Get familiar with Beverly Buchanan. In 1971, Buchanan enrolled at the Art Students’ League, where she studied with Harlem Renaissance painter Norman Lewis. From that time on, Buchanan devoted her time to making art. In the 1970s, she considered herself an abstract expressionist painter and completed a series of “Wall” paintings which were exhibited at the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey in 1976. She held degrees in parasitology, public health, and medical technology. In the early 1970s, while a health educator, she declined acceptance to medical school to become an artist. Buchanan acknowledged that it was a difficult choice, but she desired to “express the images, stories, and architecture of her African American childhood.” In 1981, Buchanan strategically placed her Georgia land work Marsh Ruins near the site of the 1891 mob lynching of Wesley Lewis and Henry Jackson and overlooking St. Simons Island, where a group of Igbo people sold into slavery drowned themselves in 1803. This work addresses the soiled history of the South while memorializing victims of racism. Buchanan earned a BA from Bennett College, and an MS and MPH from Columbia University. She is the recipient of awards such as the John Simmon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1980); the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1994); and the Anonymous Was A Woman Award (2002). The Studio Museum has presented her work in exhibitions including Ritual and Myth: A Survey of African American Art (1982); The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s(1990); and When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South (2014). She died 2015 in Ann Arbor, MI, rest in peace & respect to her legacy.