In Utah, Arizona, or, as it turns out, Georgia, Land Art is an invitation. Beginning in the early 1970s, artists ventured outdoors to re-define sculpture, digging in the mud and clay, drawing with dirt bikes, dramatically dispersing rock and soil, to re-think ephemerality, land use, and perception. Artist Beverly Buchanan (1940 – 2015), most notable for her colorful drawings and wooden sculptures of rural shacks, used cement, lime, tabby, and ash to quietly monumentalize unnoticed histories. Her Environmental Sculptures, as she called them, are not roadside attractions, but easily missed “signs” that mark unseen forces with a porous, hand-made, concretized presence. Her work invites a field trip.2

The following two essays are reflections on Beverly Buchanan’s works in Brunswick and Macon, GA, because Land Art isn’t a museum entrance. It’s a trail to follow. Noah Kelber’s essay leans south toward Marsh Ruins (1981), Buchanan’s sculpture in Brunswick, while this essay traces south to Brunswick and then northwest to Macon, with Savannah as each writer’s point of departure.

I was surprised to hear that Buchanan, whose work I knew cursorily, had an earthwork, located only an hour and a half south of Savannah.3 While not a household name, North Carolina native, Beverly Buchanan eventually became a celebrated artist with a sustained artistic practice in New York/New Jersey, and Macon, Atlanta, and Athens, GA. Her work was shown by artist Ana Mendieta in 1980 and collected by museums and private collectors such as Wes and Missy Cochran, and written about by scholars like Leslie King-Hammond and Richard Long.

First stop: Brunswick. With curiosity, I enlisted an adventurous co-pilot willing to find some rocks along a

highway (that may be invisible). We planned for low tide and searched through a municipal parklet wedged between Highway 17 and the spectacular Marshes of Glynn. Marsh Ruins (1981) is wedged into a liminal space cornered near a fishing pier. Three mound-like, hand-made “rocks”, once having reached over four feet in height out of the water, are now sunken, splitting, disintegrating tabby mounds. These erratic forms appear glacial as if they tumbled too far south. They look like fake dinosaur eggs, their shells compromised by millennia, that you might see in a natural history museum. These are not the neat cubes of Minimalism. They are unassuming as if complicating the mythic largess of earthworks.

As curator TK Smith notes, Marsh Ruins are made of “lime, water, sand, oyster shells, and ash – and then stain[ed] brown.” In the intentional banality of the works, what stands out is that nothing stands out. Only a glob of cement inscribed by the artist with a stick acts as marker. There is no official signage for Buchanan, who had a 2016 retrospective at The Brooklyn Museum and whose work was a highlight in the 2024 exhibition “Edges of Ailey” at The Whitney Museum of American Art. The site accumulates fast-food packaging and used water bottles. Most photographs that reproduce this work crop out the cars, bridge, pier, debris, and highway, transforming it into a romanticized Earthwork, bucolic, untouched. But that is only half the story. Yes, the work faces outward toward the spectacular Marshes of Glynn made famous by the 19th century poet Sidney Lanier who compared its golden light and green grasses to Ireland, but it is also grounded dockside on the shore of a municipal parklet in mainland Brunswick, a majority Black, working class, port city with its deep roots in wood pulp production, ship-building, and shrimping industries.

Marsh Ruins is situated on a promontory that demarcates a compelling mire of American history and unfolding present. Triangulating in its view toward St. Simons Island, Jekyll Island, and mainland Brunswick, the earthwork faces glorious sunrises, life-giving ecotonal grasslands, and the waterways of the Golden Isles. Across the water south is Jekyll Island, historically the leisurely stomping-grounds for the northeast’s Gilded Age families – the Rockefellers, Pulitzers, Morgans, and the Vanderbilts who had summer mansions on its bayside. The piece looks east toward St. Simons Island whose demographic makeup remains over 93% white and college educated. But also across on St. Simons is this work’s unstated raison d’etre, what TK Smith refers to as “signs of Black presence.” Dunbar Creek is the site of the Igbo Landing uprising.4 Here, in 1803, approximately seventy-five West Africans revolted against their captors and walked together, in chains, into deep waters presumably to their deaths, drowning en masse rather than facing enslavement. “This evocative story of resistance against enslavement…inspired tales of Africans flying or walking on water…the impetus for numerous African American cultural works including Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon” (perhaps not coincidentally published in 1977, the year Buchanan moved to Georgia). It was finally marked in 2022 by The Georgia Historical Society as part of a newly designated Georgia Civil Rights Trail.5 Thanks to these efforts, more locals now know this history, but it is not nationwide knowledge, just as few Americans know the people, language, food, and craft of the Gullah-Geechee culture in this region. The location Buchanan chose is one quiet point of an entangled web linking American slavery to American manufacturing and multi-generational enrichment, the north to the south, islands as leisurely escape linked with mainland labor, from idyllic beauty to the unseen and discarded. Amelia Groom points out that “[Buchanan’s] sculptural idiom is to re-center Black histories as part of an ecology of the land.”6 Buchanan provided this quiet marker challenging us to take notice.

A lover of signage, Buchanan uses wit to recognize the complexities of her work on this site. Her playful drawings made with felt tip markers, photos, and handwritten notes seem like trail-markers to understand her sculptures. In her own commentary on Marsh Ruins, in one drawing she depicts herself wearing a T-shirt that reads “ARTIST” as she points toward her boulders alongside the highway. Her character as “ARTIST” also props up a small billboard glaring with red and green Christmas lights reading: “This Way to Beverly Buchanan’s Marsh Ruins.” Her humorous self-mockery on being an obscure artist making art in an off-beat place is both deeply conscientious and funny. In her cartoon, a car speeds past her with a man waving out the window as the road veers toward an American flag, a McDonald’s, and a Sears store. Counting the artist herself as a sign, her T-shirt, the work of art, the “golden arches,” the national flag, and the department store, there are seven total signs in this drawing. The drawing thus suggests that Marsh Ruins also be read as a sign, signaling this ecosystem of layered meanings. It points toward questions like: what does it mean for her to be an artist, a Land Artist, a Black artist in America, a woman, a southern American artist, an educated rural artist inundated by a commercial culture of signage and Pop Art signification in a location loaded with history’s signposts for enslavement, compromised production, and resultant consumption? This site has also had long-term battles since around 1968 with wildlife conservation versus rampant development. It is a fraught and layered location. Buchanan’s response is to poke fun at her own piece as an unlikely tourist attraction and, further, at the idea of Earthworks as roadside commodities. This little pocket-park hidden along the edge of the country is central to the narrative of our national history and couldn’t be any less of a sideshow. It is the main event. While the work takes up little physical space, it encompasses the complexities of American history.

From an early age, Beverly Buchanan ventured out. In her early childhood, with her adoptive father Walter Buchanan, a Professor and Dean of the Department Agriculture at South Carolina State College, she traveled to farms in the Southeast advising sharecroppers and tenant farmers on crop rotation. She absorbed the rural landscape, its people, and regional architecture such as shacks, which would become essential to her practice. She went on to complete her own studies in chemistry and biology at Columbia University, eventually working as a Health Educator in New Jersey and New York around 1969 until she began to take classes at The Art Students League with Abstract Expressionist painter Norman Lewis who offered Buchanan her first show in May 1972 at Cinque Gallery in New York City founded by Norman Lewis, Romare Bearden, and Ernest Crichlow.7

Influenced by Lewis’ expressionism and Bearden’s collaged visions of Black experience with roots in the American south, Buchanan had found her artist mentors. It is clear though that she was on a journey to find her own subject matter. Scholar Park McArthur notes that her father’s 1929 master’s thesis was entitled “Economic and Social Conditions of Negroes as Tenants and Farm Laborers in South Carolina.” This title is essential footing. An artist’s lifelong pursuit is often grounded in childhood experience. From her formative years, Buchanan loved the shacks, the rocks, and the land. She absorbed the concept of endurance despite hardship and embodied them in Marsh Ruins and other hand-made structures.

Art in the early 1970s, infused with the pluralistic energies of the Civil Rights struggles, entered a fresh dialog with what sculpture could be in relation to the land. Earth Day kicked off in 1970 shortly after we landed on another big rock, the moon. Performance and conceptual art, with a focus on signification, the lingering Vietnam War, and a new reliance on photo-based media, were percolating. While living in New Jersey, Buchanan very likely knew the writings and works of New Jersey-born Earthworks pioneer Robert Smithson whose texts focused on entropy and geological ruination. After studying Stonehenge and other monumental stone puzzles, Smithson published his now canonical “Monuments of Passaic” (1967) and “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects” (1968) in ArtForum, and, together with his partner artist Nancy Holt, blazed the trail for what would become monumental rock and concrete structures in Utah, New York, and New Jersey known around the world. Beginning to show her work, Buchanan had her own exhibition in 1976 at the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey. With a career in the arts flourishing and her health science career in the rear view mirror, Buchanan took a startling U-turn and moved from New York to Macon, Georgia in 1977. As evidenced in her work at the time, it seemed even to startle her. To the New York art scene, this must have seemed like a detour. Understanding this, she embraced a sense of humor about it.

Buchanan scholar Amelia Groom describes a playful zine that Buchanan made for friends when she moved to Georgia. Entitled Hope This Helps You to Survive Your Gallery Visit, the zine provides funny advice about how to survive as an artist in New York and Georgia, mocking the pretensions of the art world, its overt and covert signs. In one drawing “we see a truck driver passing out makeshift signs along the side of the road. They display the words: ‘Art Sale’, ‘Road Art Sale’ and ‘Starving Art Sale’.”8 Her use of signage caricatures her own concerns about choosing unsupported art in the south over regular jobs and exhibitions in the north. In this zine, as in other works, we see Buchanan’s message spoken in slogans and signage. She found humor in them, often drawing and photographing them. With a Pop Art-infused inclination toward handmade signs, cartoonish billboards, and T-shirt slogans, her work signals artists as neglected, commodified beings. In this way, both her drawings and sculptural rock formations can better be understood if we see them as signs – one silent marker, the other loud signal. Rocks are mute, lasting. They leave a quiet mark, whispering I am (still) here, I endure. Signs are vocal. They boldly declare I am for sale, see me! Moving here, she had found her voice and Marsh Ruins is both rock and a sign amongst signs.

Buchanan’s first field trip in Georgia, after making a U-turn south, was, in fact, to visit a sign near Dublin, GA that read: “Hunger and Hardship Creek.” She photographed herself with the sign for this swampy tributary of the Oconee River named for the hardship experienced by its original surveyor. The photograph is one in a series. A hand-written banner over one pose reads: “Buchanan Moves South, Oct. 1977.” She uses this comedic sign to commemorate the occasion of her landing, and counters with humor the art world’s incredulity – perhaps her own as well – that a serious artist would move from New York City to Georgia. It marks the fact that she chose an artist’s life of hardship in the south over a solid paycheck in the north.

But in Buchanan’s work, there is always more to the story. Out of sight of the sign, behind a water treatment plant, was an adjacent cemetery for roughly 1,500 graves of Black residents with hand carved, cement headstones. Overgrown and forgotten, it was as late as 2015 before the cemetery was properly recognized by residents and relocated to “Cross the Creek,” an improved and marked cemetery.9 This series demonstrates Buchanan’s documented treks as narrative trails, marked with the untold stories about lost lives and histories, signs for those willing to notice.10 “Hunger and Hardship Creek” also marks her move from the urban streets of New York City to the rural land and water of the Jimmy Carter state, which in the 1970s was leading legislation to protect tributaries like this one. As was the zeitgeist of the era, Buchanan’s art links human stories with the importance of land and increasing ecological awareness.

Next stop: Ocmulgee Mounds National History Park in Macon. First, we hiked to the top of these startling indigenous earthworks along Highway 16, its native funerary site bisected in 1843 and 1873 by the national railroad, still in operation today. These mounds are also the site of a major Civil War battle in 1864, and the largest archaeological dig in US history conducted in the 1930s. The “mounds” need a name commanding more respect since they are more like pyramids demarcating the vast continuous history of native peoples in Middle Georgia between 12,000 BCE and 1800 CE. They are monumental. Yet the park felt like a soon-to-be-abandoned roadside attraction. With some helpful but faded signage, as if unchanged since Roosevelt’s 1936 WPA excavations conducted by the Civilian Conservation Corps, it is like a park people visited enthusiastically before television. Yet the hidden mounds should be the main attraction.

Third stop: Buchanan’s Unity Stones (1983). Driving across the highway from the Ocmulgee Mounds on this devastatingly hot July day to the nearby mini-mounds Buchanan made called Unity Stones, I struggled through heat hallucination to wonder why there was not more written on the link between Buchanan’s “mounds” sited at the Booker T. Washington Community Center and the Ocmulgee Mounds home for millennia of indigenous peoples and the ancestral homeland for the Muscogee Creek Nation. In my research, no text surfaced connecting the majestic native mounds to her mound sculptures just over two miles away. It is impossible not to consider connections when an artist as astute as Buchanan makes mounds in a town famous for its mounds. Her Unity Stones form an entrance-piece for a community center across the street from residential houses and a defunct arts center. Six gray concrete circular mounds with sparse, faded, now reddish-brown pigment had originally been hand-painted matte black.11 These six mounds encircle two taller, rectangular footing sculptures which she referred to as “frustulas.” Frustules, connected to the artist’s first career in science, are like the cellular version of footings, the casings that structure and filter a cell. They are ruins from nearby buried pillars of a building which she then partially re-cast, re-surfaced with porous concrete, and painted. Here they read as mini-mounds, mysterious, like a settlement ruin. Footings for building foundations, cellular wall frustules, and underground mounds, all three represent endurance without visibility. Each is a hidden force supporting people and encasing history. This site for her work pays homage to the indigenous mounds, but also the history of Booker T. Washington, an emancipated, educated, Black leader with a highly distinguished and complex career. It is important to note the 1956 federal stamp commemorating his birthplace – a shack – to understand why Buchanan marks this site in cement. Like Marsh Ruins, Buchanan marks places of neglect, using the enduring vocabulary of the cement ruin to say, look here, below the surface to the layer of meaning this place contains. Without apparent organization, her forms huddle, congregating. There is no signage, nothing that implies “this is art” or “no sitting/no touching.” She encouraged people to hang out on them. Buchanan valued how we come upon, ignore, discover, pretend not to see, hike on, sit on, or dialog within or about a place.

Final Stop: Ruins in the Rituals (1979) at The Macon Museum of Arts and Sciences. Buchanan lived in Macon between 1977 and 1985, and she chose to site a sculpture beside the museum parking lot on a hilly, manicured pathway later named The Sweet Gum Trail. Co-sponsored by University of Georgia and The Garden Clubs of Georgia and assisted by the Master Gardeners of Central Georgia, this family friendly museum has a native plant garden that offers gnomes and climb-able stone turtles. This playful atmosphere belies the web of significance in Buchanan’s choice to locate a significant earthwork at this location. Her roughly four foot “boxes,” or footings, are found objects from a nearby demolished building. These resemble square tombs with cast concrete “frustulas” strewn around sparking a Stonehenge-like curiosity. Each of the four concrete “ruins” have seams around the top, like fake lids or sarcophagi. As art historian Lucy Lippard has discussed, these are often considered within a discussion of ruination and “intentional neglect,” or “ruination as an artistic strategy” as Buchanan scholar Andy Campbell elaborates.12 They are situated without symmetry with one “cube” off in the distance, out of sync with the others as if to imply that they shifted due to time’s passage.

Placement is vital in understanding Buchanan’s work. Ruins in the Rituals is positioned next to a shack called Kingfisher Cabin used in the 1920s and 1930s by popular author Harry Stillwell Edwards. Edwards was known for his Harper’s Monthly and book-length tales of enslaved characters who happily returned to their enslavers after adventures such as Eneas Africanus (1919) which sold over a million books. Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, was his godfather.13 Given Buchanan’s affinity for shacks, and her acts of monumentalizing unnoticed connections, the artist was certainly marking a site for mourning.14 Edwards, a newspaper publisher as well, raised money for the ongoing construction of the Confederate Stone Mountain monument, just eighty miles north of Macon, by minting a half-dollar coin. Long after his death, Stone Mountain was re-energized and completed in 1964, the same year that Edwards’ shack was dedicated on the museum trail, notably during the Civil Rights struggles. The painful power of this monument to the Confederacy and this writer’s celebrated presence in Macon was certainly part of Buchanan’s quiet placement of this piece, though no writing of hers has been found on the subject. Andy Campbell notes that in her proposal for the work, she calls attention to their light, shadow, and color, but makes no note of the proximity of the shack, though the museum owns two of her shack sculptures and a drawing. He clarifies that this work was a “public mourning,” her way of marking Black lives lost to Edwards and his racist actions and texts. Without current signage, it offers an ideal teaching opportunity for the museum to add signage, to share the complexity of American histories alongside the garden’s digital field notes. This shack is not like the nearby climbing frog. It’s not a fun feature. Ruins in the Rituals, next to it, is a conscious and contextual conversation with the custodians of history, then and now.

In the 1980s, artist and associate editor of Art Papers magazine, Mildred Thompson wrote in a special issue for Contemporary Black artists that featured a Buchanan shack drawing on the cover: “…many artists have been able to reach higher states of consciousness, like those of the mystics. In cultures where artists are seen as visionaries, they are highly respected for their abilities to see beyond known realities.” Thompson’s words recall Buchanan’s marking of the unseen, her land-and-history-rooted consciousness. For the searching audience, another exhibition of her work, Beverly’s Athens, will be mounted in January 2026 at The Atheneum in Athens, GA, where she lived and worked between 1987 and 2010. Her works situated a trail for us to follow. See you in Athens...

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