special thanks to Teiger Foundation for research support. Contemporary Arts Museum Houston exhibitions are made possible by the generous donors to CAMH’s Major Exhibition Fund: Scott R. Sparvero, Chinhui Juhn and Eddie Allen, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Beverly and Howard Robinson, Ruth Dreessen and Tom Van Laan, Cindy and David Fitch, Louise Jamail, Sissy and Denny Kempner, Elisa and Cris Pye, and Poppi Massey. About Beverly Buchanan Born in Fuquay, North Carolina, Beverly Buchanan (1940-2015) grew up in South Carolina. By the late 1960s, Buchanan had earned several university degrees in the sciences, and was working as a public health worker and educator in New York City and East Orange, New Jersey. In 1971, Buchanan enrolled at the Art Students’ League, where she studied with Harlem Renaissance painter Norman Lewis. From that time on, Buchanan devoted her time to making art. In the 1970s, she considered herself an abstract expressionist painter and completed a series of “Wall” paintings which were exhibited at the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey in 1976. In 1977, Buchanan moved back to the South. From 1979 to 1986, Buchanan made a series of public stone sculptures across the American Southeast, which she allowed to decay over time and become part of the surroundings. Most notably, in 1979 she completed Ruins and Rituals (also the title of the Brooklyn Museum retrospective from 2016-2017), and in 1980 Marsh Ruins, with funding from a Guggenheim Fellowship. Some of these works can still be found, while others have withered away. They contemplate the idea of “ruination” and commemorate the history of Southern Black communities. By the mid 1980s, Buchanan was exploring Southern vernacular architecture through her practice. She created a series of makeshift sculptures known as “shacks” in which she paid tribute to the improvised and self-built homes of Black communities in rural Georgia. Often attached to her sculptures were hand-written or typed narratives, which she referred to as “legends,” that gave voice to a cast of characters, some remembered and others imagined. Buchanan’s later work is intimately linked to her natural surroundings and folk art. As a native Southerner, she drew on memories from her childhood as well as the lush Georgian landscape and yard art of local self-taught artists. A passionate gardener, Buchanan produced vivid oil pastel flower drawings and small assemblage works. The winner of numerous honors during her long career, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Buchanan’s work is in the permanent collections of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Whitney Museum, among others. A posthumous solo retrospective, Ruins and Rituals, curated by Jennifer Burris and Park McArthur, was held at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2016-17. About Dionne Lee Dionne Lee (b. 1988, New York, NY) works in photography, collage, and video to explore power, survival, and personal history in relation to the American landscape. Lee lives and works in Columbus, Ohio and received an MFA at California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2017. Lee’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New Orleans Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The Princeton University Art Museum, Contemporary Art Gallery of Vancouver, CA, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco, CA, Aperture Foundation, New York, International Center of Photography, New York, and Light Work, New York. Recent exhibitions include Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Spora, Swiss Institute, New York, NY, Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, Prologue, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH, All This Soft Wild Buzzing, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco, CA, Re/Sisters, Barbican Art Gallery, London, UK, Penumbra Foundation, New York City, Site Unfolding, Bibeau Krueger, New York City, Tara Downs, New York City, Cushion Works, San Francisco, CA, The Locker Plant / Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX, Et al. San Francisco, CA, /(Slash), San Francisco, CA, FotoFest Biennial 2022: If I Had a Hammer, Houston, TX, and Center For Fine Art Photography at the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art, Fort Collins, CO. Lee is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow. She was an Artist-in-Residence at the Chinati Foundation, Unseen California, and Land Arts of the American West between 2022-2023. In 2019 Lee was an artist in residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock. Publication The exhibition is accompanied by a risograph-printed catalogue co-published by CAMH and F featuring new writing on the artists’ works by exhibition curator Matalon and scholar Dr. Elleza Kelley, as well as an assortment of photographs, historical documents, and archival materials. Resources Tours [email protected] 713.284.8276 Additional Information Accessibility Exhibition labels will be available in English and Spanish. Press Release Divination: Beverly Buchanan & Dionne Lee Press Release Educational Materials Please come back soon to see educational materials. Related Events View Calendar