Beverly Buchanan was born in North Carolina in 1940 and raised in South Carolina. She studied and worked in science and medicine until 1971, when she enrolled in the Arts Students League and began exploring themes of architectural decay. She began to install sculptures made up of natural materials in Georgia landscapes from 1979, thus recalling histories of enslavement and segregation among African-Americans. The decaying of the outdoor sculptures over time refer to “ruins,” thus challenging methods of memory and commemoration in the U.S. Buchanan began creating indoor sculptures shortly after, made primarily of found objects. She died in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 2015.