#slow looking

It isn’t that the colour is gone. It’s that nothing calls for it anymore.

The world still offers its palette, patient, intact. But something in me no longer reaches for it.

As if a frequency was lost. As if a key went missing and every door learned to stay closed.

Some losses don’t hurt loudly. They just drain the tint from everything that follows.

(Photo: d.)

How would you describe this house in one word? Imagine you could open the door to this home and walk inside. What might you see? What might it feel like to run your hands over the wooden beams of the walls? What smells would you notice? 

This sculpture is composed of wood, metal and plastic. Its edges are rough, and there are spaces between the wooden planks of the walls and the roof. Different sizes of wooden planks are used to patch holes in areas, the different colors, textures, and sizes giving the effect of almost a patchwork quilt. In person, it is a remarkably small sculpture, standing a little taller than a coffee cup. Its diminutive stature requires that the viewer get close to it, bend down, and move around to get the full effect of the work—much like what one has to do when one tries to take in a whole house. 

“Shacks” and “ruins” play an important role in the work of this sculpture’s creator, the late Black artist Beverly Buchanan. Buchanan was born in North Carolina, but grew up in South Carolina, where her uncle and adoptive father was a professor of agriculture at South Carolina State College. As a child, Buchanan would travel around rural counties with her father, who documented Black farmers in the region. Shacks like this one were common sights, and Buchanan would later remark that she always noticed how the inhabitants would leave their own mark on the structure, someway to express their identity and their community. 

After a career as a public health educator, Buchanan turned her attention full-time to her art. Throughout her artistic career, Buchanan gathered what she called “groundings,” including histories, folklore, and photographs of ruins. The shacks she sculpted from a variety of materials are another manifestation of this gathering of groundings. Many of her shack sculptures come with stories, what she calls “legends,” about the individuals who lived in the houses; some of these stories are historical, some are fictitious, but all help make a connection between place, home, and memory. 

Buchanan’s focus on Southern vernacular architecture—that is, architecture based on the needs of the builder and the materials available, often resulting in local, regional styles—raises questions about what is saved and what is allowed to disappear or be destroyed. The cabins she crafts come from a variety of sources; they might be places she visited as a child that no longer stand, or places she found on her drives through the country, long ago abandoned. She also sought out homes that had originated as cabins built by enslaved people. Cabins used by the enslaved, homes of tenant farmers, and old churches often end up destroyed or allowed to fall into disrepair and ruin, even while the plantation houses are preserved as historical sites. Recalling the destruction of one such row of cabins used by enslaved people, Buchanan recalled, “I was so devastated. I just sat in my truck and trembled and cried.”

There remain through the United States, not only the South, untold histories, as well as histories that are purposefully suppressed. Many unmarked places in New York are the site of Indigenous and Black histories of resistance and resilience. Buchanan’s work challenges us to consider what is allowed to be preserved and what stories we choose to tell. 

How can we honor histories and the places to which they are tied? How can art be a vehicle of remembrance and a means of preserving these histories? Share your ideas or “groundings” with us, and explore the work of Beverly Buchanan in the collection.

A one-minute meditation for your Tuesday afternoon.

There is always a point where the vista opens and the body hesitates.

A line of metal and wire meant to reassure — a promise that someone has already measured the danger for you.

But it also marks something else: the place where imagination begins, where the mind leans forward further than the body can safely follow.

The world stretches on, vast and indifferent, and here I am — contained, protected, standing at the boundary between awe and surrender.

Standing before beauty, five steps away from certain death.

(Photo: d.)

“Love is the answer,” the wall insists, like a palimpsest of exhausted certainties — a phrase so over-circulated it has become almost apotropaic in its repetition.

And yet, standing here, I think of the writers who arrived at the same conclusion only after circling the perimeter of despair — after anatomising cruelty, entropy, and the quiet attrition of human relationships.

There is a difference between the sentimental and the salvific.

Between the facile injunction to “be kind” and the unadorned recognition that tenderness is the last remaining instrument against annihilation.

Sometimes a cliché endures because it is all that survives after the rest of the language has collapsed.

Even William Burroughs saw it, eventually.

In one of his final journal entries, he writes:

“Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is. LOVE.”

(Photo: d.)