Nancy Buchanan

Nancy Buchanan (b. 1946, Boston) is a Los Angeles artist whose performance, video, and installation work has combined the personal and the political for over five decades. Raised in Southern California, she was a member of UC Irvine's now-legendary first MFA class alongside Chris Burden and Barbara T. Smith, and co-founded F Space in Santa Ana — the experimental gallery where some of the era's most notorious performances took place. A central figure in LA's feminist art movement, Buchanan was a founding member of Grandview Gallery at the Woman's Building, the feminist collective Double X, Close Radio, and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). Her work turned to video in the late 1970s as a natural extension of performance, producing incisive works like Fallout from the Nuclear Family (1980), a portrait of her physicist father that exposed the dark side of Cold War America. Fellow artist Senga Nengudi has praised Buchanan as a rare bridge-builder who supported artists of color when LA's feminist institutions often did not: "She is truly for real." Buchanan taught in CalArts' School of Film/Video from 1988 to 2012; her work is collected by MoMA and the Centre Pompidou, and her papers are held at the Getty Research Institute. A retrospective, TRUTHFULLY, NANCY BUCHANAN, was recently presented at The Brick in Los Angeles.