Houston exhibition explores memory and mythmaking in the American landscape

Contemporary Arts Museum Houston is opening Divination: Beverly Buchanan & Dionne Lee this month, pairing the late US artist Beverly Buchanan (1940–2015) with Ohio-based artist Dionne Lee to examine memory, mythmaking, and the legacy of enslavement in the American landscape. The exhibition draws on Buchanan’s 1981 environmental work Marsh Ruins in Brunswick, Georgia—made of concrete and tabby in a tidal salt marsh near Igbo Landing, where captive West African people resisted enslavement in 1803—and on Lee’s contemporary documentation of the site’s deterioration. Senior curator Rebecca Matalon said the show is intentionally “a no shack show,” shifting focus from Buchanan’s better-known “shack” sculptures to her photography and archival materials, including documentation of environmental works and cast concrete pieces placed in graveyards of enslaved people. The exhibition is the second in the museum’s intergenerational series following 2021’s Wild Life: Elizabeth Murray & Jessi Reaves, and includes Lee’s photography and video addressing Black identity, survival skills, and navigational imagery such as gestures locating the North Star.

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