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Vicissitude by Luke Buchanan is located at 1050 Umstead Drive. Photos by Jude McDonald.
Sweet Earth by Isabel Lu is located near the Gipson Play Plaza. Photos by Jude McDonald.
About the Artists
Luke Buchanan, Jason Lord, and Isabel Lu
Luke Buchanan is a painter and mixed media artist based in Raleigh, NC. With a formal education in architecture from the NC State College of Design, Buchanan explores change in the built environment, alongside the histories and memories represented by buildings and public spaces. A recent year-long project captured the changing seasons of the large ginkgo tree in Dix Park. This work led to the inspiration for his mural, Vicissitude. Buchanan’s work as a painter has been recognized nationally and internationally, including features in New American Paintings, Both Ways American-Moroccan Artist Exchange, and Highlights in Contemporary North Carolina Painting at the NC Museum of Art. His public works include a number of murals throughout the triangle area. Buchanan has been a studio artist at Anchorlight in Raleigh since 2016.
Jason Lord is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and educator based in Durham. Using an expansive toolbox of materials, processes, and strategies for thinking and making, he investigates systems—how meaning emerges through relationships among parts, how structure and constraint shape experience, and how material processes can generate new forms of understanding. His work moves fluidly across media, often grounded in repetition, accumulation, and embodied inquiry. Lord holds an MFA in Studio Art from UNCG and a BFA in Studio Art from UNC-CH. He has received fellowships and support from the McColl Center, the Vermont Studio Center, the Hambidge Center, and the Andy Warhol Foundation. Jason's work at Dix Park begins with the conditions of the site itself: an active maintenance building within a landscape shaped by both care and confinement. His project will ask how objects, systems, and spaces carry traces of use, and how those traces can be reconfigured to register both presence and absence.
Raleigh-based artist Isabel Lu unpacks binary ideas of diagnosis, remedy, and the body in their work. Their educational background in nutritional science, public health, and dietetics informs their artistic practice. Isabel’s work has been exhibited across North Carolina and they have attended residences at Artspace, WilderHaven in the Sichuan Province in China, the Peter Bullough Foundation in Virginia, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center of the Arts in Nebraska. Isabel has numerous awards from South Arts, the Snapdragon Fund, North Carolina Asian Americans Together, and Raleigh Arts. Through figurative painting, zinemaking, and herbalism, Lu's work layers the body with symbols from Western and Eastern medicine, ideology, and mythology, Yin & Yang balancing light and shadow, meridians where qi stagnates and circulates, and herbs that offer nourishment and movement.
