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Old Colored School

2010
Not on view
By the time Buchanan began creating her shack sculptures in the 1980s, she had been researching the longstanding improvisational architecture of the Southern working class. She photographed wooden shacks, shotgun houses, barns, and shanties across Georgia and the Carolinas, then composed small-scale houses out of splintered, rough slabs of Georgia heart pine wood and cedar—the former being the wood often used to build the larger houses. The bright daubs of paint that decorate Old Colored School give double meaning to what reads as a dilapidated schoolhouse from the era of Jim Crow.

Artwork Details

Object Information
  • Title: Old Colored School
  • Artist: Beverly Buchanan (American, Fuquay, North Carolina 1940–2015 Ann Arbor, Michigan)
  • Date: 2010
  • Medium: Wood and paint
  • Dimensions: 20 1/4 × 14 3/4 × 18 1/2 in., 10.2 lb. (51.4 × 37.5 × 47 cm, 4.6 kg)
  • Classification: Sculpture
  • Credit Line: Hortense and William A. Mohr Sculpture Purchase Fund, 2017
  • Object Number: 2017.270a, b
  • Rights and Reproduction: Jane D. Bridges
  • Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art

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