Bree Newsome taking down the Confederate Flag at the South Carolina Statehouse, via YouTube

When in June of 2015, political activist Bree Newsome scaled a flagpole on the grounds of the South Carolina Statehouse in order to remove the Confederate flag hanging from the top of it, she was enacting the latest in a series of battles over commemorative historical memorials in the American South. While statues and monuments honoring military and political leaders of the slaveholding Confederacy proliferated in the decades following the U.S. Civil War, it took nearly a century before official memorials acknowledged African American history in the South, including resistance to slavery, Jim Crow laws, and other forms of racial oppression. Even when sanctioned, these monuments have encountered opposition from civic groups, entrenched white political interests, and commissioning agencies themselves, to say nothing of the demands for aesthetic accessibility that renders public art and commemoration of all sorts mostly innocuous and readily assimilable.

During the 1980s while living in Georgia the artist Beverly Buchanan inserted into the southern landscape a number of sculptural works in order to honor the African American presence there. Born in 1940, Buchanan lived and worked in the New York area during the late 1960s and 1970s, achieving a modest amount of artistic success. In 1977, she decided that relocating to small-town Georgia—first Macon, then Athens—would allow her to leave crumbling New York and become more of a full-time artist. The result was that Buchanan mostly fell off the map of contemporary art. The Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, and specifically guest curators Jennifer Burris and Park McArthur, are helping to make her visible again with the exhibition Beverly Buchanan—Ruins and Rituals. (The artist participated in the early planning of the show prior to her death in 2015.)

Buchanan started out making abstract paintings and drawings with particular attention to the artwork’s material surface, but she soon became intrigued by the decaying buildings she saw in her travels around New York and New Jersey during her job as a health educator. Casting concrete around used milk cartons and bricks, Buchanan began to produce what she called “Frustula” (fragment): small, rough rectangular sculptures that she organized in clusters. Ruins and Rituals contains examples in the entrance to the exhibition as well as photographic documentation in another gallery filled primarily with archival material. At first, Buchanan’s sculptures were small enough to arrange on her kitchen table, but they soon became bigger, more ambitious, and proliferated into other series, such as Wall Fragments (1978), with its thin vertical squares wedged between two blocks, or Slab Works (ca. 1978–80), which further played with these...