September 11, 2025
Nancy Buchanan
Truthfully, Nancy Buchanan
The Brick
June 22 - September 20, 2025
Nancy Buchanan
I first encountered Nancy Buchanan's works in 1985 in The Family as Subject Matter, an exhibition curated for The Washington Project for the Arts in Washington, DC by Jock Reynolds, its director. The show presented projects by Buchanan, as well as Anne Turyn, Larry Sultan and Terry Allen among others. Buchanan exhibited work about her father, the nuclear physicist Louis N. Ridenour who passed away in 1959 when Buchanan was just 13. After inheriting the family archives she investigated both the public and private life of her father and created the multi-volume work, Fallout from the Nuclear Family (1980). Through redacted texts from FBI files and personal documents, Buchanan elucidated the complicated and contradictory aspects of the life of a nuclear scientist during the Cold War.
Text, image, history, personal artifacts, narrative, storytelling and collage have been at the root of Buchanan's nuanced career, and in the retrospective exhibition Truthfully, Nancy Buchanan at The Brick, viewers can experience the breadth of her extraordinary practice. Refusing to be pigeon-holed as this or that kind of artist, Buchanan has never been wedded to a single medium. Throughout her six-decade career she has worked in performance, video, digital art, and installation, in addition to creating collages, drawings and paintings. She has also collaborated with artists ranging from Ulysses Jenkins, Barbara T. Smith, Chris Burden, and Paul McCarthy, as well as more recently with Carolyn Potter, Cynthia Maughan and Laura Owens.
The disparate subjects that Buchanan explores are often culled from current events — what was happening locally and globally at the time. She was involved with not only the women's movement, but also was (and still is) politically active in the anti war movement, as well as Black Lives Matter. Aesthetics and political concerns intermingle throughout her different projects and are almost always filtered through a personal lens. A statement on her website reads, "Buchanan uses various media to bring social realities into view, while grounded in the observation of a lived history. Known for her performances in the 1970s and 80s, she also worked in video while completing drawings and installation."
The exhibition at The Brick is a celebration of the diverse aspects of her practice. With over 100 pieces created between the 1960s and 2000s, it is loosely divided into sections: early years, hair, interiors, bestiary, consumption, development & ruins, the state & the self. It also includes a reading room. Some early works are presented in vitrines as ephemera and documentation where Buchanan explored the body— making work about intimacy and sexuality.
Her skills as a draftswoman are apparent in pieces like Hair portrait white on black (2013), a close-cropped delicate white pencil on black paper drawing that focuses on strands of flowing hair on the back of a faceless head. This work is presented alongside Untitled (Hair Room), (1973/2025) a work first conceived in 1973 and presented here for the first time. It consists of a closet-sized room from which strands of synthetic hair dangle from the ceiling. Buchanan delights in the sensations evoked when the faux strands touch skin.
What is most satisfying about the exhibition is how the different materials and processes of working come together to define her as an individual. Her drawings of dog toys (a quasi-homage to Mike Kelley) and her portraits of endangered species become a meditation on loss. Whereas collages like Saving Time (2017) or Time Out (2017) are about excess, and drawings and paintings including Art in the Park 2 (2024) and Gaza (2025) speak to the urgency of destruction and ruin.
Buchanan looks to the past as well as the present. Her pieces investigate dreams, disasters, nature, and the changing urban environment. She is at once serious about the current political climate, seen in American Dream #6 Media Nightmare (1987), yet her works also display a keen wit and sense of humor. It is hard not to smile at the toy lips and teeth that appear in the Mouthpiece photos from 1985. Security and Fallout From the Nuclear Family are installation pieces from the 1980s that juxtapose the personal and political as Buchanan confronts her ancestry and the work of her father in these pieces.
While there is a reading room and a video room, they are not the main focus of the exhibition, rather it is the works made by hand — Buchanan's many drawings, paintings, sculptures and collages — that are not only a surprise but also a clear testament to the depth of her conceptual thinking, her artistic skills and love of the process of making.
Truthfully, Nancy Buchanan
The Brick
June 22 - September 20, 2025
Nancy Buchanan
I first encountered Nancy Buchanan's works in 1985 in The Family as Subject Matter, an exhibition curated for The Washington Project for the Arts in Washington, DC by Jock Reynolds, its director. The show presented projects by Buchanan, as well as Anne Turyn, Larry Sultan and Terry Allen among others. Buchanan exhibited work about her father, the nuclear physicist Louis N. Ridenour who passed away in 1959 when Buchanan was just 13. After inheriting the family archives she investigated both the public and private life of her father and created the multi-volume work, Fallout from the Nuclear Family (1980). Through redacted texts from FBI files and personal documents, Buchanan elucidated the complicated and contradictory aspects of the life of a nuclear scientist during the Cold War.
Text, image, history, personal artifacts, narrative, storytelling and collage have been at the root of Buchanan's nuanced career, and in the retrospective exhibition Truthfully, Nancy Buchanan at The Brick, viewers can experience the breadth of her extraordinary practice. Refusing to be pigeon-holed as this or that kind of artist, Buchanan has never been wedded to a single medium. Throughout her six-decade career she has worked in performance, video, digital art, and installation, in addition to creating collages, drawings and paintings. She has also collaborated with artists ranging from Ulysses Jenkins, Barbara T. Smith, Chris Burden, and Paul McCarthy, as well as more recently with Carolyn Potter, Cynthia Maughan and Laura Owens.
The disparate subjects that Buchanan explores are often culled from current events — what was happening locally and globally at the time. She was involved with not only the women's movement, but also was (and still is) politically active in the anti war movement, as well as Black Lives Matter. Aesthetics and political concerns intermingle throughout her different projects and are almost always filtered through a personal lens. A statement on her website reads, "Buchanan uses various media to bring social realities into view, while grounded in the observation of a lived history. Known for her performances in the 1970s and 80s, she also worked in video while completing drawings and installation."
The exhibition at The Brick is a celebration of the diverse aspects of her practice. With over 100 pieces created between the 1960s and 2000s, it is loosely divided into sections: early years, hair, interiors, bestiary, consumption, development & ruins, the state & the self. It also includes a reading room. Some early works are presented in vitrines as ephemera and documentation where Buchanan explored the body— making work about intimacy and sexuality.
Her skills as a draftswoman are apparent in pieces like Hair portrait white on black (2013), a close-cropped delicate white pencil on black paper drawing that focuses on strands of flowing hair on the back of a faceless head. This work is presented alongside Untitled (Hair Room), (1973/2025) a work first conceived in 1973 and presented here for the first time. It consists of a closet-sized room from which strands of synthetic hair dangle from the ceiling. Buchanan delights in the sensations evoked when the faux strands touch skin.
What is most satisfying about the exhibition is how the different materials and processes of working come together to define her as an individual. Her drawings of dog toys (a quasi-homage to Mike Kelley) and her portraits of endangered species become a meditation on loss. Whereas collages like Saving Time (2017) or Time Out (2017) are about excess, and drawings and paintings including Art in the Park 2 (2024) and Gaza (2025) speak to the urgency of destruction and ruin.
Buchanan looks to the past as well as the present. Her pieces investigate dreams, disasters, nature, and the changing urban environment. She is at once serious about the current political climate, seen in American Dream #6 Media Nightmare (1987), yet her works also display a keen wit and sense of humor. It is hard not to smile at the toy lips and teeth that appear in the Mouthpiece photos from 1985. Security and Fallout From the Nuclear Family are installation pieces from the 1980s that juxtapose the personal and political as Buchanan confronts her ancestry and the work of her father in these pieces.
While there is a reading room and a video room, they are not the main focus of the exhibition, rather it is the works made by hand — Buchanan's many drawings, paintings, sculptures and collages — that are not only a surprise but also a clear testament to the depth of her conceptual thinking, her artistic skills and love of the process of making.