Against Monumentality

Beverly Buchanan Whispers in the Marsh

by Noah Kelber

When I first moved to Savannah, I was struck by the number of public sculptures and monuments that occupied the city. I came to understand the history of many of these monuments to soldiers and to wars and would find myself wondering how Savannah would feel if it was filled with artistic sculptures highlighting a different Georgia, its history, and its creative heroes.

A little over an hour south of Savannah you can find one of the most complex examples of sculpture in the whole Southeast. It’s not in a museum, and it’s not in the center of a manicured square. It is adjacent to a small community park on the edges of the Marshes of Glynn in Brunswick.

It may take searching, but you will soon spot three mounds, in a tight triangular layout, emerging out of the marsh grasses. These weathered grey and brown forms, with their white speckles, due to shells in the tabby that encapsulates them, both elude your view and barely catch your eye. They could be mistaken for natural rocks jutting out of the marsh or for ruins buried for hundreds of years. As you wade into the marsh, the wear and age of the mounds becomes visible; its concrete skeleton under a layer of tabby reveals its hand-made interior. The search feels like discovering a hidden artifact. There is no marker; no large pedestal or stand from which to view the work. In the marsh, this trio has merged with the tidal grasses and debris that wash ashore daily.

I first saw the work in early 2024. I had just completed a cross-country road trip with my dad from Southern California to Savannah. Before he returned to California, we decided on one last adventure. We took I-95 south to Brunswick, and after about an hour we got off onto Highway 17. Shortly after entering Brunswick, along the right side of the road was our stop. The Marshes of Glynn Overlook Park, a small roadside community park with a handful of benches and tables. There was only one other car and a middle-aged man sitting on one of the benches looking out over the water. Curious why we had stopped at the park, he came to talk with us. He lived in Brunswick and had been there his whole life. He often came to the park to eat lunch and take a break. When I explained we were there to see the sculpture, he looked confused. “What sculpture?” he asked. I motioned in the direction of Marsh Ruins and explained a bit about them. I walked him over to the edge of the park with the best view. He had never heard of it or noticed it in the marsh. A smile of recognition emerged. He was determined to tell his friends about Brunswick’s famous work of art. It was special to see someone who had been to this park presumably hundreds of times throughout his life see the site in a new way. This is what public sculpture and Land Art accomplish in their best moments. They provide a new set of conditions to see our world and, in some cases, to see the history of the land on which we reside.

Created over two days in July 1981, Beverly Buchanan constructed Marsh Ruins with the help of a local contractor. Concrete was used as a base to create the “boulders” and tabby was used as an outer coating to seal them. Tabby is a shell-lime mixture that was historically used in the American South, including in constructions by and for enslaved African Americans. Throughout the South, tabby roads, walls, and structures can still be found. Each of the three mounds were given a final layer of brown stain (most of it faded by now), blending it into the landscape and harmonizing this new ruin with the marsh as a way of resisting monumentality while evoking a palette of racial and regional histories.

Marsh Ruins is tied to the history of the surrounding region. Located near St. Simons Island, it is near Igbo Landing, where in 1803, a group of enslaved Africans returned into the sea and collectively drowned themselves rather than submit to enslavement. Buchanan never confirmed whether the location of Marsh Ruins was deliberately chosen to echo this act of resistance, but it is noted that she visited the site of Igbo Landing in the week prior to the construction and the thematic resonances are unmistakable. The visibility of the work is dictated by the tides. During high tide, only a small portion of the largest stone reaches out of the water. During low tide, you can walk all the way next to the stones and see all that is visible of them since over time they have been sinking into the marsh. When they were first constructed, the stones were of human scale. The largest stone was about five feet high and the other two were just above and below three feet. Now, they are no higher than three feet out of the marsh. In this sense, the work does not simply memorialize — it participates in the processes of memory, erosion, and transformation.

The work wears its age like a badge of honor. The decaying forms highlight how Buchanan intentionally embraced ruination as a process – she embraced entropy and disintegration as metaphors for cultural and historical erasure, all as forms of remembrance. As scholar Andy Campbell has pointed out, her refusal of monumentality and intentional anonymity critiques how memorial culture often erases Black narratives while foregrounding white perspectives. The forms are meant to crack, flake, sink, and eventually disappear. This fugitive lifespan rejects conventional public memorials whose permanence and visibility serve dominant historical narratives. Marsh Ruins stages erasure as both a metaphor and a physical fact.

I often find myself thinking of what the South would look like with more sculptures like Buchanan’s and less commemorating problematic figures of the past. Think of all the histories and stories that have been overlooked or hidden. We find ourselves at a time when confederate monuments are being re-erected in parts of our country. At this same time, artists and arts organizations are seeing major cuts in funding. In 1980, Buchanan was able to construct Marsh Ruins with funds provided by a Guggenheim Fellowship. Without continued support for the arts and artists who push boundaries and speak the truth, we may deprive ourselves of a future that shows the whole picture.

In the early 1980’s Land Art and Earthworks were dominated by the mass-scale works constructed by white male artists, often in remote desert settings – think Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) or Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969). Those works occupy vast expanses of land and assert dominance over the landscape. Buchanan’s Marsh Ruins, by contrast, is modest, whispering outward from deep within the tidal marsh. She chose to create a work that lacked the monumentality of other earthworks. Most earthworks shout their existence while Buchanan chose a whisper as her delivery. I’ve had the great fortune to visit most of the major earthworks across the country and Marsh Ruins is at the top of my list. It melds the best parts of the movement’s ideas into one work. With significant yet quiet power, it yields to accessibility. Most earthworks are not easily accessible. Some require special vehicles to navigate offroad terrain. Others require long pilgrimages to eerily remote sections of the desert. Some require you to be one of a lucky few to get tickets to visit (De Maria’s Lighting Field and Heizer’s City). But Buchanan chose a site along a highway in a generously populated town. The work sits a mere thirty feet from a paved road. Comparatively, Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels in Utah is about 30 plus miles from the closest unincorporated town with the final ten to thirty miles (depending on the direction from which you enter and exit) fully off-road. Michael Heizer’s Double Negative in Nevada is eight miles with difficult off-road conditions after leaving the closest city. It is rather remarkable that Buchanan’s choice of site is so accessible while still maintaining the surprise that comes with finding a work of Land Art in person.

In terms of experience, some might argue that viewing Marsh Ruins is not as durational as other examples of Land Art. Holt’s Sun Tunnels are aligned to the sunrise and sunset on the winter and summer solstices, encouraging visitors to spend a day looking at the change. Walter De Maria’s Lighting Field requires the six visitors a day to stay for 24 hours in an on-site cabin to view the transformation of the landscape and work. I would encourage anyone with some spare time to stay and watch Buchanan’s still forms. The site is grand, offering a spectacular light show over time. As the light flickers and dims and the tide shifts, the Ruins reveal their changing surfaces and shape conditions, with a fluctuating mood. Despite gallery representation and some recognition, Buchanan never received widespread acclaim or acknowledgment during her life. This never stopped her from making art and sharing the side of the South she came to know. There are a handful of videos on YouTube that show Buchanan working on her art, driving around to different locations in Georgia, and most of all, exuding a humor that makes me wish I could have met her.

In the quiet persistence of Marsh Ruins, Buchanan left us a model for how art can honor the land, confront history, and invite discovery without overpowering its surroundings. It is a work that resists the easy consumption of spectacle, instead rewarding patience, attention, and a willingness to see the overlooked. In a landscape still crowded with monuments to a narrow version of history, Buchanan’s work offers another path – one that folds beauty and grief into the same tide-worn forms, where memory is kept not by permanence but by the ongoing act of noticing. To imagine a South filled with works like Marsh Ruins is to imagine a place where art amplifies the voices and stories embedded in the land that rise and fall with the water, always ready to be seen and heard again.

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