Beverly Buchanan in Berlin: "Beverly Buchanan. Weathering" @ Haus am Waldsee

text by Arlo Kremen


Standing a block away from the last stop of the U3 at Krumme Lanke, Haus am Waldsee, a beautiful residence turned art museum, sits by the Zehlendorf quarter’s local lake, or Waldsee. Haus am Waldsee is the only property on the lake where all visitors are free to access the water, a facet of the institution deeply in line with the ethos of the late Beverly Buchanan’s work. For her “shack” works, Buchanan regularly trespassed onto the grounds of these structures of Southern American vernacular architecture for photos and inspiration, coming face to face with many upset, disgruntled, and irritated homeowners, but also new friends. In this regular practice, she met Ms. Mary Lou Fulcron, a woman who had built her house and lived alone. In an excerpt of the artist’s writing, Buchanan shares how she helped carry logs for Ms. Fulcron, and her challenge of ingratiating herself with an isolated black woman in Georgia, a challenge that had become a regular exercise for the artist. From her brief diary entry pinned up in the show, Ms. Fulcron meant a lot to Buchanan. A woman of endurance, who, when hospitalized, escaped back to her house on foot, ten miles away, scared something would happen to her home.

These are the stories Buchanan saw in every shack she came across, with many of these structures being somewhat-restyled slave cabins. She saw power, endurance, and survival in each and every one. When speaking to curators, Beatrice Hilke and Pia-Marie Remmers told another story of Buchanan entering a home at night without a roof. All she wrote about was how clear the stars were. She never came to a home with judgment, critique, or patronizing worry; she came to these homes as if they were art objects—monuments to those who live and have lived in them.

Beverly Buchanan
Three Families (A Memorial Piece with Scars) [with legend], 1989
Print on paper
10 x 23 cm
Courtesy of the Estate of Beverly Buchanan and Andrew Edlin Gallery

Ima-Abasi Okon made two accompanying works to the show. The first involved lockboxes outside the premises that take visitors to the lake and onto the private property around the museum. In these lockboxes are lube and organic materials. Lube is a substance to bring an object into a space where it does not belong. With its sexual connotations, the interaction between foreign object and intruded upon space can be procreative and pleasurable, referring to Buchanan’s trespassings and their paramount role in her practice. The other works Okon made were wall paintings covering every inch of wall with pollen. Titled Sex (2025), the walls are streaked yellow, bringing the materiality and smell of the outside inside. Here, Okon submits the walls to environmental degradation, a frequent technique of her more labor-intensive sculptural works. With a title like Sex, Okon also propounds this feature of her work as similarly pleasurable and procreative. 

A common misconception of Buchanan’s oeuvre is that she is an outsider artist. However, the artist had been exhibited at A.I.R. gallery alongside contemporary and friend Ana Mendieta and started out as an abstract expressionist under the tutelage of Norman Lewis. Buchanan was trained as an insider. Her works are of the trends of her time, land art, conceptual art, and post-minimalism, but her works have a D.I.Y. inflection to them. Her shacks, alongside her other wooden construction pieces, are undeniably in conversation with the folk art of the South. According to Buchanan, she always “made things,” never really understanding her creations as art objects until later. She began her professional life in medicine, studying parasitology at Columbia University, which brought her to New York, where she eventually connected with the Art Students’ League. 

Beverly Buchanan,
Lamar County, GA, 2003
Oil pastel on paper
56 x 76 cm
courtesy of the Estate of Beverly Buchanan and Andrew Edlin Gallery

The artist suffered from several chronic illnesses, having stacks of medical bills to pay at any given time. To pay these bills, Buchanan sold many of her works for the exact prices of different bills, spreading her work across a plethora of private owners in and outside of Macon and Athens, Georgia. Hilke and Remmers, doing research in the state to prepare for this show, ventured into many homes only to find different Buchanan works on unassuming walls and tables. All of her flower works exhibited in the show came from these homes. The flowers were put together by Okon, offering a contrasting side to the artist, who, in adjoining rooms, has her still sculptural works. One such room includes her monumental frustula, cement sculptures whose molds she made from bricks and found materials like milk cartons. The frustula works, while many being of different cement mixtures, all have a timeless, enduring quality—shaped by time. The flowers, on the other hand, are electric. Quick, loose-colored scrawlings across paper build up a shape that could be called anything but still lives. Her shack pastels have an identical effect. Often exhibited with the shack sculptures, the curators made the decision to show the pastels on the second floor, overlooking the sculpture garden. By separating pastels from sculptures, both mediums could stand autonomously, the curators prevent the unfortunate hierarchy that tends to favor the shack sculptures as the more prominent representations.

Beverly Buchanan
Untitled, 1978—1980
Print on glossy paper
20 x 25 cm
Courtesy of the Estate of Beverly Buchanan and Andrew Edlin Gallery


Beverly Buchanan. Weathering took a very gentle, nuanced approach to the wide-ranging work of Beverly Buchanan, permitting her work to breathe and soak up the space as individual works and as series, while simultaneously forwarding the artist’s massive archive. Buchanan had a rigorous documentation process—photos, writings, poems, and drawings—spread by the stairwell on the second floor, situating her ephemera as a prime feature of her practice. Her archiving instinct became of sizable importance to her Marsh Ruins (1981). For this land piece on the coast of Georgia, Buchanan built a memorial to the enslaved people who, once landed on American soil, raced to the water and drowned as an act of return to their homes. Funded by the Guggenheim grant, Buchanan worked with a few other laborers to make tabby stones that blend into the swamp landscape, becoming nearly unrecognizable as human-made objects. Shown as a slideshow, the recording covers the correspondence between the artist and the Guggenheim, the work proceeds through the day-by-day photographic coverage with supplementary captions taken by the artist to prove the project was completed. Although not necessarily Marsh Ruins, the work shown is an artwork in its own right, turning bureaucratic processes into a creative act. Beverly Buchanan. Weathering showcases a nuanced approach to Buchanan’s work, all while giving visitors a glimpse into her mind to reveal a singular person who stretched her art into every corner of her life.


Beverly Buchanan. Weathering is on view through February 1st @ Haus am Waldsee, Berlin.

"Embrace" by Klára Hosnedlová @ Hamburger Bahnhof


text by Arlo Kremen

Embrace is the largest installation of the Czech-born artist Klára Hosnedlová. The installation was produced as the culmination of the annual CHANEL Commission at Hamburger Bahnhof—the old train hall turned art institution. Her resulting work has a remarkable all-at-once effect, where disparate facets of existence overlap: tactile, industrial, sound, history, architecture, scale, the land, and heritage are all interwoven in her piece, compelling visitors to sit patiently in Hosnedlová’s singular world.

The artist transforms the exhibition hall’s original floors with grey stone tiles. The plane of grey is interrupted by gashes of sand, dirt, and water—natural material invades the clinical space of art reception. Industrial speakers sourced from Berlin clubs, some of which no longer exist, pile onto some of the intruding earth beds. While some speakers amplify the audio cycle for the show, others lie entirely inert as empty vessels.

The show’s soundtrack was developed by Berlin- and Brussels-based composer and artist Billy Bultheel. The track cycles through a women’s choir, Lada, who sing in Moravian micro-dialects, instrumental sections, church bells, and the voice of Czech rapper Yzomandias. Much of the work originates in memories and histories of where Hosnedlová grew up, the Moravian town of Uherské Hradiště, where the inorganic structures of central-east European communist industrial architecture and the region’s rich cultural landscape came into contact. The eight steel walls bordering the show hold sand-covered reliefs that similarly evoke memories. Both referring to Moravia’s history, they also call on the socialist wall friezes common in public buildings. With the fossils embodying both prehistoric and communist histories, they turn to Hosnedlová’s childhood in the immediate aftermath of Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, her birth taking place just a year after and three years before the formation of the modern Czech Republic in 1993. But they simultaneously represent her childhood hobby of collecting fossils, believing them to be remnants of another world.

Embrace, 2025
Klára Hosnedlová
Installation view
Courtesy Artist, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, White Cube / Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Zdeněk Porcal – Studio Flusser

These reliefs also bear the work of glass-making artisans whose practice has been informed by generations of glass-makers, joining the separate referents of the reliefs through their regionality and as a historic artisan medium. Like claws, the hand-cast glass protrudes from the reliefs, mimicking, too, the carbonization of a prehistoric relic. Nine pieces of colored glass in total, whose material contrasts with the rigid structure of the reliefs, balancing fragility and durability.

The embroideries embedded in the reliefs act as portals to the past, depicting scenes from unseen staged performances that were photographed at brutalist structures in Berlin. These slow, intimate moments transport the viewer into a still past. Some depicted scenes emphasize physical touch. One embroidery shows a man with a lighter flaming right by his ambomen; his skin, brightened by the fire, evokes the sensation of a flame near the skin—its primal warmth. Another shows someone fiddling with a lit match, meditating on the feeling of an enclosing fire, a moment before movement. These gentle images are blown up within the immensity of the reliefs, both in size and in their references to ancient life and architecture, considering these ephemeral interactions with the body and natural phenomena like fire as contained within the vastness of history, politics, and culture.

 

Embrace, 2025
Klára Hosnedlová
Installation view
Courtesy Artist, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, White Cube / Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Zdeněk Porcal – Studio Flusser

 

Some reliefs, displaced from the steel walls, are fixed to the hemp and flax tapestries hanging in the middle of the hall. Six in total, they hang from the ceiling and culminate in clumped tendrils, which cover the floor around the tapestry. Each is made from spun flax and hemp and dyed in an earthy tone from plant-based dyes. Such works also return to Bohemia, for the region has a long, pre-industrial tradition of flax and hemp cultivation that largely ended after the Second World War, when global industrialization and the legacies of colonial trade displaced regional textile production across Europe. For these works, Hosnedlová worked with the last flax and hemp processors in that region of modern-day Czech Republic. These fixtures, both blocking the viewer out and trapping the viewer in, disassemble traditional notions of inside and outside, inculcating the viewer into a landscape.

The show accomplishes an evocation. Through Embrace, a feeling of loss and slippage permeates, but its subject is not turning to pure nothingness. What is decaying—whether it be the cultural traditions and history of Moravia due to colonial capitalism or the regional sonic topography of language and music felt passing through the dusty, beaten, and partially defective speakers—it is going somewhere. Whether in memory-soaked imaginative environments like the one Hosnedlová crafts, or as a relic for new generations to uncover, the artist demonstrates her trust that the Moravia of her childhood will not disappear—it will carbonize under the earth for someone else to uncover and cherish as a key to another world.

Embrace is on view through April 1, 2026 @ Hamburger Bahnhof, Invalidenstraße 50, Berlin.

Design, Desert, and the Art of Slowing Down: A Family Stay At The Desert Wave House

text by Oliver Kupper

We packed the car and headed to Palm Desert to stay at the Desert Wave House, a mid-century modern dreamscape nestled among the palms and rock formations. It was one of those family getaways that somehow managed to be both restful and quietly transformative—a pause, a breath. And, thanks to a new collaboration with Design Within Reach and Boutique Homes, it became something else too: a design-lover’s immersion, curated down to the very last detail.

It’s the first time Design Within Reach has offered this kind of experience—a full takeover of a private architectural home, styled with furniture pieces from the Paul Smith Collection, which merges iconic pieces from DWR’s roster with the legendary British designer and fabrics textiles developed with Maharam. And you can feel that intention the moment you step inside. It’s not just staged to be photographed—it’s designed to be lived in.

The Desert Wave House, designed in the 1950s by Walter S. White, is almost unreal in its beauty. From the road, it ripples into view like a mirage—low-slung, curvilinear, with its signature undulating roofline that echoes the nearby Santa Rosa Mountains. Inside, the architecture feels elemental. Soft light pours through clerestory windows, bouncing across poured across uncovered original terrazzo floors. But what makes the space sing right now is the way Design Within Reach has layered in warmth and ease—simple lines, beautiful textures, tactile materials. We arrived midafternoon and immediately dropped our bags. The house gently asks you to slow down.

One of my favorite rooms is the living room, with a vinyl record player—yes, a real one—which sat on a credenza stocked with records. We put on Miles Davis while making breakfast and then later flipped to Fleetwood Mac as the sun dipped low. It sounds like a small thing, but those musical moments grounded the day. There’s something so physical and present about putting a record on and letting the crackle warm the room.

And then, of course, there’s the pool. A sparkling, perfectly proportioned pool with views out to mountains. We spent hours floating and watching shadows stretch across the patio. Design Within Reach had furnished the outdoor space with low-slung loungers, architectural umbrellas, and side tables made for lemonade (or spritzes, depending on the hour). In the evenings, we watched the sky go pink, then purple, then absolutely star-splattered.

What struck me most was how seamless everything felt—not just the interiors, but the experience of being in the house. The kitchen was stocked with beautiful tableware; the bedrooms had DWR linens so soft they might as well have been washed a hundred times. Every corner was photogenic—but also intuitive and functional. It’s not easy to create a space that feels elevated and effortless. But they did.

This partnership between Design Within Reach and the Desert Wave House feels like something new. Not just a showroom in situ, but a lived-in, emotionally resonant experience of what good design can actually do. How it can set a tone. Encourage rest. Invite connection. For years, DWR has been synonymous with accessible modern design—you walk into their stores and can imagine these pieces in your own home. But this collaboration takes that idea a step further. It asks: What happens if you let people live inside the fantasy for a few days? The answer is: you come away inspired.

For our family, it was more than just a stylish weekend. It was a memory—of barefoot breakfasts and shared swims, of design conversations. It was time spent inside a space that reminded us how much atmosphere matters. How much the way a room feels shapes the way you show up in it.

We left reluctantly, peeling ourselves away from the sun-drenched terrace and carefully repacking our half-read books and damp swimsuits. But we also left with ideas. About what it means to create a beautiful, functional home. About the joy of a well-balanced chair. About the luxury of slowing down enough to notice details.

It’s rare that a branded experience actually sticks—that it feels like more than a surface-level showcase. But this one did. The Desert Wave House wasn’t just beautifully curated—it was generous, lived-in, soulful. It reminded us that good design doesn’t shout. It whispers. It nudges. It opens up space for presence.

The experience can be booked until August 31st here.

Prada’s Architectural Meditation in Osaka

Prada Mode, Osaka
Courtesy of Prada

text by Andrea Riano


At a time when fashion’s cultural events are so often reduced to surface-level branding, Prada Mode’s second edition in Japan is a serious meditation on how architecture can reimagine the ecosystem of an island. In the heart of Osaka, the brand collaborates with architect Kazuyo Sejima, inviting guests to participate in a critical dialogue, exclusive performances, and an immersive exhibition.

Open to the public through June 15th, Prada Mode Osaka takes place in Umekita Park, a rare oasis nestled between Osaka’s glass towers and directly connected to the country’s busiest train station. This is the twelfth edition of the brand’s cultural journey, which has landed everywhere from Miami to Hong Kong and now, for the second time, in Japan. This particular edition is curated by Pritzker Prize-winning architect and head of SANAA, Kazuyo Sejima, a frequent collaborator of Prada.

Prada Mode, Osaka
Courtesy of Prada

In 2008, the Fukutake Foundation, which manages the Benesse Art Site Naoshima, invited Sejima to reimagine and shape the built environment of the small Seto island of Inujima. At Prada Mode, the architect shares this ongoing work through models, videos, and other materials at a SANAA-designed pavilion in the park. In the days leading up to Prada Mode Osaka, Inujima Project offered a private preview of Inujima, introducing the history of the island, Sejima’s projects there over the past 17 years, and her vision for its future. During the Inujima Project, Prada and the architect unveiled a permanent pavilion at Inujima Life Garden, designed by Sejima and donated to the island by Prada.

“On Inujima, a tiny island rich in nature, visitors will encounter and experience symbiosis - a landscape that combines history, architecture, art, and daily life. In Osaka, a city with historical ties to Inujima, this experience will be shared and expanded to reach a wider audience. At this edition of Prada Mode, Symbiosis will take shape through conversations and discoveries, creating a new landscape that continues to grow with the participation of all,” says Kazuyo Sejima.

Kazuyo Sejima at Prada Mode, Osaka
Courtesy of Prada

The programming reflects that same ethos. The week-long schedule is a soft collision of art, intellect, and experimental sound curated by Craig Richards, featuring performances by Nik Bärtsch, Reggie Watts, and C.A.R. (Choosing Acronyms Randomly), the latter being an incredible post-punk performance. Guests lounged on floor cushions, sipped Prada-branded negronis and olives, while watching film screenings by Bêka & Lemoine and a dance piece by choreographer Wayne McGregor, joined by composer Keiichiro Shibuya. Shibuya also presented “ANDROID MARIA,” a newly created android developed with a team of leading developers, produced and presented by ATAK.

“It’s not about promotion here. It’s about architecture, music, ideas. The curation is unique. Prada genuinely wants to support culture.” says Shibuya, who is known for challenging the boundaries between humans and technology through his compositions and collaborations with artists and scientists, such as his Android Orchestra. 

Indeed, Prada Mode has never really been about fashion, instead, it's about the contexts that shape it: cities, people, materials, and memory. In Osaka, that vision reaches a new level of clarity.

Prada Mode, Osaka
Courtesy of Prada

Prada Mode is on view through June 15th at Umekita Park, Ofukacho, Kita Ward, Osaka, 530-0011