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BEVERLY BUCHANAN

Today Beverly Buchanan leaves her comfortable Macon, Georgia, apartment early and heads downtown. She parks her bright yellow Volkswagon on the empty street, and climbs several flights of stairs to the two-room studio she rents above a drugstore. For furniture, the rooms contain only sturdy work tables and a forest of green plants. Stones, red brick, and fragments of cementcover the dusty wood floors. A huge black and white oil painting hangs on one wall; smaller, brighter canvases line up beneath it. 

Buchanan is an artist and a "builder." Her sturdy body moves gracefully as she strides about in the debris, finally locating some photographs of the monumental sculpture she designed and built at Overlook Park in the Marshes of Glynn. 

She is not going to stay downtown long this morning. The "big work" is her first love. She has a piece she must finish soon for an exhibit at Beaver College in Pennsylvania. In fifteen minutes she is back in the Volkswagon driving the few miles to her outdoor studio at Ocmulgee Arts Center where she starts work early to take advantage of the coolish morning air and the fresh sunlight. "Sometimes," she says, "Louise Burkhalter--my friend and director of the center-- has to drag me in to keep from dying of a heat stroke or exhaustion. Lots of times she feeds me. I get so wrapped up in the work, that I don't think about myself at all. But I am trying to take better care of myself now, because the work comes out of me."  

She is building a large abstract design that manages to look both modern and primitive in a way that has caused many art critics to call her work "mythic" and "ritualistic." When asked how she plans to get a piece of that size all the way from Georgia to Pennsylvania, she says: "I don't know," absentmindedly looking at the structure, "I'll find some way to do it. I may have to rent a truck and drive it myself. But even that costs a lot of money." 

In 1977 when Beverly Buchanan decided to leave the New York area and move South, she was just beginning to attract attention. Collectors were buying her work; the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased an ambitious work called "Wall Columns." Her sculpture was on display at the prestigious Jock Truman Gallery in New York City. She was being included in lists of distinguished artists. The critics were writing about her. 

Friends and colleagues were surprised; most of them told her not to do it. She remembers especially the warnings of native Southerners who thought the South in the 1970's would be disastrous for an ambitious black woman artist. 

Why should she leave the center of the art world for some little provincial town in the South where she was sure to be ignored and discriminated against? But Buchanan had her reasons. She explains: "I was tired of making dark little ghetto sculpture. I knew I wanted to do something in a big landscape. Light and space had become very important to me."

She chose Macon for its landscape, but also because Charlotte Moore Perkins, a friend and her first agent when they were both living in East Orange, New Jersey, had come back to her native state and liked it. Perkins encouraged Beverly to make the move because she thought she needed a simpler life in order to do her best work.

Buchanan also admits to other than artistic considerations. She had been