Beverly Buchanan's outdoor sculptures, such as 'Marsh Ruins' (1981) and 'Unity Stones' (1983), are quietly eroding in landscapes across Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina. These anti-monuments, made from tabby concrete and stone, blend into their surroundings while subtly referencing the region's layered histories, including Indigenous shell middens, plantation ruins, and the 1803 slave revolt on St. Simons Island. Buchanan, who died in 2015, is now receiving renewed attention: her work will be featured at the Venice Biennale this spring, and a touring retrospective is currently at Frac Lorraine in Metz, following a posthumous show at the Brooklyn Museum in 2016–17.
This resurgence matters because Buchanan's work offers a quiet, critical counterpoint to monumental Land art and the romanticized Southern landscape poetry of Sidney Lanier, whose poem 'The Marshes of Glynn' was co-opted by Confederate revisionists. Her crumbling, unassuming sculptures force viewers to confront the repressed memories and violent histories embedded in the American landscape—slavery, erasure, and selective memory. As interest in her practice grows internationally, Buchanan's anti-monuments feel increasingly urgent, asking us to look for similar tremors in our own present.