Beverly Buchanan (1940–2015) was an artist who worked at the nexus of art and architecture. For half a century, she traced the eroded surfaces of “city ruins” on canvas and paper, researched vernacular dwellings and their “builder-occupants” in the rural South, and persistently embedded long-neglected histories of anti-Black politics within their territorial surroundings. This sourcebook gathers Buchanan’s writings, drawings, photographs, and ephemera to shed light on her oeuvre, including her architectural paintings, environmental sculptures, and shack works. The rarely seen archives stem from various public and private collections and are published for the first time in this volume. In addition to the primary sources included in the publication, commissioned essays by scholars, critics, and curators situate Buchanan’s work within a wide discursive and historical framework. Artists' books and printed matter were central to Buchanan’s practice. In tribute to this, the publication includes new works by contemporary artists Tony Cokes, Phoebe Collings-James, Mo Costello, Devin T. Mays, and Walter Price, among others, responding to Buchanan’s fanzine Tale of Lila and the Collapsed House, from which the publication draws its title.

Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen are curators and codirectors of exhibitions at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zurich. Together they work on projects at the intersection of architecture, art, research, and teaching, resulting in such exhibitions as Unschöne Museen (curated with Geraldine Tedder), Cloud’ 68. Collection of Radical Architecture, and Home. A User’s Manual or Book for Architects. Fischli and Olsen have curated numerous exhibitions in collaboration with international institutions, such as Warsaw Under Construction, inaugurating the new Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw’s building; Retail Apocalypse at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal and ETH Zurich; Sturm & Drang with Armature Globale at Fondazione Prada in Milan; and Inside Outside. / Petra Blaisse at La Triennale di Milano and MAXXI Rome. In 2023, they taught as the John Portman Design Critics in Architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Elena Bally is a curatorial assistant at gta exhibitions, ETH Zurich. She studied art history in Zurich, Vienna, and Rome. She is currently finishing her studies with a thesis titled “Beverly Buchanan’s Unity Stones (1983) im Spannungsfeld von Kunst, Arbeit und Schwarzsein.” At gta exhibitions, she co-curated “Beverly Buchanan: I Broke the House” (2024) with Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen, and worked on several exhibition projects, including “Unschöne Museen” (2023), curated by Fischli, Olsen, and Geraldine Tedder; and “Life, Without Buildings” (2022), curated by Adam Szymczyk. In 2023, she was awarded the Förderpreis Kunstwissenschaften by the Alfred Richterich Foundation and the Swiss Association of Art Historians.

Simone Browne is associate professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin (UTA). She is also research director of Critical Surveillance Inquiry with Good Systems, a research collaborative at UTA.

Jeffrey Bruce is director of exhibitions at the Tubman African American Museum, Macon, Georgia.

Julia Bryan-Wilson is professor of contemporary art and LGBTQ+ studies and core faculty in Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender.

Tony Cokes is an artist and professor of modern culture and media at Brown University.

Phoebe Collings-James is a multidisciplinary artist based in London.

Mo Costello is an artist and educator based in Athens, Georgia. Together with Katz Tepper, she is working on the exhibition, publication, and symposium “Beverly’s Athens,” scheduled for 2026 in partnership with University of Georgia (UGA) Press and the Athenaeum, UGA's downtown contemporary art space.

Lowery Stokes Sims is an independent curator and art historian. She served as executive director of The Studio Museum in Harlem from 2000–05 and as president from 2005–06. From 1972–99, she worked on the educational and curatorial staff of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, concluding her tenure there as curator of modern art. Sims has published extensively on modern and contemporary art with a special interest in African, Native, Latin, and Asian American artists.

Aruna D'Souza is an art historian, curator, and author who writes about modern and contemporary art; intersectional feminisms, and other forms of politics; and how museums shape our views of each other and the world.

Patricia Ekpo is a postdoctoral fellow at the Pembroke Center, Brown University. She is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work mobilizes black studies, art history, black feminist thought, and psychoanalysis to interrogate the role of antiblackness in constituting space, body, gender, psyche, and subjectivity.

Jack Halberstam is professor of gender studies and English at Columbia University.

Tonja Khabir is a community activist. Khabir is working on reopening the Bobby Jones Performing Arts Center in Macon, Georgia just across the street from Buchanan’s Unity Stones in the Pleasant Hill district.

Charlotte Matter is an assistant professor of contemporary art at the University of Basel.

Uri McMillan is an associate professor of English, sexuality and gender studies, and African American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Devin T. Mays is an artist and assistant professor of art at Rice University, Houston.

Maria-Magdalena Campos Pons is an artist and professor of art at Vanderbilt University, Nashville. She is the founder of The Engine for Art, Democracy, and Justice, a trans institutional research initiative and ongoing collaboration between Fisk University, the Frist Art Museum, Millions of Conversations, and Vanderbilt University that explores creative approaches to living together in the South(s).

Walter Price is a painter based in New York.

Sarah Richter is a postdoctoral fellow at the Pembroke Center, Brown University.

Jamaal B. Sheats is director and curator of the Fisk University Galleries and an assistant professor in the Fisk University art department.

Journey Streams is a writer, critic, and artist engaged in personal nonfiction and cultural legacies.

Adam Szymczyk is a curator and writer based in Zurich. He is curator-at-large at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. He is a member of the board of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and a member of the advisory committee of the Kontakt Art Collection in Vienna. He was artistic director of documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel in 2017 and served as director and chief curator at Kunsthalle Basel between 2003–14.

M. Ty is an assistant professor of literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

gta exhibitions cultivates spaces for shared reflection on the futurity of the built environment; on how it came to be, how it structures our lived realities, and how it can be reimagined. Exhibition making itself is understood as a means of producing collective knowledge that transcends disciplinary boundaries. The exhibitions are a source of learning and teaching. They are shaped by the interactions and contributions of students, collectives, invited architects, artists and scholars, and feature newly commissioned works. As part of the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), founded in 1967, gta exhibitions is deeply anchored in a culture of experimentation, education and transnational dialogue. gta initiates collaboration between the various research areas within the Department of Architecture and makes use of the Institute’s archives. Beyond the campus, gta exhibitions acts as an interface with the wider field of academia, involving both local and international audiences.