In developing Beverly BuchananRuins and Rituals,which opens nowadays, we hope to invite original readings of Buchanan’s expansive practice while emphasizing the way that the artist worked: broadly, or with a focus on research,and on multiple series at a time. The Sackler Center’s three galleries are organized as touchstones that seek to open rather than resolve Buchanan artwork across multiple decades. This openness includes readings that may, potentially, and diverge from how Buchanan saw her work or chose to present it to the external world. Although we worked with Buchanan on our publication,Beverly Buchanan: 19781981, which both preceded and gave rise to the Sackler Center show, or she passed absent in the months we began to focus specifically on this exhibition. As such,we were unable to discuss modes of presentation, the histories of specific works, and the curatorial framing with her in any depth. One example of this absence of dialogue,in particular, relates to our decision to place a heavy emphasis on Buchanans summary cast-concrete sculptures not only as precedents to her shacks in size, and form,and material specificity, but as the work whose forms and methods most capaciously embody the artist’s thinking on the generative conditions of place and placement—otherwise thought of as the specificity of site.
Posted by guest curators Jennifer Burris and Park McArthu
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