America’s great tradition of self-taught art is comprehensively documented at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City. The museum has played a key role in promoting appreciation for all untutored artists, particularly since the 1980s for African American painters, sculptors and craftsmen.
Currently on national tour is a selection of some of the museum’s treasures in “Ancestry and Innovation: African American Art from the American Folk Art Museum,” on view at the Gibbes Museum of Art through October 11. The wide-ranging exhibition of some 40 works in various media explores the artistic expressions of self-trained black artists from the rural South and the urban North. Interspersed with compelling, colorful quilts, the paintings and sculptures celebrate the continuing contributions of African Americans to the nation’s cultural and visual experience.
“Ancestry and Innovation” is organized by the American Folk Art Museum and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service.
Among the untutored black artists working in the Twentieth Century, the eternally charming, evocative work of Clementine Hunter (1887‱988) of Melrose Plantation, Natchitoches, La., stands out. In her long life, Hunter transformed the work and rituals of her small Louisiana community on the Cane River into concise, animated paintings.
A prolific artist, Hunter created several thousand works during a four-decade career at Melrose Plantation that started when she began laboring in the fields in her midteens. Along the way, she had seven children and excelled at making clothes, quilts and baskets. Promoted later to domestic helper in the Big House, Hunter benefited from the fact that the owners of the plantation were patrons of the arts and hosted numerous artists and writers, said to include Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck and Alexander Wolcott and silversmith William Spratling. Encouraged by several of these artists-in-residence, around 1940 Hunter began to produce memory paintings documenting the plantation experience. Using tubes of paint left behind by a visiting artist, she created her first painting on a discarded window shade.
Typically, her oils have a strip of brown or green at the base to suggest the ground, and a swath of blue, gray and white at the top, implying the sky. In between, Hunter placed figures engaged in everyday activities of the plantation.
Her playful sense of place, combined with vibrant color combinations and bold brushstrokes, bring to life such scenes as “Fishing,” circa 1968, and “Playing Cards,” circa 1970. By contrast, “Black Matriarch,” circa 1970s, is a strong, featureless, respectful homage to black women who played such central roles on plantations. Among other scenes of vanishing plantation life: picking cotton, gathering pecans, washing clothes, weddings, baptisms and funeral scenes. She often painted on cardboard boxes, jugs, bottles and gourds.
Although the painter was illiterate, she placed a sign outside her studio that read, “Clementine Hunter, Artist, 50 cents a look.” A number of her works remain on view at Melrose, some painted on inside walls of historic structures. Hunter became Louisiana’s most celebrated primitive artist, dubbed by some the “Southern (or black) Grandma Moses.”
After her death, her life and work became the subject of several books and numerous exhibitions. Her artwork, when it comes on the market, sells for handsome sums. Today, Melrose Plantation is on the National Register of Historic Places, and Hunter’s studio is included in the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Historic Homes and Studios program.
Another female star of the exhibition is Georgia’s Nellie Mae Rowe (1900‱982), whose spiritual-driven, vividly colored works have gained national and international acclaim. One of ten children of farm workers, she excelled early on in drawing and doll-making, but it was only after the death of her second husband in 1948 that she was able to devote time to making art.
Rowe used materials at hand: crayons, pens, marker pens, pencils, paper, cardboard, egg cartons and Styrofoam food trays, as well as recycled objects and African and Afro-Caribbean charms and protective signs.
Her highly detailed, vividly colored drawings include pictures of herself, friends, local personalities and barnyard animals. “Woman Warning Black Dog Not to Eat Too Many Mulberries” utilizes crayon and pencil on paper to delineate an enigmatic narrative that measures 19 by 24 inches. Rowe’s abiding religious faith and sense of humor imbue her work with integrity and wit.
Some of the most fascinating sculptures in the exhibition are by David Butler (1898‱997) of Louisiana. Inspired by his faith and his dreams, he crafted complex works out of painted metal and wood, often with plastic and wire.
Forced to retire at age 62 after working in local sawmills, Butler began creating artwork from flattened roofing tin. After painting the metal in vivid colors and adding found objects, such as a plastic ribbon bow, he would display his handiwork in his yard. As one can judge from works in the show, like “Heart and Arrow,” circa 1978‱982, and “Rooster,” circa 1982, his tin pieces were manipulated into idiosyncratic shapes and adorned with dazzling colors. Butler’s yard and house in Patterson, La., filled with painted metal cutouts fashioned into people, animals and icons from the artist’s imagination and life experiences, became a memorable place to visit.
One of the most striking sculptures exhibited is a multipurpose piece, “The Last Frontier,” circa 1988‱989, by Willie LeRoy Elliot (b 1943). Made of salvaged wood painted vivid blue, red, yellow and white, the central structure depicts a male figure with a snake around his neck. To enliven the piece, Elliot added plastic knives, rearview mirrors, broken glass, tiles, plastic, metal, masks and Popsicle sticks. The quirky assembled piece, measuring 53 by 60 by 28 inches, can serve as a love seat, side table and tray with primping mirror all at once.
Elliott, who lives in Alabama and Michigan, based the sculpture on a childhood memory of his grandfather protecting him by killing a potentially venomous snake. Elliot, who believes the snake was deadly, considers this a life-changing experience and turned it into a memorable work of art.
Like many other self-trained black artists, faith was linked to the work of the best-known folk sculptor on view, Bessie Harvey (1929‱994). Beginning her sculpting in the 1970s, when she was an impoverished, middle-aged single mother raising 11 children from two marriages, she rode her unusual gifts and the surge of interest in African American self-taught art toward the end of the Twentieth Century to recognition in the national art world.
One of 13 children born in Georgia and raised in poverty, Harvey was sustained by her mother’s strong Christian faith and her own ability to make “something out of nothing.” Close to nature, she talked to trees, birds and clouds, and eventually began transforming tree branches and roots into useful household items.
Dropping out of school in the fourth grade to help her family survive, she married at 14 and had three children before moving to Tennessee and divorcing. The true genesis of Harvey’s art came when her beloved mother died in 1974, and she took up making art as her way of grieving.
Her faith and art intertwined as she let her feelings come out through her work. She shared some of her objects with patients at the hospital where she worked on the housekeeping staff. Guided by visions, Harvey collected debris, especially wood with contours and patterns indicating the presence of spirit figures, and brought out its features with paint, wood putty, shells, hair and cloth. As she worked in her studio to bring out the embedded spirit, she talked to God and her sculptures.
Her process was almost exclusively additive; as she pointed out, “I don’t carve; they already shaped.” She usually applied a coat of black enamel paint, used wood putty to redefine preexisting facial features worn by nature, and attached additional objects with household glue or nails. Small pieces of wood served as limbs when needed. Shells, bits of glass and plastic, hair, jewelry and clothing were often added to unusual objects with an otherworldly appearance.
She worked indefatigably †at night to be alone and to avoid interruptions by curious visitors. “When the nerve hit me, I don’t want nobody to bother me, just let me do it,” Harvey declared. It is uncertain how many works she created during her 20-year career; likely more than a half-dozen pieces a day.
A display of her art in the early 1980s at the hospital where she worked increased Harvey’s visibility to critics and introduced her to a national audience.
Soon after, although suffering from ill health, she began to show in New York galleries, leading to critical acclaim and much-needed revenue. On the other hand, because Harvey was more concerned about having her work interact with people than about making a profit, opportunistic collectors drove off from her studio with truckloads of art for which they never paid.
These incidents led later to works on the theme of deception, such as “A Thousand Tongues Can Never Tell,” 1991‱993, in which a large, menacing figure wags a grotesque array of colorful, tentacle-like tongues. The black forked tongue at the center confirms the figure’s malign intent and echoes the bifurcated form of its spotted tail. Harvey talked of forgiveness for those who had exploited her, but this and related works suggest the full intensity of her pain.
For more than two decades, Thornton Dial Sr (b 1928) has created paintings, assemblages, works on paper and sculpture that have brought a significant level of critical recognition and success to someone who was not seeking them. Fully involved in the great issues of the day and admired in the art world, he expresses his insights into racism, social values and politics in hard-hitting, expressive work. His art, often humorous and reflective, is always challenging.
Born in Alabama, Dial dropped out of school in the fourth grade to go to work. During his 30-year stint as a jack-of-all-trades for the Pullman Standard Company, he welded railroad cars, good preparation for producing monumental assemblages and sculpture. He has always worked with his hands and made “things.” He and his wife reared five children, including Richard and Thornton Jr, who are artists and live in Bessemer, Ala.
By the time of his discovery in the 1980s, Dial was creating idiosyncratic sculptural objects. He also uses paints and pastels on canvas or artist papers, as in “The Man Rode Past His Barn To Another New Day,” 1994‱995. In this complex canvas, he applied oil and enamel with clothing, carpet, rope, wire and industrial sealing compound to achieve interesting results. Relatively late in life, Dial began to create his large, complex assemblages using found objects to respond to social and political events.
Recognized as among the greatest living self-taught artists, Dial is one of the few artists who can bridge the gap between untutored and trained artists. His art has won numerous awards, has been featured in many gallery exhibitions and is in the collections of prestigious museums around the country. Thornton Dial Sr’s art is as thoughtful, thought-provoking and timeless as the best of contemporary artists.
Quilts, which the American Folk Art Museum has promoted as important works of art, are well represented in “Ancestry and Innovation .” With the growing interest in relationships between African American-made quilts and African textile traditions and the enormous popularity of Gee’s Bend products, quilts are riding high these days.
Emanating primarily from Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi, the quilts in the current show resonate with the seven characteristics identified as relating to ancestral African traditions: bright colors, vertical stripes, large designs, asymmetry, improvisation, multiple patterning and symbolic forms. One dazzling example is “Star Quilt,” 1997, a kaleidoscope of colorful starbursts, asymmetrically composed. It was made by Alabama quiltmaker Nora McKeon Ezell (1917′007), who never bought new material to make quilts, believing that the use of scraps was an integral part of the art and heritage of quiltmaking.
Another gifted quiltmaker, Pecolia Warner (1901‱983), learned the art under her mother’s watchful eye in the Mississippi Delta. While living in New Orleans and Chicago for many years, she continued to create quilts. “Making quilts, that’s my calling,” she said. Returning to the South in 1968, she made such eye-appealing works as “Pig Pen Quilt,” 1982, a large assemblage of 16 brightly hued squares that commands attention.
By bringing together paintings and sculpture by past, present and future self-taught African American artists, teamed with appealing, vibrant quilts, “Ancestry and Innovation” reminds us of the singular contributions black artists have made and continue to make to America’s artistic and cultural heritage.
The Gibbes Museum is at 135 Meeting Street. For information, 843-722-2706 or www.gibbesmuseum.org .
