Beverly Buchanan’s varied body of sculpture, painting, land art, writing, and more trouble separation—blurring distinctions between art object and body, art object and environment, art object and process. Among Buchanan’s many dozen shack sculptures, Mr. Robert Mathis’ Yellow Root House and Table (1991) stands out for its intermixture of scale that disturbs stable object ontology. (See facing page.) The work is a sculptural rendering of a shack and table made of warm yellow Georgia pine wood, nails, and tar paper that stands five feet and nine inches tall and twenty-four inches wide. The shack, or yellow root house portion of the work, is certainly not at architectural scale but is tall and large enough to call forth the human body. It is attached to a table at furniture scale with four solid wooden legs, a wooden plank top, and two wooden slats nailed to the front with three uneven slats nailed to the back. As a potentially functional table, it also implies human action and pulls the sculpture into the functional world of the living. We can imagine the yellow root plant of the work’s title being stored in this “house” and yellow root in its tea form being served on this table, while house, table, and yellow root alike are ontologically linked as wood. The multiscalar nature of the sculpture triangulates a metonymic relationship to the body, to architecture, to the organic, in order to evoke a form of racialized being that holds these scales together in painful tension.
The yellow root house’s frontal wooden slats are variably sized and nailed horizontally, vertically, diagonally, stacked, overlapped, and worriedly gathered—not haphazardly, but with happenstance and with hazard. This flurry of slats does not line up flush with the side slats or the tender thin slats that make up the “roof” of the house, which cannot be called a proper roof: there are wide gaps and there is no real cover. The house does not have a door but is open, letting in whatever is outside, such that inside is whatever is outside, but still the structure strains toward domicile and labors to hold in and hold up. The precarity of this hold is where and how blackness emerges in Buchanan’s sculptural shacks. The happenstance and hazard of her shack constructions are drawn from her interactions with Southern shacks and their black dwellers, products of tenant farming and sharecropping borne of chattel slavery and its spatial and subjective afterlives, which remade a people with a place to signifiers of no-place, no-protection, no-interior-space. Or as Sarah Richter describes, Buchanan’s shacks “never held so much as gave,” because in the wake of slavery and its hold, they are naturalized as “already-given, takeable, not belonging to anyone, or belonging to someone who is no one before the law.”1 This non-place that gives but cannot hold is as obdurate as it is precarious. Nahum Chandler calls this the immaterial materiality of Buchanan’s shack structures, which “gesture toward and obscure distinct spaces of possible habitude.”2 Mr. Robert Mathis apprehends a blackened relation to the space of habitude, one that gives life from its precarity and questions the possibility of habitude itself, at all scales: the bodily (yellow root tea moves from table to mouth), the architectural (a wide open, capacious, and non-holding house), and the structural (wood to wood to wood, the relation of all things across scale).
This black relation of space to place to body is a reflection and extension of black being itself, which is undone in its doing, unmade from the human it makes. As that which is excluded and constitutive for the modern human to cohere, black being is not at home in this world but foundational to it. Like the walls and roof of Mr. Robert Mathis’ Yellow Root House and Table, blackness labors and holds that which it cannot be held by. A yellow root house can contain the materials of human ongoingness needed to hunker down, build, sustain, but Buchanan’s borders do not sit flush and the gaps are as important as the slats, which are open to the nonhuman—air, light, dust, rain. Buchanan’s shack sculptures mirror blackness’s worldmaking labor, labor that shapes what it is and is not: breathing life, blood, body, and the elemental. This blackened labor is furthered in Mr. Robert Mathis by the black tar paper attached to the front of the sculpture, where, in a more figurative register, the door, window, eyes, or mouth might be. This covering denies access to interiority but is not a bid for opacity: the shack is open and, at many points, we can see through to the other side. The black tar paper is opaque but not flat, almost three-dimensional in its depth—a hole covering a presumptive hole. The house and the blackened positionality it invokes is not open as an invitation but as an imputation and does not obscure as much as it is produced via obfuscation. What kind of breath emerges from such a hole? What space does this blackened breath make? Buchanan limns these questions in the “legend” that she pairs with Mr. Robert Mathis’ Yellow Root House and Table:
There is a mix of old and new in this house. Labored breathing of the old (“a little shortness of breath”) and too much sweet in the new—a diabetic son who drinks yellow root tea. Some people chew on young sticks for arthritis. In 1991, a clump of less than ten match size pieces of yellow root can cost up to three dollars.
The human and nonhuman organic are all mixed up here. The labor of lungs and the sweetness of blood come together, not directly attached to a body, but instead flowing through the wooden house and sticks of yellow root. The house labors to breathe and is effusive in its sweetness as are its inhabitants, without distinction. The mix of old and new is a consistent quality of Buchanan’s shack sculptures, because she often scavenged and was given used or discarded wood for the works, and this is evident in the varied wear of Mr. Robert Mathis’ wood. Labored breath is linked to old wood, which mixes with young sweet wood—all of which is tempered by yellow root sipped or chewed to lower blood sugar or soothe old bones. The sculpture retains its status as root house and table on which yellow root can be stored and served, but also maintains a liveliness of being, coextensive with blood and bones, with the sweet and achy. Through this ontological confluence, the weary wood’s “shortness of breath” and the house’s diabetic son mirror Buchanan’s lifelong asthma that became more debilitating after she moved from New Jersey to Georgia in 1977, due to the longer allergy season in the South, with pollen, mold, and dust mites that can trigger and worsen asthma symptoms such as wheezing, coughing, and shortness of breath. Buchanan, a former public health educator and aspiring doctor, transmitted her knowledge and symptomatic chronic bodily experience into her artwork, and her body became sculpture and house—open, laboring, impossibly holding. Buchanan’s legend (her name for the texts that often accompany her sculptures) serves as more than a caption for the sculpture, in excess of ekphrasis. It melds divisions between object and body, artist and artwork, wood and flesh by reenacting the role of language in constructing and enlivening bodies and things in modernity and, specifically, the place of an ontologically dispersed and distributive blackness in that construction.
Like many of the references in her sculptures’ titles and legends, Buchanan knew Mr. Robert Mathis. His phone number is listed in her 1992 address book, along with directions to his Hull, Georgia, home and a note that his son “knows about yellow root.” Buchanan names and locates Mr. Mathis in life and in this artwork as part of her search for bodily cure, stemming from a family legend that Buchanan’s grandmother had cured her asthma through an Indigenous remedy, the details of which were lost over time. Many of Buchanan’s sculptures and legends can be understood as the product of and vehicle for her search for this cure, its relief and sustenance. We can see it in her 1993 work “Medicine Woman” or “The Doctor,” a found-object assemblage sculpture that constructs a figure out of antique pill bottles and art materials, an ode to an enigmatic woman who carries the tools of cure as body. We can also see it in Buchanan’s sojourns to ramshackle black shacks in the South, which she photographed as extensions of her own body. As Buchanan wrote about the shack photos in a 1985 letter, “the empty ones are stark and strong images but are very fragile structures . . . Not all black structures or people are strong as they may appear . . .” In her incessant movement through the Georgia landscape, she sought both cure and communion with blackness’s dispersed and laboring forms, as shack and body that enliven and enable that terrain, and this one.
This bodily and aesthetic dispersal also manifested in Buchanan’s expansive network of health care providers. In her application for an artist grant in 1994, Buchanan included the names and contact information for the Athens medical specialists she saw for diabetes treatment, gastroenterology, orthopedic, and ophthalmology care. By including her networked medical care alongside a profile of her artistic practice, Buchanan enacts a dispersed and networked mode of being and artmaking. She foregrounds the body’s dependency on structures outside of itself, and for Buchanan, a black woman living in the South, this dependency was as pained as it was necessary. Buchanan’s many bodily ailments arose within and through structures of antiblackness that made her open and vulnerable to weathering forces, and the care she received did not exist outside of these structures. In conversation with Mo Costello and Katz Tepper in January 2024, pulmonary and allergy specialist Dr. Stephen Lucas shared that Buchanan’s case was medically challenging and exacerbated by the fact that she had “crappy insurance that didn’t really cover anything” and “never had any money.” Interconnected with this privation is Lucas’s significant collection of Buchanan’s drawings and prints, which she often bartered for medical care and services. Lucas poignantly states of her artwork and this dynamic: “Beverly just scattered it all over the landscape.” Underneath these statements is the pressing heartbeat of her necessity and lack, which is linked to the ontology of blackness and which interrupts any possibility of closed, autonomous self and body. This blackened lack is endlessly productive and Buchanan created richly from this place, a needful, world-making generativity that cannot be dissociated from her pained body nor from the still-growing cultural and financial value it provides those who received it. Buchanan made her suffering public, or was open to the publicness of her suffering, and scattered her pained body of work through the South, illuminating a blackened landscape in the process. This is an effort of what Saidiya Hartman terms redress of the pained and dis-membered black body, an “articulation of needs or desires and the endeavor to meet them” that attends to the body “as a site of pleasure, eros, and sociality and articulat[es] its violated condition.”3
Buchanan depicted the social underpinnings of the networked black body in Sassafras and Yellow Root (1993), a legend closely related to Mr. Robert Mathis’ Yellow Root House and Table:
Stay away from white sassafras tea. It’s dangerous, Emory said long distance from South Carolina. Red Roots are what you need for your medicine. I knew about red sassafras but white was a mystery. Mr. Mathis said his son could lower his blood sugar with yellow root tea.
My pharmacy is a social, friendly place where you can eat lunch while waiting for your arthritis medicine. It’s also frequented by three Black ladies, a “little” older than I, who shop, talk and look. The driver of this long Chevy Impala and I talked about “sugar” one day and we said, simultaneously, that “Yellow root tea” lowered it, but we didn’t know why. She suggested I keep a pitcher of it refrigerated. I told her, maybe not, because, visitors might mistake its yellow color for . . . something else.
This work is a tribute to all doctors, everywhere.
In this rich scene, Buchanan extends her search for yellow root and cure, drawing on a network of folk medicine that is both within and against the formally medicalized space of the pharmacy. She did not place complete faith in formal medicine and turned to the social network of black folk medicine for knowledge of what sustains through precarity. As Sharla Fett describes in Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (2002), this knowledge was gleaned from chattel slavery’s violently forged modes of engaging the Southern fields and forest at eye level, as compared to the white slaveholder’s experience of landscape at a remove. In their close attention to landscape, the enslaved searched for herbs that could assist their ailing, laboring bodies. Fett writes that blood was the most significant factor in enslaved black herbalists’ diagnosis of illness, and depending on the qualities of the blood—“high/low, thick/thin, fast/slow, hot/cold, pure/impure”—they prescribed medicines such as sassafras root tea to address the issue. Buchanan recognized the continued significance of these practices in the afterlives of slavery and used them to ground her artistic and personal search for bodily relief. Also grounding is the incisive humor present in Sassafras and Yellow Root, which Buchanan frequently employs to relate through the painful reality of blackness’s embattled relationship to secure embodiment and health in a world structured by its impossibility.
Buchanan’s mode of public health is in opposition and apposition to the sequestered authority of a medical doctor’s office, the privatizing ethos of medical notes and prescriptions, and, most foundationally, the modern sense of a closed and individualized body. Blackness belies this relation to medicine because it’s a body that came into being in modernity for the use of others. When those who became Africans were transformed into blacks, birthed by the Middle Passage and chattel slavery, the possibility of an interiorized and self-possessed body was lost as bodily health was tied to soundness for the master and increase in productivity. Soundness as a measure of health was based on the slave’s capacity to labor and their worth on the marketplace, a concept which included physical, mental, and moral dimensions, as Fett details in Working Cures. If we take as a given, that which still gives, the structures that produced chattel slavery and that remain in this world, acting on and shaping black and non-black bodies alike, then we can understand the continuing difficulty of a conception of black health that does not give over and against itself. Buchanan works through this paradox publicly and openly in her searching legends and markedly unsound sculptural shack edifices of the black body.
Prior to her wooden shacks, Buchanan explored the architectural remnants of black bodily pain and labor with her environmental sculpture Marsh Ruins (1981), three tabby concrete forms installed in the Marshes of Glynn in Brunswick, Georgia. Tabby concrete is a labor-intensive mixture of oyster shell particles and quicklime, sand, ash, and water produced by slaves and utilized largely in plantation architecture in the antebellum Southeast. After viewing the tabby remains of the Retreat Plantation Slave Hospital in St. Simons Island, Georgia, in 1981, Buchanan wrote in her notes: “The hospital was for ill slaves. What was such a thing? Who was in charge, who ran it—who was ‘doctor’[?] . . . I stood and looked long and walked slowly and imagined and—waited. I said aloud to the walls—what the hell do I think I’m doing? . . . I thought—stronger. It [the marsh sculpture] has to be strong, like all these magnificent ruins round here.” Buchanan saw clearly the spatializing nature of labored, pained black breath. She extended this breath into Marsh Ruins, years later into Mr. Robert Mathis’ Yellow Root House and Table, and into her expansive oeuvre of spatially imbued sculpture, legends, and photography. Her work refuses clear distinctions of being and object to also refuse temporal distinctions that misunderstand the being of blackness. Instead, Buchanan linked her life experience and aesthetic production to chattel slavery, foregrounding the continuity between then and now, here and there, illuminating the Southern landscape as subtended by the virtualized black body, by constricted black breath.
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1. Sarah Richter, “ ‘splinter to the heart of the world’: Beverly Buchanan’s shack works,” Journal of Visual Culture 23, no. 1 (August 2024): 9–10. https://doi.org/10.1177/14704129241237898.
2. Nahum Dmitri Chandler, “To Make a Way Out of No Way: Meditation on the Art of Beverly Buchanan” in All in the Family: Improvisational Architecture in the Work of Beverly Buchanan, ed. Marianetta Porter, n.d., accessed in Beverly Buchanan papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
3. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 77.
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