In 1979, Beverly Buchanan moved her spacious second-floor studio on College Street to a temporary workspace outside the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Macon, Georgia. She had already been in town for a year when her proposal for a site-specific installation on the Sweet Gum Trail, a walking path that winds through stands of trees, wildlife, and dense Southern flora, was approved. The result of her residency, Ruins and Rituals, consists of four large concrete footers and seven smaller cast concrete forms arranged in a cleared space between the trees. The structures were stained in subtle hues of lavender and ochre, colors that have faded over time but once played with the shifting light of the site. Buchanan described the installation as having multiple “stand-spots,” where viewers could experience different perspectives, shadows, and color shifts. The arrangement suggests both a gathering and an absence, a meeting place that evokes tombs or reliquaries, while also gesturing toward the legacies of displacement and erasure tied to the site’s history.
Walking around the work, it’s difficult not to notice a white sign and a small wooden cabin in the distance, partially framed by southern magnolia trees. From nearly every angle, the structure feels like it’s looming, as if it’s always there no matter where you stand. Buchanan purposely situated her work in this space, formerly named the Harry Stillwell Edwards Arboretum, after the pro-slavery novelist whose writing trafficked in the white supremacist nostalgia of the Jim Crow era. The arboretum’s historical associations were not lost on Buchanan; placing Ruins and Rituals within sight of Edwards’s former writing retreat, Kingfisher Cabin, was a deliberate act of cultural commentary.
The proximity of Ruins and Rituals to Kingfisher Cabin deepens the work’s significance. This is where the Macon-born novelist and poet wrote much of his most recognized work, Eneas Africanus (1919), a story similar in tone and intent to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. First serialized in the Macon Evening News and later published as a novel, the book sold more than three million copies. Standing there today, I read the interpretive sign over and over again. It lists Edwards’s accomplishments, explains that the cabin was moved to this site in 1964 as a “permanent exhibit of Macon’s heritage,” and notes its restoration in 2006 as part of the museum’s 50th-anniversary celebration. What it does not mention is the harm his writing caused, or how preserving and celebrating this structure continues to shape public understandings of history and culture.
One of Buchanan’s concrete footers is placed closer to the cabin than the others, slightly isolated, a move she used to highlight the spectral presence of history. What might initially appear as a benign landscape becomes a space where the politics of memory are actively contested, where Buchanan’s minimalist forms function as silent witnesses to the racist narratives once produced there.
Critics have often interpreted Ruins and Rituals through the lenses of prehistoric lithic sites, African spiritual systems, or land art traditions. While those readings are not incorrect, Buchanan’s engagement with this site is more pointed and more charged. The visible installation represents only one-third of the work. Another portion was placed deep in an unspecified wooded area, while the final component was discreetly submerged by the artist in the nearby Ocmulgee River, once a hub for the cotton industry, reliant on enslaved African labor, where it was allowed to sink, shift, or wash away without witnesses. Like the buried histories of Black communities throughout the South, these submerged elements resist easy comprehension, offering instead a space for contemplation, absence, and memory.
Buchanan’s years in Macon, from 1977 to 1985, mark a period of profound creative engagement. After years in New York City, the move was more than a geographic shift, it was a return to the Southern landscapes that had long informed her artistic sensibilities. Macon, with its history of segregation and its fraught intersections between Black and white communities, offered Buchanan a terrain thick with contradiction. Her art became a way of making the narratives embedded in that landscape visible, using modest materials to confront complex histories surrounding race, memory, and public space.
If Ruins and Rituals operates through distance, fragmentation, and witnessing, Unity Stones, completed in 1983, turns toward proximity and use. Installed in front of the Booker T. Washington Community Center in Macon’s historically Black Pleasant Hill neighborhood, the sculpture is composed of concrete forms dyed a deep matte black, now faded to dark gray. Buchanan envisioned the work as a gathering place, a site for sitting, talking, and being together. Its location beside a community center offering essential services, from food support to arts programming, aligns the sculpture with the rhythms of everyday life.
Buchanan’s choice of black pigment, which permeates the concrete rather than sitting on its surface, speaks to her broader exploration of Blackness as both a material and conceptual presence. The heavy Georgia granite stones carry the weight of history while also functioning as sites of potential communion. Yet, as with much of Buchanan’s work, Unity Stonesresists a singular, uplifting narrative. The stones are arranged in a way that creates tension: some stand alone, others cluster tightly together. To actually occupy every stone at once would feel cramped. Full unity here is possible, but it would be uncomfortable, negotiated rather than seamless.
That discomfort echoes Buchanan’s engagement with Booker T. Washington’s 1895 Atlanta Compromise speech, in which he urged Black Americans to “cast down your bucket where you are.” While Washington’s accommodationist politics have long been critiqued, Unity Stones complicates rather than resolves that legacy. The sculpture’s rough-hewn forms suggest both the strength and the limitations of Washington’s vision: durable, pragmatic, but constrained by the conditions imposed upon it.
The placement of Unity Stones within Pleasant Hill, a neighborhood that once thrived and now bears the marks of economic neglect, underscores Buchanan’s commitment to working within specific Black geographies. I’ve visited the site three times this year. People clearly live on Monroe Street, but the pace is unhurried, the street nearly silent. The sculpture remains, weathered and largely unattended. Its state of quiet neglect mirrors the broader conditions facing the neighborhood, where public investment and preservation have been inconsistent at best.
Taken together, Buchanan’s public works in Macon, Ruins and Rituals and Unity Stones, demonstrate her ability to weave the material and the metaphorical into spaces where histories of marginalization are both remembered and unsettled. Her use of concrete, heavy, durable, yet vulnerable to decades of sun, rain, and frost, reflects the way memory itself operates: enduring, but never fixed. Rooted in this particular corner of the American South, these works reach outward toward larger questions about who controls historical narratives, what is preserved, and what is allowed to disappear. In Macon, Buchanan found a landscape ripe for her explorations of ruin, resilience, recognition, and the politics of space, and she left behind works that continue to quietly insist on being reckoned with.
