For over five decades, artist Nancy Buchanan has been a vital part of the Los Angeles art community, creating performance, video, drawing, collage, digital art, sculpture, and mixed-media installations, and teaching for over thirty years as a respected core faculty member at the California Institute of the Arts. Organized by artist Laura Owens—who was her student at CalArts—and The Brick’s Catherine Taft, this exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of Buchanan’s expansive body of work, foregrounding her important conceptual practice and pioneering experimentations with new media. Moreover, the exhibition spotlights and contextualizes Buchanan’s now sixty-five-year-long drawing practice, an under-recognized aspect of her career that demonstrates the artist’s constant wit, political engagement, and ferocious productivity. This exhibition aims to re-situate Buchanan among artists known for crafting the West Coast sensibility of the 1970s and 1980s, and introduce her expansive body of work to new generations. TRUTHFULLY, NANCY BUCHANAN comprises important documentation of and ephemera from Buchanan’s performance of the 1970s and early 1980s, a time when she collaborated with fellow artists including Chris Burden, Marcia Hafif, Ulysses Jenkins, Cynthia Maughan, Paul McCarthy, Carolyn Potter, Barbara T. Smith, Doug Wichert, and Michael Zinzun. These events took place at venues such as F Space Gallery, LACE, and the L.A. Woman’s Building. The show also traces Buchanan’s video and installation work from the 1980s to the 2000s, reflecting her deep engagement with feminism, environmentalism, national politics, global economics, and autobiography. These concerns are evident in an adaptation of Fallout from the Nuclear Family (1981) and Security (1987), works that draw from the life of the artist’s father, Louis N. Ridenour Jr., a prominent physicist whose work was entwined with the creation of some of the first atomic weapons. While these are among Buchanan’s most recognizable pieces, this show will also feature singular examples of early painting and multi-media sculptures, newly transferred CD-Rom and Hypercard art, rarely exhibited works on paper, and a previously unrealized environmental installation. Buchanan’s ambitious Hair Room is presented here for the first time, having been conceptualized in 1973 and only realized this year. The exhibition will also feature a new collaboration between Buchanan and Owens that completes an otherwise unfinished canvas from 1971. TRUTHFULLY, NANCY BUCHANAN is accompanied by a series of related events including artist and curator walk-throughs, special screenings of the artist’s long form videos, and an event in partnership with the Performance Art Museum. Notably, on September 20th, Slauson Malone 1 (artist Jasper Marsalis) will reinterpret Buchanan’s infamous 1974 performance Rock ’n’ Roll. Please check The Brick website for more information soon. Following this exhibition, The Brick will produce a fully illustrated catalogue of Buchanan’s work, with scholarly essays and contributions by both Laura Owens and Catherine Taft among others. Forthcoming in 2026, this marks Buchanan’s first comprehensive monograph, featuring first-person accounts by the artist and her circle of friends and collaborators, as well as archival reprints, rare photographs, and more. This exhibition is curated by Laura Owens and Catherine Taft, with Hannah Burstein. Image: Nancy Buchanan with Baxter, the Irish wolfhound, ca.1974. Photo by Ransom Rideout, courtesy of Nancy Buchanan.