Browse

Accession #	2017.9a-c
Artist	Beverly Buchanan
Title	Untitled (Frustula Series)
Date	ca. 1978
Medium	Concrete
Dimensions	Weight of all three components together: 625 lb. (283.5kg) component a: 21 × 11 × 17 1/2 in., 245 lb. (53.3 × 27.9 × 44.5 cm) component b: 12 1/2 × 15 × 16 in., 215 lb. (31.8 × 38.1 × 40.6 cm) component c: 22 1/2 × 6 × 15 in., 142 lb. (57.2 × 15.2 × 38.1 cm)
Credit Line	Gift of Arden Scott, 2017
Location	American Identities: Colony to Nation / Inventing American Landscape

Curatorial Remarks: After working in public health in New Jersey and studying parasitology at Columbia University, Buchanan began making art in New York in the late 1970s. Establishing herself through the mentorship of Norman Lewis and Romare Bearden, Buchanan found success in the contemporary art world, where she was included in several groundbreaking feminist exhibitions and was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Buchanan took a particular interest in the revelatory nature of ruins and their ability to expose the histories of a place and its former inhabitants. To make her multipart Frustula works, the artist cast pigmented concrete in molds she constructed from milk cartons. Borrowing a term from her work in biology for the structural casing of a cell wall, Buchanan conceived the Frustula as representations of ruins and time, striated deposits of history meant to commemorate quiet, often overlooked historical moments.