Nancy Buchanan

WHAT DOES HE OWE US?

Mar 31 – Apr 13, 2024

During the 2020 presidential race, Nancy Buchanan collected mailers that were sent to her friends solicitating

donations for the then-president’s re-election campaign. For her Window Dressing installation, What Does He Owe

Us?, she stitched together these printed forms and envelopes and then painted over them to create large-scale

murals depicting iconic symbols associated with the greed and boorishness of the Trump presidency: a gilded

coronation carriage and an oozing hamburger.

Nancy Buchanan is a conceptual artist working in many forms; her performance works began in 1972, when she was a member of the

infamous F Space Gallery in Santa Ana, CA; her earliest videotapes were recorded on open-reel Portapacks; and she also produces

installations, drawings, and mixed-media work. She assisted activist Michael Zinzun with his cable access program Message to the

Grassroots from 1988-1998 and traveled to Namibia to document that country’s independence from South Africa. Buchanan’s work has been

included in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los

Angeles, the Centre Pompidou, and the Getty Research Institute (where her papers and video works are archived). Buchanan is the recipient

of four National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist grants, a COLA grant, and a Rockefeller Fellowship in New Media. Her work was

included in the 58th Carnegie International.