feel rubble
Betty Beaumont
Beverly Buchanan
Gabriela Salazar
Organized by Patrick Bova
September 10 – October 30, 2022
What is it to feel rubble? To sense the imprecious, washed up or broken off? Alongside presumed waste comes
life; nooks and cracks to fill and nest within.
Situated inside 403 Colonels Row on Governors Island, feel rubble assembles historic photographs by Beverly
Buchanan, a sculpture and films by Betty Beaumont, and recent sculptures by Gabriela Salazar. These three
artists’ distinct approaches to materials and scale find common ground in a language of endurance, memory, and
the limits of knowability. Each understands materials—for example, concrete, styrofoam, coal fly ash, dirt, wood,
and paper—as unexpected, inconspicuous messengers.
Wedged against an interior threshold, Gabriela Salazar’s In Fill (2022) forms a lumpen, careful triangle. It
incorporates the outside washed in: detritus from across this island found, sorted, and assessed. It nearly
breaches the doorway. Nearby, hardened security envelopes rest on three long, glass-topped tables. Holding the
once- liquid remnants of the artist’s studio practice, In Securities (2014-ongoing) eke out the capacity of their
containers, pushing against time and themselves. Salazar’s investment in architecture, site, and the environment
use the island as a source and its rubble as a collaborator.
Beverly Buchanan’s color photographs, all made in the early 1990s, are four of many images the artist took while
living in the American South that document vernacular architecture and the lives lived in such spaces. Buchanan—
widely known for her “shack sculptures” of the same subject matter—had a keen eye for rubble. In the 1970s and
1980s, the artist made a number of earthworks (smaller, discrete sculptures and a few site-specific works in
Georgia) out of cast concrete and tabby. Ruinous from conception, Buchanan’s outdoor sculptures are inherently
unlike most public artworks; they are unremarkable yet commanding in their still-aroundness.
In dialogue with Salazar and Buchanan, works by Betty Beaumont orbit an artwork that isn’t here and can’t even
be seen. From 1978 to 1980, Beaumont completed a large-scale, site-specific work on the floor of the Atlantic
Ocean, 40 miles from this very harbor off the coast of Fire Island National Seashore. Comprising 500 tons of coal
fly ash waste formed into blocks, Ocean Landmark intended to reclaim an area of heavy ocean dumping into a
flourishing reef. It is still there, and fish have returned.
Implicitly unviewable, Ocean Landmark’s integrity as an artwork, as expressed by the artist, “resides in its
invisibility.” The films and sculpture on view in this house offer glimpses into the artist’s research and process of
completing Ocean Landmark. Each is a distinct effort to visualize the invisible and imagine the inaccessible, yet in
no way can they claim any certainty in their varied conjurings. In particular, The Object operates as a kind of
imperfect surrogate; a pile of 17,000 hand-painted styrofoam blocks made in 1978 to gain a sense of the scale and
mass of the project.
Rubble, in all of its ubiquity, echoes of built environments. Today it speaks to yesterday and tomorrow’s
circumstance, enduring time and transformation, noticings and forgettings. It is fill fallen out. Feeling rubble is a
chance to see rubble.
feel rubble
Gabriela Salazar was born in New York City to architects from Puerto Rico. She has had solo exhibitions at
NURTUREart; The Bronx River Arts Center; The Lighthouse Works, Fishers Island; Efrain Lopez Gallery, Chicago;
The River Valley Arts Collective at the Al Held Foundation, New York, and with the Climate Museum, in Washington
Square Park, NYC. Her work has been included in group shows at Socrates Sculpture Park, the Queens Museum,
El Museo del Barrio, The Drawing Center, David Nolan Gallery, Candice Madey Gallery, Storm King Art Center, and
upcoming (November 23) at the Whitney Museum, in no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the
Wake of Hurricane Maria. Salazar’s work has also appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, hyperallergic,
and The Brooklyn Rail. Residencies include Workspace (LMCC); Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, Skowhegan
School of Painting & Sculpture, Abrons Arts Center, “Open Sessions” at The Drawing Center, and the Socrates
Emerging Artist Fellowship. She holds an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design, a BA from Yale University, and
lives, works, and teaches in NYC.
Betty Beaumont was born in Toronto, Canada and currently lives and works in New York. She has received
prestigious grants and awards including the 2006 Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of California at
Berkeley, and grants from Creative Capital, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts,
the Gottlieb Foundation, and the Pollock Krasner Foundation. In addition to numerous exhibitions in galleries in
Europe, Asia, and the US, she has shown internationally at museums including The Centre Pompidou-Metz
(France), The Bibliotheca Alexandrina (Alexandria, Egypt), National Museum of Modern Art (Kyoto and Tokyo),
Museum Het Domein (Sittard, Netherlands), Bibliotéca Nacional José Marti (Havana, Cuba), Whitney Museum of
Art, MoMA P.S.1, Queens Museum, Hudson River Museum (Yonkers, NY), and Katonah Museum (Katonah, NY).
Beaumont has held academic positions at the University of California at Berkeley, SUNY Purchase, Hunter College,
School of the Art Institute of Chicago, New York University, and Columbia University.
Beverly Buchanan (1940-2015) was born in Fuquay, North Carolina. She was the recipient of numerous awards,
including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1980) and a National Endowment for the
Arts Fellowship (1980). Her work is in the permanent collections of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Studio Museum in Harlem, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Museum
of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. The work
has been exhibited widely, including solo shows at Steinbaum Krauss Gallery in New York in 1996 and ‘98,
Shackworks, a traveling mid-career retrospective hosted by the Montclair Museum of Art (New Jersey), and most
recently, a posthumous solo retrospective, Ruins and Rituals, curated by Jennifer Burris and Park McArthur, at the
Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2016-17.
Acknowledgements
Gabriela Salazar, Betty Beaumont, Aurélie Bernard Wortsman and Andrew Edlin Gallery, Eugenia Kisin, Karen
Holmberg, Cyd Cipolla, Clara Parker Luce, Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez, Chad Stayrook, Chris Crary, Keelin Pogue, Clare Soennichsen, Lindsay Yocum, Jacob Ford, and Lucas Regazzi.
This exhibition is a project of the Gallatin WetLab and was generously supported by NYU Gallatin School of
Individualized Study.
