annenberg media ♪ funding for this program was provided by... "every year, leftover family members came from columbia "just to look and remember.

"some parts of the house were bought, "others salvaged from houses taken over by kudzu and snakes. "one window cost two months' pay. "a fancy door she had to have "was four months' worth of washing clothes. "the first grandbaby arrived "when the second story was started. he had to have a home!" man: southerners have a really strong sense of place, but it's not just like in "gone with the wind" where the land's the only thing. it's the house. we are "house proud." and if we see houses as important, sometimes we haven't seen shacks as important. we've differentiated between the grand antebellum architecture. that's what people think of when they think of the south.

but the reality is that very few people, black or white, ever lived in a white-column mansion. most of us lived in houses much more like these shacks. and i think that beverly has called attention to what's really one of the predominant housing varieties in the sth. she is honoring where a whole bunch of us came from. woman: as a child, beverly would accompany her father, walter buchanan, on his rounds, his visits to sharecroppers' homes and to tenant farmers' homes in his capacity as a state representative for agriculture, as well as for his position as the dean of the school of agriculture

at the south carolina state college. woman: and although beverly never lived in a shack, they would get rained in, and beverly would get an opportunity to stay overnight in the shack communities. buchanan: so i was exposed to a lot of practical things. so i saw, you know, calves being born, and horses and pigs and little baby chickens. westmacott: and it may not have meant much to her when she was doing it as a young child, but it certainly has permeated her memory and her work today. and it can be seen in a lot of the photographs that her father actually took while they were on these trips when he was documenting the state of life for the people that he was seeing.

steinbaum: those memories of the shack communities are often shared with her audience through the work and through the legends. buchanan: "nellie mae went around the yard every day "looking for the right stick to draw with in the dirt. "the yard in front of their house "was her favorite drawing spot. "the road to town was too dusty and wide and busy. "her grandfather, ollie malcolm rush, "built this house for his family a long time ago. it's called a shotgun house." i've been making things all my life. and maybe an attraction for wood was nice. we lived on campus. it was a house on campus, so i grew up on campus.

it was helpful that i could be exposed to a situation where there was wood, where there were carpenters. and i just kind of would make things. i made things from scraps of wood that were being thrown away. i made all sorts of stuff from leftover, thrown-out things. and i guess that eventually transformed into what later was called art. it was just never called that. it was called making things. it was called making things. i don't have a degree in art. i don't have an art degree at all. my undergraduate degree is in medical technology. my family always wanted a doctor, and so i headed toward the sciences. and going to medical school was something that i knew would be beneficial to the "race," world race, my race.

but my thinking was, "i don't want to be a doctor who paints. i think i want to be a painter." it was like i was already an artist, but i mean, i just, i sort of had to say that to myself. my first interest is in the structure of something. and so when i start out making something, i'm not thinking about who might have lived there. i'm thinking about how i want it to look. structure for me is number one. and then i will decide who might have lived there. somes i will move away frowhat i'm working on and look at it -- look back at it -- and move around it and look at it. it's a process of getting a fresh look at something. it's like working on a drawing and you back up to see what your perspective is.

and you see how you're doing -- how if it's flowing the way you want it flow, if it's moving the way you want it to move. i bent the metal one way, and i saw that the top part wasn't going to work. if this was clay, then i could just, you kn, take my hand and whack off some clay or smooth it down. this is like a real building experience here. this is like working on a house. it's like part of it's covering up part of the roofline. that's not going to work structurally. see, i'm back to structure, you know. 'cause i knew that it had to be cut. but i wouldn't know until i cut it whether i was right. i was right. that's called experience...yeah.

westmacott: there's a generosity of spirit and an appreciation for the world around her that's reflected in her work. it's also integrated with who she is for me. i mean, she's colorful. she's fun. she's tough. she's resilient. she's creative and imaginative. this particular survey focuses on work that had to do with pieces that were inspired by architectural ideas. and that, for beverly, didn't start until the '70s. and it started with her "black wall" paintings, which, i believe, is the first reference

to some architectural component -- walls. and so she began doing these works that show a lot of texture but the general color is just black. she also started working with clay and making these small slab constructions with clay that were also glazed black. pickard: she's gone from kind of cool, large blocks of color, working in three-dimensional forms with stone, and she's broken these patterns down and has gotten more colorful and more varied. and she's also gotten a little bit more figurative. westmacott: she then began making pieces out of foam core. and these, i think, are probably -- in her sculptural work -- are the most complete combination

of her abstract-expressionist interest and her interest in shacks. what she's done is lifted the two-dimensional abstract-expressionist brushwork and turned them into the slabs that she was constructing these architectural pieces with. buchanan: so what i did was to put the walls together, put a roof on them, and then eventually i added the foundations that i had been making all the time. so my work is, i guess you could say, finally coming together. the walls and the foundations have come together now. westmacott: after working with the foam core, she then began making shacks out of bits and pieces of found wood that captured the atmosphere, the quality, of the actual shacks that she was remembering from her youth, and that she was still seeing in the southern landscape.

and even more recently, she's taken to going to secondhand stores and stopping by yard sales and just picking up a piece that might appeal to her, and storing it away much the way the people who lived in these buildings did, in terms of picking up something that might some day be useful in some way. beverly, have i ever gotten you lost? yes! one time you said, "i don't think i know where we are." that was just once, though. but that wasn't lost.

that meant we just didn't know where we were. buchanan: prudence lopp is a very dear friend whose formal job it is to appraise property. in addition to that, i just have this very intense interest in old houses and gardens and that sort of thing. buchanan: so she has to look at real estate. a lot of it's rural. a lot of it's just farms. and she would say, "i know where there's some very old houses "that you might like to see. ride with me, i have to go up to north georgia." this is it, gang. she and i were on our way some months ago to look at an appraisal for her, and i saw a bunch of chickens in this yard, and asked her to back up. and i stayed in her car, and she hopped out and asked mr. hansen -- we discovered that was his name, mr. hansen -- asked if we could photograph his chickens. lopp: and, of course, he was very accommodating. keep 'em in the pen, don't let 'em eat up my garden. lopp: he wanted us just to stop and sit down

and talk to him, because he was lonely. oh! oh! oh! [ dog barks ] buchanan: and then he showed us his pigs and his barn and his old tractor. somebody stole one of them out of the pen there. buchanan: so here was a working farm -- used to be a working farm. he and his wife lived there alone. lopp: he doesn't read or write. he hadn't been out of the county but one time in his 70-something years.

i haven't seen the frame of an outhouse in years! that's the frame of it. lopp: beverly and i went out the other day and looked at some properties where there were outhouses, and there was a frame of an outhouse, but you could still see the two little round holes. we get very excited when we see outhouses! [ camera clicks ] yeah, there were people living here. in fact, there was a lady across the street, right there, sitting on that porch. and i stopped to tell her that i was just taking photos of houses, and that i was an artist, that i liked houses. [ clears throat ] [ camera clicks ] hmm, wonder where they all went?

[ camera clicks ] i've photographed houses that are not there any more, and it's like i think maybe, maybe i shouldn't tell people i'm going to come and photograph their house. it's like, "that means two months from now iton't be here -- might not be here, right?" it's a little scary. and i said to prudence, "we can't save the whole state of georgia. we can't save everybody's..." "the first sight of the house "was like a bolt of lightning had hit me. "and i could only sit and stare.

"then i noticed her in part of her garden. "getting out cautiously, i said something like, "'how are you today?' "and said that i had just come by to see her house "because i heard that she had built it. "she wasn't hostile, but reserved. "i was familiar with the reserve of old black women "who live alone with no visible means of protection. "i was scared to death! "miss furcron was proud of her gardens "and whether you were there for long or not, "she had things to do around there, and you felt intrusive. "she had asked how old i was, and if i was married. "she said that she had never married. "i miss her more than she knows. "her house looks abandoned, as her yard and gardens show. "apparently, one time she got loose from the nursing home and walked 10 miles toward her home."

she's still in a nursing home, but she doesn't know that her house doesn't exist anymore. [ opera music plays ] there may be artists who can have people watch them. i can't. it's a very private act. that's why. when i'm working, i listen to music. who are you? if i'm doing shacks, i might put on jessye norman. you don't have to have a chimney. you're just a drawing! you don't need a chimney! if i put on the rolling stones, it would ruin it! put on the rolling stones another time, or put on nothing at all. and now the hard part begins -- putting the orchestra together. [ pop music plays ]

whew! [ rock 'n' roll music plays ] ♪ climbing jacob's ladder ♪ jacob's ladder whew! we have a lot to do, but we've got the core. what is this? trash. trash in here. trash, trash. made in georgia. trash, trash. [ "davy crockett" plays ] [ southern rock music plays ]

[ opera music plays ] no, you know who you are. [ groaning ] [ sighing ] pickard: the tubman museum is georgia's largest african american museum. our mission is to educate people about african american art, history, and culture, and we do this in a lot of different ways. but for me, beverly buchanan's show of shacks, which we've entitled "coming home," is one of the best ways we've ever done this.

beverly has strong macon connections. and i think a lot of the groundwork for these shacks came to her while she was living in our community. and she's just added a figure, a large-scale, monumental figure, to one of the pieces. and i think that's an exciting and significant change. the name of the piece is called "harriet's shack," and it's harriet tubman, who the museum is named for. we honor her as a woman of strength and courage, and i think beverly does too by making her two stories tall and this giant woman that is conveying power and courage. but also there are flowers all over her dress, and she looks like she's someone you'd want to get to know. these are places that black and white, rich and poor, we all see and understand. these pieces just, i mean, they seem to dance. the colors, the wild lines, the movement.

when we were hanging them, we kept putting the level on them, trying to see did we really have them level, because they seem to move and generate an energy of their own. and that comes from the bright colors and the unusual juxtapositions of these wild primary colors thrown right up against each other. to me, they're the visual equivalent of jazz. we see a lot of improvisation here. they're going in all different directions, but they make sense as a whole. it's just like jazz. there's a coherency and a consistency within the wildness. that's not to say there's not a lot of thought behind it. i think that people can make a real mistake at thinking what she's doing is random and haphazard. there's a random quality to it, but she thinks a lot about the relationships, even between little bits and pieces as they work together. but she's definitely thinking about the overall composition.

[ metal clatters ] buchanan: when i started looking at this piece to start working on it some more, i was not happy with it. i was not happy at all with it. what made me not happy was the shape of the roof. i took a hammer, just kind of gave it a rampf -- rhaaaa! and picked up the pieces that had fallen on the ground and started to work more with metal. i'm not on a car assembly line. i don't have until 4:00 this afternoon to get this all ready to go here. because it's a little more complicated than that. i'm not counting the minutes and the times or the hours or the days. i'm working on what looks good and when i can work. if it suddenly starts to rain right now, i'd have to stop. okay, let's turn you around so i can look at you.

you're not a slim shack. you're in the state that i'm in, sort of. you're a little overweight. but you're sturdy. more sturdy than i am. i always talk to the sculpture. whether it's the stone pieces or the shack pieces, i have this little conversation. it's like i'm eliciting their help. you have to help me here by letting me see things that i might not see. doesn't seem to want to have a door. we'll talk about it, won't we? you don't have to have steps, but by golly, you're going to have to have a door -- or the remnants of. that piece is shaping up very well for me, except the door.

i just have this obsession now about a door. wh this piece lly a closed-up ki of ece, i just have this obsession now it will only need a door if my intention is to have it look abandoned but someone could walk in and look around. if it doesn't have a door, it means it's abandoned and you can't get inside to look at it. frankly, you look nice without a door. i just think you should have a door! [ laughing ] oh! hah! whew! well, i like the way you look so far. we'll have to resolve the door thing. hmm... [ sighing ] -- captions by vitac -- burbank, pittsburgh, washington

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