DETROIT, MICH.- David Klein Gallery presents Beverly Buchanan, Low Country. The exhibition includes Buchanan’s iconic shack sculptures and brightly colored drawings inspired by her childhood memories of traditional Southern tobacco barns and small houses.

Best known for her exploration of the vernacular architecture of the American South, Buchanan describes her interest in the rural shacks: Remembering the look and feel of structures has been a strong focus in my drawings and sculptures. My vision and interest shifted to the reality of current places and their surrounding landscape. The house and its yard and the road behind and across…...the first sight of the house made me feel like a bolt of lightning had hit me.

Beverly Buchanan was born in Fuquay, NC in 1940 and grew up in Orangeburg, SC where her father was the Dean of South Carolina State College. Buchanan graduated from Bennet College in North Carolina with a degree in medical technology in 1962 and later earned a Master’s Degree in Public Health from Columbia University in New York. She worked in the fields of medical technology and health education until leaving the medical field to pursue a career in art.

In 1971 Buchanan enrolled at the Art Students’ League in New York, where she studied with the abstract-expressionist painter Norman Lewis. Through Lewis she met Romare Bearden, who became her friend and mentor. Beverly became a visible an active member of the New York art scene in the 1970’s and 90’s, meeting influential curators, gallerists, and critics including Lowery Stokes Sims, Betty Parsons and Lucy Lippard.

In 1980, Buchanan was awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She was also the recipient of a PollockKrasner Foundation award. Her work has been widely exhibited at museums and galleries in the United States, including The Montclair Art Museum, NJ; The Studio Museum, Harlem, New York; The Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC; the Tubman African American Museum, Macon, GA; and the Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, GA.

Her recent retrospective: Beverly Buchanan, Ruins & Rituals, opened at The Brooklyn Museum in October 2016. This comprehensive exhibition launched the Museum’s year long program “A Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum”. Buchanan’s work is in many public and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; the Carnegie Museum of Art, PA; the Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, SC; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; the Asheville Art Museum, NC; and The Studio Museum, Harlem, New York.

Chloe Wilcox captured the subtleties of Buchanan’s work in a review she wrote for the Brooklyn Rail in 2015 “...Despite the energy Buchanan has imbedded in the forms of her sculptures, they also exude a startling silence. These homes are, after all, quite empty….the simultaneous vitality and vacancy of these structures creates a vague sense of loss.

….A similar sense of emptiness animates Buchanan’s oil pastels….In these pictures, the square and rectangular structures buck up. Clapboards undulate above the confetti –colored landscapes. Her harried application of the bright pastels injects the images with feverish motion.. These houses with their weightlessness and psychedelic palette, occupy a deserted, dreamlike world.”