Beverly Buchanan (1940-2015) was a Black artist. She grew up in South Carolina often going with her father on trips to the countryside for his work as Dean of the School of Agriculture at South Carolina State College. Beverly never forgot her views of the sharecropper’s shacks on these trips. She was later trained in medical technology and public health at Bennett College and Columbia University and just when she might have begun medical school, art pulled her back to those childhood trips.

 

Beverly began to draw, paint and sculpt in celebration of the hopeful structures she had seen. She felt these testaments to making do though born of poverty were filled with vitality and creativity, with improvisation, resilience and tenacity. In her expressionistic work she portrayed these domestic and functional structures as a triumph of the human spirit. With humility and complexity she lifted up the determined choices of the people toward shelter and beauty for all of us to see.

 

Beverly Buchanan’s work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney and the Brooklyn Museum in addition to many others around the country.

 

Beverly Buchanan built the Beatitudes for us. May we see and hear them now in this Lenten Season. Thanks be to God.

 

In gratitude, faith and hope,

 

Sandy Prouty
Minister of Children and Families
Montview Church