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.

Active in anti-war organizations since her student days at UCI, Buchanan served as a close collaborator of Michael Zinzun, a Pasadena, California community activist, helping produce his cable-access television show, "Message to the Grassroots."

"[11]Fallout from the Nuclear Family (1980), is a portrait of Buchanan's prominent physicist-father, Louis Ridenour, comprising ten unique books assembled from his personal and professional papers.

"In Buchanan’s work, a conventional self-portrait appears alongside one of her as a jagged-teethed, hairy faced, mouth-agape WOLFWOMAN, with a text describing her reign of terror on LA’s male artists.

in Owego, NY, was included in the California Video exhibition at the Getty Research Institute in 2007: Tech-Knowledge (1984) examines how technology permeates society and shapes our consciousness.

[14]Andra Darlington writes in the exhibition catalogue: "Buchanan produced two interactive computer pieces about pressing social issues: Peace Stack (named with reference to the authoring platform, Hypercard, exhibited 1991 in World News, Beyond Baroque Gallery, Venice, CA and at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center, Fullerton, CA), and S&L (S&L: Transactions in the Post-Industrial Era, Walter/McBean Gallery, San Francisco Art Institute, 1991).

Incorporating images, video, audio and text recognition, it is a meditation on the significance of what home means in the contemporary era of rapacious land speculation and environmental degradation.

Lucy R. Lippard writes about the artwork in The Lure of the Local:Home, is an interactive journal on the subject of development, with emphasis on the cyclical nature of Southern California real estate "booms," or "bubbles."

In this complex visual/verbal survey, which is growing at subdivision rate, she asks how we view our landscape; how nostalgic and/or "marketing" images shape our conception of land and history; what contradictions are hidden when one perspective on development is privileged?

Through travel with ArtRole, a UK organization networking with artists in Kurdistan, Iraq, in 2008 she produced an experimental videotape exploring contemporary women's lives in that region.