Macon Magazine

October/November 2026| maconmagazine.com 69 most famous series and motif — shacks. Though seeds for such work were planted earlier in the Carolinas and New York, it was in Macon where they took shape. They grew further when Buchanan moved briefl y to Atlanta, then Athens for a long period from 1987 to 2010. These works, these shacks, have been considered memory architecture honoring Black Southern resilience. Buchanan has gained fame for merging vernacular history with art, that is, the lived experience of actual people in actual places. It seems that within both healthcare and her art lies the importance of people as individuals. Along with outdoor sculptures — resilient and surviving though overtaken by the ravages of time and nature — there are many of her paintings and sculptural works at the Museum of Arts and Sciences, the Tubman African American Museum, and in the holdings of Macon collectors — as well as at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Smithsonian Archive of American Art in Washington, to name a few. Naturally, in Athens, her work is in the collection of the Georgia Museum of Art, where earlier this year an exhibit called "Shacks, Stories and Spirit: Beverly Buchanan's Art of Home" was featured. A w o m a n o f a c h i e v e m e n t In March, Buchanan was inducted into the Georgia Women of Achievement Hall of Fame, a hall created to honor Georgia women, inspire young women, and promote education. Buchanan was nominated by Susan Welsh of Welsh Art Appraisal + Advisory, who is now executive director emeritus of the Museum of Arts and Sciences. "Like many in Macon, I've been captivated by Beverly Buchanan's Ruins and Rituals at the museum," she said. "I never had the opportunity to meet her, but I talked with her several times, particularly during the months surrounding a large retrospective exhibition of her work we presented at the museum in 2014. The project highlighted the years she spent in Macon and featured works on loan from local collectors. She was living in Michigan then and unable to travel due to health but was delighted by the interest. "In my opinion, she created her most important work while living in Macon, and we have an abundance of her work here, from sculptures, paintings and drawings to environmental public works. No other community has such a deeply personal relationship and history with the artist." Ashley Curtis fi rst came to Macon to study at Mercer. She was introduced to Buchanan in an art history class and taken to see "Ruins and Rituals." "Buchanan was such a fascinating person and known all around the world," Curtis said. "To realize I could see and experience her work right down the road — well, it was amazing to see it live and not in a book or photograph.

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