GUEST: This is a piece originally owned by my grandmother, made by Beverly Buchanan. Beverly Buchanan is from South Carolina, I believe, but spent most of her working career in Georgia after being educated in New York. What she's known most for is her shacks, both the, these kind of sculpture, mixed-media pieces and paintings. She was inspired by rural, particularly African American, Georgia residents and their shotgun-style, like, homemade homesteads like this.
APPRAISER: So how did this come to be in your family?
GUEST: My grandmother was Beverly's CPA, and became her friend over that relationship, and she collected a lot of her art throughout their friendship, both being gifted it and purchasing it. So, I don't know which one she did for this particular piece.
APPRAISER: She was born in North Carolina, and then went to graduate school at Columbia University in New York, and then, in 1971, decided to go study art with Norman Lewis, who was a very well-known African American painter who was an Abstract Expressionist. And he and a group of other painters had a gallery called the Cinque Gallery. And she was mentored by another member of that group, Romare Bearden, who was a very famous collagist. She showed her work at that gallery, among some other galleries in New York, before returning to the South in the late '70s. So what I like about this piece is that while it's representational of a house, it also does have abstract elements to it, and it has, obviously, a collage element to it. It's signed and dated on the bottom, 1996.
GUEST: Ah.
APPRAISER: She moved back, uh, to Georgia in the 1970s and began making pieces like this for the next 20, 25 years. This piece was part of her "Shacks" series, where she did a series of paintings and constructions like this that reflected the architecture and the life that she knew in Georgia. The house is made of a wooden base that's been painted blue and a sort of a brownish red, and that's very typical of most of the shacks that I've seen. But this one's particularly nice, because it's got all of the different buttons on it, and also has the salt shaker, a domestic item, and has these little sequins on the door. And on the side, it has the spool of thread attached to the house, used as a basket. There's just a lot-- a great deal of variety in the pieces that she chose to use. There's been a lot of, uh, interest in her work at auction lately. The last couple of pieces like this that have come up at auction have done very well. This one is, uh, particularly nice. I think it's better than the last two. And there was a fierce bidding over the last couple of pieces. So, if this were to go to auction, I believe that the estimate would be $10,000 to $15,000.
GUEST: Rea... Wow! Okay! (smacks lips) (laughing): Wow, thank you.
APPRAISER: I wouldn't be surprised if it did better than that at auction.
GUEST: Oh! (chuckles)
APPRAISER: So, it's a really beautiful piece, and...
GUEST: Thank you, I love it, too.
