Bones, Roses, and Ruins

Janet Sarbanes encounters Nancy Buchanan’s career retrospective at the Brick in Los Angeles.

By Janet SarbanesNovember 14, 2025

• Art & Architecture

LEAVING THE HOUSE in early July to go see Nancy Buchanan’s retrospective at the Brick in Los Angeles, I received a rapid-response notification of a possible ICE agent or bounty hunter parked near a restaurant a few blocks from my house in Cypress Park. Can someone check out the situation and get a photo of the SUV license plate? I hurried to my car and raced down to the corner, where I spotted the blue Ford Expedition with fully tinted windows—the kind of vehicle, we had learned in the three weeks since the start of ICE kidnappings in Los Angeles, that likely belonged to the agency. I jumped out to take photos and sent them in. More rapid-response volunteers arrived, and another, identical vehicle was found idling nearby—these are the ones that snatch and grab. Others went on to warn nearby street vendors and restaurants. I went on to the Brick.

This felt like a fitting detour on the way to encounter more than 50 years of Nancy Buchanan’s work. Stretching from her earliest efforts on paper through years of performance and video work, painting, sculpture, installations, and drawings, Truthfully, Nancy Buchanan, assiduously curated by Laura Owens and Catherine Taft, deeply impressed in both its art and its politics. On that first visit, I found myself muttering “matters and materials,” struck by the way Buchanan engages, with equal insight and ingenuity, both social questions and aesthetic ones. This kind of commitment used to be a hallmark of the contemporary artist—it was certainly characteristic of those who populated CalArts’ faculty when I arrived as a young professor of critical studies in the early 2000s, such as Buchanan, Allan Sekula, Leslie Dick, Charles Gaines, and Millie Wilson. While their practices were very different, they all shared a fierce belief that artists had something to say about the society we live in, and ways of saying it that no one else did. As Buchanan observed when asked about a 1984 trip to postrevolutionary Nicaragua:

One of the things I’ve been interested in is trying to fit myself in as a social being somehow. And that was the exciting thing about Nicaragua. You had this sense that people felt they actually had a place, that they actually belonged, and all the aspects of their life sort of made sense. I think in our society that’s not the norm. You have one role here, and one role there, and you juggle your life, your beliefs and your work. I don’t want to do that. I also think that my personal feelings are very intimately tied up with where I am as a member of society, that there’s a level of personal concern about political issues. […] For a long time I separated the information about issues that I cared about from my work until I figured out that I didn’t have to do that and it was a real delight.

The “Early Years” section of the exhibition contained documentation of the feminist performance art pieces that arose from this realization. One of the pieces documented was Deer/Dear (1978), which Buchanan describes memorably in the accompanying text as “a travelogue in fear.” It featured Buchanan bound with rope and struggling to free herself as an audiotape played an account of her nightmares of armed men appearing with an “endless list of weapons,” followed by “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes” from Disney’s Cinderella (1950). After freeing herself from bondage, Buchanan presented a slideshow of images of houses while describing frightening incidents in the domestic life of an unnamed woman, as three female performers dressed in army fatigues simulated being mounted to the wall like hunting trophies and shooting at deer silhouettes stapled to the wall. This early work contains a set of concerns that coursed through many pieces in the show: domestic architecture, gendered violence, narratives of femininity, and the link between the domination of animals and the domination of women (a primary tenet of ecofeminism).

The “Early Years” gallery also featured Buchanan’s 1979 video These Creatures, a 60-second riff on commercial images of women in various poses—flipping their hair, dunking their hands in soapsuds—that also reflects on gendered violence and women’s relationship to animality under patriarchy. But here, it is the patronizing male voice-over that expresses fear of their violence: “Isn’t it amazing that we allow them to live among us, these creatures that we can, and do, control? What secrets do they possess? What allows them to function without violence? Are they secretly violent?” One woman’s face is painted green, another has a red nose, and yet another has unseeing blue eyes painted onto her own eyelids. As Buchanan noted in a 2020 talk, she wanted the makeup to be all wrong, disrupting the beauty-myth-as-social-control mechanism. The effect is disorienting and vaguely science-fictiony, an early example of the technologized surrealism that characterizes many of Buchanan’s video pieces, with their inventive image processing. In a more classically surrealist move, the final woman featured in the video receives a box of long-stemmed roses from a male admirer, and the stems turn out to be bones.

These same bone-roses were on display in the center of the room at the Brick, along with other assemblages merging bones with feminine domestic objects, underscoring that “domesticity and heteronormative ‘romance’ are always horror adjacent,” as Owens and Taft observe. Another pivotal feminist performance piece documented in the room’s vitrines was Hair Transplant (1972), in which Buchanan shaved much of the body hair off her collaborator, Bob Walker, then cut her own long hair, which she had dyed red and curled, and glued it to the shaved parts of Walker, distributing the remainder to the audience. She notes in a 2021 interview that there was no sound in the gallery until she cut her own hair, and at that point the audience gasped. Such is the value placed on women’s hair, and Buchanan’s work delights in teasing out and disrupting the whys and hows of that valuation. A miniature chair sculpture with long red hair cascading down its back greeted visitors as they entered the retrospective, and straight ahead was Hair Room, conceived in 1973 but first fabricated for this show, featuring long strands of synthetic hair hanging from the ceiling that brushed the top of your head and face as you moved through. Hair in places where you don’t expect it creates the feeling of bodily boundaries uncontrolled and exceeded—nowhere more so than in Buchanan’s Hair Piece (1972/2012) a large rug made from human and poodle hair, featured in the show’s “Bestiary” room.

At the center of the show, a gallery titled “The Self and the State” featured installations and videos that grapple with the work of Louis Ridenour, Buchanan’s father, who, during World War II and the Cold War, undertook research for the federal government in nuclear physics, electronics, and airborne radar. The fascinating wall installation Security (1987) includes a selection of the 400 pages she was able to obtain of her father’s more than 100-page FBI file, as well as hanging folders containing a selection of Ridenour’s papers, including a 1943 letter from Robert Oppenheimer inviting him to work at Los Alamos (he did not go). Fallout from the Nuclear Family (1980), which Buchanan describes as “a documentary portrait,” assembles a sampling of her father’s papers and memorabilia into 10 photocopied books with cutouts framing his words. Buchanan notes that she arrived at this form as a way of presenting Ridenour’s views on the weaponization of science while allowing the reader to form their own understanding of “this time at which our dreams and fears about the fruits of technology were first polarized.”

Mouthpiece (1989), located between these two installations, is a video expansion of an earlier performance work that features a scene of partygoers eating cake in the shape of Africa and South America, stabbing at it with toothpicks labeled with the names of multinational corporations while a voice-over celebrates US interventionism abroad. As Owens and Taft note, Buchanan “utiliz[es] a feminist framework of foregrounding political issues in the body,” using body parts “as metaphors to satirize and critique U.S. interventionist foreign policy.” There is a prevalence of mouths (and cakes) in Buchanan’s video work, often in extreme close-up, images that both defamiliarize and literalize hyperconsumption, America’s gift to the world.

One gallery was given over entirely to Buchanan’s continuing engagement with video, as both a medium and a subject, in works such as Tech-Knowledge (1984) and The Work of Art in the Age of Electronic Reproduction (1985–86), developed at the Experimental Television Center in New York. Her investment in the material qualities of analog TV and video was evident in many of the works projected as well as the monumental Set in Stone (2021), a sculpture placed near the entrance of the gallery, made from a repurposed TV monitor in a 1940s wooden chassis with strips of black and white granite where a screen, with its horizontal scan lines, would normally be. Another monitor located in the gallery played documentaries Buchanan made during her decade-long collaboration with former Black Panther and police brutality activist Michael Zinzun on the public access show Message to the Grassroots. The video room was the only presentation in this expansive exhibition that felt unnecessarily compressed: given the centrality of video to Buchanan’s body of work, another room devoted to it would have been welcome.

A good part of the retrospective showcased Buchanan’s drawings, paintings, and sculptures, presented to striking effect in a room titled “Development and Ruins,” where her interest in domestic space opens onto the distortions of the idea of home wrought by California land speculation. The series After California (1999) repurposes archetypal California landscape paintings of the early 20th century by adding in photographs of tract housing—so subtly that, from afar, I thought I was looking at a Sherrie Levine–esque appropriation. I didn’t spot the creep of suburban sprawl into those mythic images of untouched natural beauty until I got closer, which made it even creepier, as one narrative of the Golden State succumbed to another.

The close relationship between development and ruination is further explored in American Dream #8: Untitled (Relief), from 1999, a work from the eponymous series of mixed-media sculptures (a collaboration with Carolyn Potter). It reproduces in miniature a hillside in Buchanan’s Mount Washington neighborhood that was developed and then abandoned when the builders ran out of money, and features a tiny, embedded video documenting the seven years the project was under construction. Even the graffiti etched into the concrete by an angry neighbor is faithfully recreated: I am going to burn this down when you are done, I promise. A wall of drawings titled Ruins (2025), the most recent works in the show, depict local buildings that have fallen into disrepair alongside two drawings of collapsed apartment buildings in Gaza, one of them rendered in purple, after the Lavender AI program the Israeli army used for its devastating bombing campaign.

On my second visit to the show, I had the good fortune to run into Buchanan herself. I’d been studying a poster that refers back to her trip to Nicaragua, and to a conversation with an elderly man who reminded her that Nicaraguans think of Americans as their neighbors, regardless of the actions of our government. “Would you gun down your neighbor as he offers you a plate of food?” the poster reads. “One cannot imagine it—the plate flying into the air, spattered with blood, the tiny cookies ground underfoot. […] What kind of neighbors are we?” That was the question facing Los Angeles this past summer as whole neighborhoods were terrorized by ICE, and the question that continues to face us today, at home and on the world stage. It is a moment that calls for the solidarity between local and international struggles that Buchanan has spent a lifetime articulating, which makes her work feel especially vital right now, and the Brick retrospective especially timely. As we spoke, she noted that, these days, she prefers drawing to video—the new technologies just don’t grab her anymore. Protest signs do, though. “Maybe I’ll make some more posters,” she said, with a gleam in her eye.

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Featured image: Nancy Buchanan. Still from These Creatures, 1979. Single-channel video, 60 seconds, color, sound. Courtesy of the artist.