In Brunswick, Georgia, three worn, boulder-like forms are deteriorating in a tidal salt marsh. Sometimes they are nearly hidden when the waters rise. Marsh Ruins was created from concrete and tabby (lime, sand, ash and shells) by the US artist Beverly Buchanan (1940-2015) in 1981 and subtly draws attention to the complex history of this land. It is an area that inspired the 19th-century poem of Southern nostalgia, The Marshes of Glynn by Sidney Lanier, but it is also home to Igbo Landing, a renowned site of resistance in which captive West African people chose suicide over enslavement in 1803.
Last year, the Ohio-based artist Dionne Lee and the senior curator at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Rebecca Matalon, together travelled to what remains of Marsh Ruins as part of their planning for the exhibition Divination: Beverly Buchanan & Dionne Lee, which opens at the Texan museum this month. The show will examine how the two artists have engaged with these undercurrents of mythmaking and the realities of enslavement in the American landscape.
“There’s a way in which we can think of divination as a kind of uncovering of hidden histories, giving us insight into a present moment,” Matalon says. “Buchanan’s work quite literally is bringing attention to what remains unseen, and I think that Lee’s work very much allowed me to see those aspects of Buchanan’s practice.”
The exhibition is the second in a series, following on from 2021’s Wild Life: Elizabeth Murray & Jessi Reaves, that brings together work by two artists from different generations. The show will include Lee’s work in photography, video and other media examining the endurance of Black identity on the land, whether through the documentation of people learning survival skills or images of hand gestures locating the North Star, which would have been a beacon for enslaved people.
While the North Carolina-born Buchanan, who died in 2015, is now most associated with her “shack” sculptures that evoke the modest hand-built homes of the American South, Divination will concentrate on her photography and materials from her archives. “From the start, I—and in conversation with Lee—made the decision that it was going to be a no shack show,” Matalon says. “I think they’re incredibly interesting and important but have really come to dominate Buchanan’s legacy. I was really interested in what you might consider the more minor or marginal aspects of her work. I had not ever really thought of Buchanan as a photographer, but the size of her archive reveals that it was an essential mode in which she was making work from the beginning to the end of her career.”
One of Dionne Lee’s photographs of her interventions in the landscape, Untitled Rock Drawing II (2023) Courtesy of the artist and Petra Bibeau, New York
The photographs include her documentation of environmental works like Marsh Ruins and cast concrete pieces that she placed in the graveyards of enslaved people. In turn, Lee’s photographs of Marsh Ruins visualise how Buchanan’s work, often made to be ephemeral, still remains embedded in the land. “I think a lot about the process of deterioration from working with organic materials, and Beverly’s approach to thinking about ruination has shown up in a lot of my work,” Lee says.
Conjuring the unseen
Although their practices are distinct, the exhibition will highlight the artists’ connections, bringing together, for example, Buchanan’s personal walking sticks with the dowsing rods that Lee has used in her photographs and is now making into wood-burned sculptures. “It’s a very new process that feels inspired by [Buchanan],” Lee says.
The two artists are united by having used their work to conjure through images and objects something unseen. As Lee says: “I think that artmaking is a form of divination and the act of creation requires a process of channelling.”
Divination will travel next year to the Wexner Center for the Arts at the Ohio State University and the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Meanwhile, Buchanan’s first European survey, Weathering, also opens this month at Spike Island in Bristol (26 September-31 January 2027). The exhibition will span her whole career and include her shack sculptures.
• Divination: Beverly Buchanan & Dionne Lee, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 4 September-14 February 2027
