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BEVERLY BUCHANAN
American, born in Fuquay, North Carolina, 1940; Lives in Athens, Georgia

When I was living and making work in New York, my work was very different from what it now physically conveys to me as well as to others. I am still interested in pieces as architecture and probably always will be. As a Southerner, I am interested in the work of folk artists and talk with them whenever I can. I discovered that some of my ideas about trying to return to a simple, uncomplicated look in my work were influenced by folk artists although I had not counted on or consciously thought about them. I think that artists in the South must at some point confront the work of folk artists not so much in the terms of the work but of the persons and the work as being of and from the same place with the same influences, food, dirt, sky, reclaimed land, development, violence, guns, ghosts and so forth.

Being at Nellie Mae Rowe's home was like being engulfed in a magic forest of her work because every surface had a mark from her hand and the simple chewing gum works made you never take gum as just chewing gum again. I had to return home to find out that I might have something to say that I was not saying "up there" which had to do with a kind of celebration of the spirit of people I had known who lived in dwellings called "shacks" and who could be recognized by what they wore and how they walked and by the flowers they grew in their front yards.

SUMMER
1988
Oilstick, 38 1/4 x 50 1/4
Lent by Bernice Steinbaum Gallery,
New York

FALL
1988
Oilstick, 38 1/4 x 50 1/4
Lent by Bernice Steinbaum Gallery,
New York

WINTER
1988
Oilstick, 38 1/4 x 50 1/4
Lent by Bernice Steinbaum Gallery,
New York

SPRING
1988
Oilstick, 38 1/4 x 50 1/4
Lent by Norma Jean and Kevin Smiley,
New York