Nancy Buchanan
| Nancy Buchanan | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
Nancy Page Ridenour August 30, 1946 |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | University of California, Irvine (BFA and MFA) |
| Known for | Installation, performance, and video art |
| Website | nancybuchanan |
Nancy Buchanan (born August 30, 1946) is a Los Angeles-based artist best known for her work in installation, performance, and video art. She played a central role in the feminist art movement in Los Angeles in the 1970s. Her work has been exhibited widely and is collected by major museums including the Museum of Modern Art and the Centre Pompidou.
Buchanan was born Nancy Page Ridenour in Boston, Massachusetts. Her family moved to California when she was a child. She earned her B.A. and M.F.A. at the University of California, Irvine, where she studied with Larry Bell, Vija Celmins, David Hockney, and Robert Irwin.
Since the 1970s, Buchanan has made videos and performances that combine the personal and the political. Buchanan, like other feminist artists of the period (including Eleanor Antin, Martha Rosler, and Barbara T. Smith) "began incorporating fictional, political, or autobiographical narrative into their work, drawing on genres of mass media that could not successfully have been referenced by 'serious' art even a few years earlier."
Buchanan's early videos disrupt representational stereotypes through a feminist critique of formulaic narrative genres. Many of her later works document and critique insidious operations of political and corporate power, often with a wry sense of humor. Her video polemics of the 1980s and 1990s address such issues as government-sponsored fear tactics underpinning nuclear proliferation, American interventionist foreign policy in Latin America, and the role of exploitative real-estate speculation in the failure of the American dream.
Buchanan was a producer of Close Radio along with Paul McCarthy and John Duncan.
Andra Darlington writes in From California Video: Artists and Histories:
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