Beverly Buchanan:I Broke the House

Over 25 contributors on Beverly Buchanan’s wide-ranging practice to reframe race, sexuality, disability, and the poetics of place.

Beverly Buchanan: I Broke the House surveys Buchanan’s wide-ranging oeuvre of sculpture, painting, photography, drawing, writing, and printed matter. Pairing newly commissioned essays with archival materials, the book situates the artwork of Beverly Buchanan (1940–2015) within historical, discursive, and deeply personal contexts. Tracing eroded surfaces of urban ruins on canvas and paper, studying vernacular dwellings and their “builder-occupants” in the rural South, and addressing questions of race, commemoration, and politics of place through site-specific sculpture, Buchanan built a language of place and repair. Alongside extensive primary sources from public and private archives, contributions by over 25 scholars and artists extend and complicate our understanding of this exceptional artist.

Contributors
Elena Bally, Simone Browne, Jeffrey Bruce, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Jennifer Burris, Andy Campbell, Maria-Magdalena Campos-Pons, Tony Cokes, Phoebe Collings-James, Mo Costello, Aruna D’Souza, Patricia Ekpo, Fredi Fischli, Jack Halberstam, Tonja Khabir, Charlotte Matter, Devin T. Mays, Park McArthur, Niels Olsen, Walter Price, Sarah Richter, Lowery Stokes Sims, Jamaal Sheats, Journey Streams, Adam Szymczyk, and M. Ty. | Elena Bally is a curator at gta exhibitions, ETH Zurich. She studied art history in Zurich, Vienna, and Rome. She is currently finishing her studies with a thesis titled Beverly Buchanan’s Unity Stones (1983) im Spannungsfeld von Kunst, Arbeit und Schwarzsein. At gta exhibitions, she co-curated Beverly Buchanan: I Broke the House (2024) with Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen, and worked on several exhibition projects, including Unschöne Museen (2023), curated by Fischli, Olsen, and Geraldine Tedder; and Life, Without Buildings (2022), curated by Adam Szymczyk. In 2023, she was awarded the Förderpreis Kunstwissenschaften by the Alfred Richterich Foundation and the Swiss Association of Art Historians.

Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen are curators and codirectors of exhibitions at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zurich. Together they work on projects at the intersection of architecture, art, research, and teaching, resulting in such exhibitions as Unschöne Museen (curated with Geraldine Tedder), Cloud '68: Collection of Radical Architecture, and Home: A User’s Manual or Book for Architects. In 2023, they taught as the John Portman Design Critics in Architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design.