L-R: Lowes Grid (2011), Two Pitchers (2011), and Lateral Follower (2012), by Jim Buchman are on display at Memphis Botanic Garden.
Jim Buchman has never been on speaking terms with a comb in his life. If he ever owned one, it’s long since been welded into a granite monument to the evils of vanity. His hair, like his sculptures, resists order. Strands lifted by a quick rake of the fingers fall where they please. Einstein and he share unruly hair and a restless intellect. At a Lincolnesque 6-foot-3, he towers over me, and the dissimilarity doesn’t end there.
We met in the 10th grade at White Station High School. Our graduating class of 1966 included Kathy Bates, winner of the Oscar for Best Actress, and Alan Lightman, physicist and best-selling novelist, along with Jim — leaving me feeling like a pair of overalls in a closet full of tuxedos. From there the dissimilarities multiply.
Jim went north to Dartmouth; I stayed south, at Tennessee. He became a sculptor; I, an attorney. Despite our differences we remained friends, visiting with each other on his trips to Memphis.
His love of shapes and forms may have come from his father, Leslie Buchman, a principal in a Memphis steel manufacturing firm, Southern Fabricators, who also dabbled in watercolors. His dad’s contacts landed Jim a summer job with S & W Construction Company pouring concrete for bridges across I-55 — an experience that would later serve him well.
His grandmother, Alice Wallace, lived in an old home at the corner of East Cherry Circle and Poplar, the property torn down to make way for the Christ Methodist Church soccer field. When his father and mother married, Jim’s grandmother gave her daughter, Annie Rose Wallace, and her new husband the sheep pasture adjoining her property. Jim grew up in the home they built there.
A seminal event in Jim’s youth was his trip to Europe with his mother and his younger sister, Dana (more about her later). They bought a car in Rotterdam, and 16-year-old Jim somehow managed to steer it to Paris. Annie Rose took him to the Musée Rodin which, at the time, was hosting an exhibit of twentieth-century American abstract sculptures. It featured leading modernists such as David Smith, Isamu Noguchi, and Mark Di Suvero, among others. In Paris, ironically surrounded by American art, Jim decided to be a sculptor.
His entire family was talented. His younger sister, Dana Buchman, stitched her way into the New York fashion world with an exclusive line of dresses, purses, and accessories. His older sister, Leslie Buchman, had a more secret profession, working for the CIA as a language expert. Their mother was so proud of Leslie that she bragged to friends that her daughter was in the CIA — until a stern man in a black suit appeared at her door with instructions to stop the loose talk. She complied.
photograph by jonathan boyd
Artist Jim Buchman with First Black (2011), one of several elaborate concrete sculptures he installed at the Overton Park Shell.
Most parents might be skeptical of a young boy’s dream to join the ranks of American abstract sculptors, but Jim’s mother and father immediately enrolled him in a sculpting course at the Memphis College of Art. When other boys received baseball mitts, Jim’s parents gave him an acetylene torch for Christmas. He and his neighborhood friends made mobiles under Jim’s supervision. “I just liked making stuff,” Jim explained.
The summer between his sophomore and junior years in college, he attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. In 1970, armed with his bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth, a major in English, and minor in art, Jim rented an abandoned sawmill in Bradford, New Hampshire, where he bent and shaped inner tubes over steel frames creating hanging, cruciform sculptures.
He took slides of his work to New York and began cold-calling art dealers. Some liked what they saw, some didn’t, but one asked if he could keep the slides for a while. When Jim came to retrieve them, the dealer’s secretary said, “I don’t have them. I gave them to Mr. Hutchinson.” Jim knew Max Hutchinson was an art dealer who had made his name selling a Jackson Pollock. He went to Hutchinson’s office where the receptionist asked, “Oh, are you the inner-tube guy?”
“Yeah,” Jim replied.
“Mr. Hutchinson wants to talk to you,” and she ushered Jim into Hutchinson’s office. He liked Jim’s art and included one of his sculptures in a group show with other artists in Hutchinson’s gallery in New York. He took Jim under his wing, encouraging him: “Keep in touch and let me know if you’ve got anything else you’d like me to see.” Now, Jim had a well-known New York gallery interested in his work.
Later, Jim moved his studio from New Hampshire to Burlington, Vermont. He noticed huge stone tailings littering the median of the newly built interstate on his way to Burlington. The jagged pieces of granite gave him the idea of working with granite and steel. He learned from a local quarry that he could get all the stone he wanted for $5 a ton.
Jim would climb hills and dislodge a slab of granite with crowbars, sending it crashing to the bottom. He loaded it onto a surplus army truck and hauled it to his studio where he banded it with steel.
His sculptures were studies in contrast. Steel was forced to yield to rough granite, while flexible rubber fleshed out the rigid steel — juxtapositions of opposites. Granite and rubber, blending into steel, created a symbiotic unity between dissimilar materials. In the mid-seventies, this could be a commentary on pluralism and diversity, a vision that speaks just as powerfully today.
Jim never had any detailed design for any of his pieces. He’d just start with a basic concept, and the sculptures would take on a life of their own, building themselves. “I just kept working with them, making changes that the sculptures demanded,” he said, “until I thought I had something that looked cool.”
“Buchman’s large columan structures seem austere and self-contained, but they also possess a raw power and an energetic surface quality that command attention.” — Kevin Sharp, Dixon Gallery & Gardens
He showed slides of his granite and steel works to Hutchinson in New York. The gallery owner looked up at him, smiled, and said, “Go across the street and see where you’re going to have your first solo show.”
Jim’s sculptures were huge, weighing several tons each. He had to disassemble them and truck them in from his studio, lowering them with cranes to the basement exhibition space. They had to block traffic in Soho to finish the job, and every one of those colossal sculptures sold.
During the show, Robert Hughes, noted critic for Time, wrote a review praising his work. The article led to even greater demand for Jim’s sculptures and more reviews — in New York magazine, Art International, Art in America, and others.
In 1977, he was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 1980 he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. His success led to more shows in New York and commissions from Lebanon Valley College and the Federal Building in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
In 1979, he was commissioned to produce a monumental granite and steel sculpture for the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid. Other creations were displayed in Albany, Houston, Tulsa, New Orleans, Colorado, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and as far away as Korea. They’ve been featured in art magazines highlighting their massive scale and modernist sensibilities, aligning his work with those twentieth-century American abstract sculptors he admired so much in Paris at 16.
Not too shabby for a tall, skinny kid from Memphis who made mobiles in his garage on East Cherry Circle.
photograph courtesy dixon gallery & gardens
A Jim Buchman sculpture, titled Undersea, is part of the permanent collection at the Dixon Gallery & Gardens. Gift in honor of Bickie McDonnell by her loving family, 2013.1
In 2000, Jim came home to Memphis and married Nancy Cheairs, a nationally celebrated artist known for her richly hued glazed paintings that straddle the line between abstraction and symbolism. They have since divorced.
In Memphis, he taught kids how “to make stuff” at Bridges and later at Memphis University School, and, of course, he kept sculpting, but this time there was no granite and steel. That had become a cliché he’d tired of. Plus, there wasn’t a large supply of granite around Memphis. He wanted to try something new and different, something creative that hadn’t ever been done before. So, he started fooling around with cement.
Jim built a contraption from sprockets, roller chains, and drill bits that spun wet cement into sevenfoot columns of static motion.
“Man, those things were fun to make!” he explained. “Cement flew everywhere. I’d get it all over me. I looked more like the sculpture than the sculptor!” The result was remarkable. The columns are decorated with filigree so fine you fear it will fall at your feet if you touch it. There are open wounds in the cement that make you want to render first aid. The cement curves like cresting waves, frozen in time.
“They are all female forms,” he said, and I suppose some of those curves might be womanly, but it was all an obscure abstraction for me. But that’s what abstract art is. Sometimes even the sculptor cannot control the interpretation. All art is what happens to you when you gaze upon it.
And gaze the public did when the Dixon Gallery & Gardens displayed all 13 of Jim’s columns in 2012. “It may be fair to say that Jim Buchman forges seeming opposites into reconciled wholes,” wrote Kevin Sharp, the gallery director, when the pieces were unveiled. “His large columnar structures seem austere and self-contained, but they also possess a raw power and an energetic surface quality that command attention.”
The Dixon bought one for permanent display. Across the street, Memphis Botanic Garden purchased three, where they stand like sentries over the gardens.
Jim gave the remaining nine to the Overton Park Shell in 2024. They were installed in 2025 on the west side of the Shell. They’ve called it The Jim Buchman Sculpture Walk. “God, I hate that name,” Jim told me. “It makes me feel like I’m dead!”
The next time anyone visits the Shell, they should stop and see The (Very Much Alive) Jim Buchman Sculpture Walk and then stroll about 100 yards to the south, next to the older section of Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, to see one of his small granite and steel pieces called Foil. Jim now lives in his studio on Flicker Street, which looks like the setting of an episode of Hoarders. He has cleared a path through what appears to be debris, but to him it’s treasure, carefully catalogued, in a Buchman Decimal System known only to him.
“What’s your next project?” I recently asked him.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “I might go back to wood.” He had worked with wood before, turning and carving it with band and reciprocating saws. “I might do the same thing but change the cutting blade to a router and see what happens, but no more cement, right now. I want to try something new.”
That’s what great artists do, don’t they? They move on to something new, something different, something no one’s done before.
Jim and I are still very dissimilar. He’s Ivy League; I’m SEC. He’s tall and thin; I’m short and stout. Much like his sculptures, we’re a study in contrast, a juxtaposition of opposites. Oh, he’ll probably even grumble about this article. It will sound like a memorial, as if he’s dead. But he’s still very much alive, “making stuff,” changing the landscape of Memphis with his art.
