Beverly Buchanan: I Broke the House

Curator: gta exhibitions, ETH Zurich in collaboration with Tubman African American Museum, Macon, GA; Fisk University Galleries, Nashville, TN; Engine for Art, Democracy and Justice (EADJ), Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN

Artists: Senga Nengudi, Ana Mendieta, Kazuko Miyamoto, Park McArthur and Jennifer Burris, Cameron Rowland, Devin T. Mays, Aria Dean and Alicia Henry.

“I Broke the House” spans Beverly Buchanan’s wide-ranging oeuvre of sculpture, painting, photography, drawing, writing and printed matter. As a study of Buchanan’s artwork, the exhibition gathers fragmented materials by an artist who defied official mechanisms of commemoration and classification. Her practice traces eroded surfaces of “City Ruins” on canvas and paper, researches vernacular dwellings and their builder-occupants in the rural South and persistently embeds long-neglected histories of anti-Black politics in their territorial surroundings.
In the context of a gallery attached to an architecture school, Buchanan’s work—predicated on critical engagement with the built environment—challenges the normative formats and politics of exhibiting architecture. By investigating and undoing solid structures, Buchanan confronts viewers with unsettling readings of sites, buildings and memorials in solidarity with communities that resist authoritarian narratives.