About : standard furniture mission hills
Title : standard furniture mission hills
standard furniture mission hills
good evening, everybody. thank you so much for coming tonight. i am leslie umberger, the curator of folk and self-taught art here at the smithsonian american art museum. before we begin, please silence your cell phones and other electronic devices. i am going to start by introducing our four panelists. then, each of them will make a short presentation. after that, we will open the floor to questions. this event is being recorded and webcast so if you do have a question, please present it at one of the microphones located
at the center of either aisles. so that everybody can hear your questions very clearly. we really appreciate having your feedback about the event, or the museum experience in general. please consider filling out a comment card at the end of the program. tonight's discussion provides an opportunity to celebrate the renovation and re-installation of the galleries dedicated to self-taught art here at the smithsonian. also, to explore the way in which this work is viewed and considered in contemporary settings spanning the museum, the academy, and the commercial market.
our panel focuses on the delicate balance of integrating work made without any regard for the art world into that very world, while still acknowledging its important points of departure. these specialists tonight bring a variety of perspectives and experiences and i've asked each of them to discuss: how we may foster public appreciation for work that might be perceived as simple or unsophisticated but is much more often nuanced and complex,
and how we might reconcile exceptional artistic autonomy with art historical importance and connoisseurship. tom di maria has served as the director of creative growth art center since 2000. creative growth offers adults with developmental, mental, and physical disabilities a professional and peer based studio environment for artistic practice as well as artistic representation. tom is an award winning filmmaker who went to creative growth after serving as the assistance director for the berkeley art museum
and pacific film archive at uc berkeley. his background in the arts ceeded his conviction that artists should work with artists. his leadership transformed creative growth into an internationally recognized studio in which the foremost framework is art, not disability. katherine jentleson is the merrie and dan boone curator of folk and self-taught art at the high museum of art in atlanta. in 2014, katie was the the douglass foundation predoctoral fellow of american art here at saam. her duke university dissertation focused on the first
self-taught american artists to rise to prominence in the post war era, john kane, horace pippin, and grandma moses. she examined the ways in which the art world both welcomed and marginalized these artists and how both their presence and popular reception ultimately altered the course of american art. in her first year at the high, katie has organized green pastures in memory of thornton dial, senior, a cut above: wood sculpture form the gordon w. bailey collection, and forging connections: ronald lockett's alabama contemporaries. bernard l. herman is the george b. tindall distinguished professor of southern studies and chair in the
department of american studies at the university of north carolina, chapel hill. he is the curator of: fever within: the art of ronald lockett, which debuted at the american folk art museum in new york and which opens soon at the high. recent publications include: the exhibition catalog, fever within, thornton dial: thoughts on paper, and troublesome things in the borderlands of american art. bernie's academic background is in folklore and folk-life and his areas of expertise span art, food ways, and the archaeology of architecture.
philip march jones is the director of the andrew edlin gallery in new york. previously he was the director of the new york branch of the paris based christian berst art brut, and prior to that, he was the director of the atlanta based souls grown deep foundation which is dedicated to the preservation, documentation, and exhibition of african american vernacular art. in 2009, philip founded institute 193, a nonprofit contemporary art space and publisher based in lexington, kentucky whose mission is to collaborate with artists, writers, and musicians to document the cultural production of the modern south.
his work and writings have been published by vanderbilt university, dust-to-digital, and the jargon society. welcome panelists. tom we begin with you. - applause - thank you leslie, i'm really happy to be here representing creative growth. i used to live in washington a few years, so it's a nice homecoming. the city has changed since 1988. especially 14th street nest, where i used to live. there is a whole history of art that is
as complex and long as the history of human kind. contemporary artists often reference this history when they are making art. but there is a whole group of people who make work that doesn't reference art history. what do we think about what they are making, and how do we come to understand and appreciate the things that they are making? of course, one of the first things we want to do is just look at an object and decide what we think about it. what do we see? you may or may not know this work, but why would somebody make it? it's a simple question, but a fundamentally important question. i have never made anything that looks like this
maybe you have. but why is it done? is it shamanistic, does it have a spiritual meaning? what's our engagement with it? what does it mean to you visually? if it's interesting, then maybe there is a lot of questions to ask about it. let's see what one of the great art critics of our time, in my opinion, says about it. this is roberta smith writing about the work we have just seen. at the end of this review she is saying that "countering the impression" these are sort of exploding, three dimensional
paintings. "countering the impression that something has been hidden is the strong sense of something turned inside out, and the inescapable - i love this part - impression of a mind and personality at work creating instances of insistent aesthetic communication." i think that's kind of what we are talking about often in a self-taught arena, or for all artists. this insistent aesthetic communication. if you have that in your mind, and look at the work again, does that help? do you see it in a difference way? does it really matter?
in self-taught there is often this argument or this consideration of the artist's biography. how does the story lead the art? i believe the art should lead the story of course. but if this is compelling, then meeting the maker might be compelling and we might learn more about the context and the situation in which it was made. the artist who made this work, worked at creative growth. her name was judith scott, she is no longer alive. her biography is compelling if you are looking for a compelling biography in the field. her's is probably second to none. born a twin, down syndrome, deaf grows up with her sister.
the girls are separated at age six. she is institutionalized for forty years without langauge. left alone essentially in an institution. her sister has an epiphany, and finds her in ohio brings her from the institution to creative growth where she languages for two years before picking up objects and wrapping them in fiber and fabric. which started a 20 year obsessive sculpture making career. they reflect her concerns about not having personal property in an institution.
how she bound things and made them her own. two people tied together, two figures tied together, like the two twins reunited. her context, of course influenced the work. wow. when we see it in a different context, we see a canvas work cross over into contemporary. this is in the art brut museum in lausanne, which is not a contemporary space particularly. this is a contemporary space. this is her work in tokyo at the genza galleries, there.
it really takes a different way of perceiving. this is the current exhibition traveling of her work. it's a one woman show from the sackler center for feminist art at the brooklyn museum. it's been traveling for a year. it's now in toronto at the oakville gallery until the end of the year. where did judith make her work? she made it at creative growth art center. up until 1972, there is probably about a 150 year history of people in the field looking at patients in psychiatric hospitals making art,
art brut artists post wwii. who are these people making things that didn't go to art school, essentially? but in 1972, then governor ronald reagon suddenly de-institutionalizes a whole population of people in california with developmental disabilities to save money. what are they going to do? of course, artists lead the culture. artists in oakland got together, put some paint on a table in the garage in their home and invited the people from the institution in believing in the power of art as a transformative act.
this is when creative growth is already ten years old and it still looks like an institution. it was a radical act. people with disabilities were extremely marginalized. the idea that they could become artists was beyond the comprehension of most people. bought a building in 1982 where they used to fix cars that now looks like this. we now serve 162 artists in our studio making visual art every week. we have the only three, our community is advanced,
we have the only three artists with developmental disabilities purchased by the museum of modern art in new york for their permanent collection. we really try to advance our artists into the highest level as being seen as contemporary. our philosophy is very particular, in that, we are artists run. i went to art school, we have 28 staff. everybody went to art school. there is no other training. it's not therapeutic by definition, although something therapeutic happens by making the work. we have been there 45 years,
and some of our artists have come every day for 45 years. we have been there for 45 years and some of our artists have come there everyday for 45 years. this is how the staff works with the artists, helping enable them access to materials or with some of the technical processes, but the voice is their own. that's a complicated thing. how do you allow a person to achieve and become who they are without directing? of course, there is a million questions about how things unfold.
our gallery here is a portal in the same building to allow the public to come in and see the works and understand - break down barriers around disability - who are our people? when people say or ask, "do you direct the artists are creative growth? you must because some of them are really good." i can use an example of a new artists, monica valentine. who started in our program two or three years ago. monica has prosthetic eyes and has no vision. coming to creative growth, i probably would not have said,
"well, why don't we give her a box of pins and sharp objects and color beads and sequence and have her make optically charged sculptural objects by touch." but that's what monica has decided to do. now, she says she feels the color in her hands. that the color has different feelings and she senses that, and builds these patterns that way. i was giving a talk at the university of oregon two weeks ago, and an art student said, "oh, i didn't know that feeling color in your hands is a thing." i thought, "i don't think it is a thing, i think it's
her things, and i think it's a pretty great thing." this is monica's thing. it's about allowing the artist to find their way and not making assumptions about what they can or cannot do and learning from them. i think this looks, quite contemporary. another artist to leads the way is a creative growth artist named william scott. william is this great guy, because he wants to change the world and make the world a better place.
this is his self portrait as william scott, a tall and popular guy. in case you are not convinced, you can read on his tie that he is popular. so the painting will change his reality. it's a powerful idea that you can paint a new history for yourself, a new reality. he wants the world to be peaceful so bad that he has formed a partnership with the new black jesus. they are going to do it together. nothing is going to get in this guy's way. here william becomes billy the kid.
young, successful, athletic, on the lakers, no disability, the painting is a transformative tool. it's a very contemporary idea. sometimes i ask the question, "can a person with a developmental disability challenge me intellectually?" the answer is yes. william, for example, had an accident as a boy that scarred his body from a burn. tom i want the scar to be gone. i can't help you william it's bad. william paints the hospital the day before he went in
so that he could move back in time and unerase the accident. he is also a phenomenal painter. this is painted from memory. the brick count, and window count is correct. but he is moving back to the new san francisco, the new hospital the removal of a personal history. isn't that a fantastic idea, that you can paint away your past? in a stunning image finished two weeks ago, a kind of madonna and child, of william and his mother, in the 70's, happy, glowing, new, renewed, no disability.
she is not going to get old, they are going to be together forever. it's this touchy, utopian vision. contemporary, i think. last, i'm going to talk about dan miller, because dan is in the collection here and we are extremely excited about that. dan is a young man on, well he is my age, so he is a young man. dan is an old guy
who was born on the autistic spectrum and nonverbal. fifty five or so years ago, there wasn't so much known about early intervention and how we present artists, or how we deal with people with autism and how important early intervention is. his mother was a school teacher, so she had that idea. she'd sit with the kid every night spelling words, just thinking, "he is going to talk, he is going to talk." he did talk,
but twenty years later when he picked up a pen and a paintbrush. he made these drawings and images built upon words, one letter after the other. the words that were in his head for twenty years that he didn't have a path to move forward with until he had the paper in front of him. here you see the light bulb, which is a theme for him. it references life. he broke a light bulb when he was a boy and it scared him. we see light bulb, and one, two, three, four and number patterns that build.
blue, one of his favorite colors. dan sat in his uncle's hardware store on the weekends. so he loves these things. he kind of compulsively reads the grainger catalog, if you know what that is. he writes about the things in the hardware store. electric, circuit, router, switches, and i think somehow maybe the metaphorical for dan's issues around communication, "can i get the circuits right? how can i get this language out?"
he paints, and his work evolves. here you see an object - the page - and you see the word written - book and paper. as his work as grown, and his colors have changed, they have gotten larger, and more complex. i think he puts to rest the argument that some people make around artists with disabilities or some self-taught artists that they are kind of one trick ponies. they do one thing again and again, but they don't really evolve, because there is not an artist's statement or a progression.
dan does progress. these paintings are quite large now. like most evolving artists, his work has become increasingly abstract. recently he found an old typewriter at creative growth and sat down and typed the same words that he has been writing. making, in a modern, concrete fluxus poetry kind of style that he doesn't understand the reference to. how do we understand artists
whose work doesn't reflect art history, but whose work is making art history? by seeing them as contemporary. this is how dan works. we look at him helping us pick his work for a solo show in paris, for example. presenting his work at ricco/maresca in a really contemporary way because that's how we want his work to be seen.
the path to art is often the path to communication. when you are in the magnificent new galleries here you'll see this path to communication. the work is speaking to you. in many cases the work is yelling at you and if you open your ears, you'll see what the artist wants you to see. hello. the last time i was here, or supposed to be here, i went into labor. it's vary nice to be back under different circumstances and wonderful to be here to celebrate the awesome reinstallation
that leslie has done with the incredible self-taught work in this collection. i'm going to do something a little different than what tom has done and give you a kind of walk through time. a sense of how self-taught artists have been incorporated into museum programs really over the course of the past century. then, bring you up-to-date with where we are now. i'm also going to start with somebody that he mentioned, roberta smith. this awesome new york times art critic who is a great advocate for self-taught artists. several years ago, new york times art critic, roberta smith called on all curators to figure out how to integrate the outsider geniuses
or near geniuses into their programs. she criticized several major museums for keeping folk and academic art segregated in their recently rehung galleries of american art. which she felt remained monotonous and uninspired as a result. "the snow globe needs to be shaken" she wrote. "homogeneity dulls the eye and lulls the brain. it is the discrepancies that grab our attention and make us look more sharply and deeply." as if hearing smith's calls, some of the nations leading institutions have made notable room for self-taught artists in recent years. in fall of 2014, the metropolitan museum of art announced its acquisition of
57 works of southern vernacular art from the souls grown deep foundation, which will soon go on view in the breuer building. in the same year, the los angeles county museum of art celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with an exhibition of 50 recent gifts from gordon w. bailey, that included five works by sam doyle, joseph s. farmer, clementine hunter, and herbert singleton. it was the museum's first major acquisition of contemporary self-taught art. one of the most buzzed about incursions of self-taught artists in the mainstream in recent years was the appearance at the 2013 biennial of the italian american's self-taught artists, marino auriti's encyclopedic palace.
an epic architectural model that the artist designed in the post war period as an addition to the national mall. biennial curator and new museum director, massimiliano gioni encountered the work at the american folk art museum. he was so inspired by auiti's dream of universal all embracing knowledge that the palace became the center piece of the arsenale, which included the work of many self-taught artists, as well. of course, the market is responding with commercial galleries specialized in emerging and established contemporary artists
such as james fuentes and marianne boesky, bringing self-taught artists such as lonnie holley and thornton dial senior into their rosters. the outsider art fair expanded to paris, and christie's recently revived its sales dedicated to outsider art. establishing new record prices for artists such as william edmondson whose boxer brought nearly $800,000 last january. all of this activity contributes to the impression that we are living in the midst of unprecedented boundary breaking or in catchy newspaper headline speak, a moment when outsiders are becoming insiders. the reality, however, is that the american art world's love affair with self-taught artists began nearly a century ago
during a period when nationalism and populism governed the cultural zeitgeists on a manner not seen before or since. the first living self-taught artist to crash the gates of the mainstream artworld was john kane, a scottish american house painter who seen from the scottish highlands was exhibited in the 1927 edition of the carnegie international. causing a frenzy in the press on par with the fascination generated by gioni's inclusion of self-taught artists in venice. kane's work attracted support from many arbiters of modernism, including alfred bar and albert barnes. leading to an embrace of self-taught artists that flourished in the 1930's.
in 1937, for instance, visionary nashville sculptor, william edmondson, became the first african american artists to have a solo exhibition at moma. the painting of horace pippin, who turned to art making as a way to reabilitate an injury that he endured while he was fighting in world war one, made its debut at a local art annual in west chester, pennsylvania. the following year, pippin's paintings were included in moma's seminal survey of self-taught artists, masters of popular painting. an edmondson sculpture was sent to paris in the first major exhibition of american art to appear abroad in decades.
also organized by moma. moma moved away from self-taught artists after a poorly received show of morris hirshfield's work in 1943. but the 1940's witnessed the rise of grandma moses. hands down the most mainstream self-taught artist of all time. in addition to becoming a household name through her unforgettable mass media appearances, and the licensing of her imagery for greeting cards, fabrics, and other consumables, moses became a representative of american values abroad, as her work toured europe in the 1950's.
a lesser known weapon in the cultural arsenal that the united states government drew upon during the cold war. the following decade saw the founding of the museum of early american folk art, later renamed the american folk art museum. the first exhibition to explore a self-taught artists environment. a show dedicated to simon rodia, the creator of the watts towers in los angeles. the smithsonian also increased its engagement with self-taught artists in the 1960's. inviting the kentucky carver, edgar tolson, to the 1968 addition of the festival of american folk life and taking on james hampton's epic tinfoil covered altar which looks
better than ever in the galleries. if you haven't seen it yet, its really incredibly breathtaking. his work, throne of the third heaven of the nations general assembly was discovered after the artist died in 1965. when pieces of the throne traveled in 1971, the whitney was among the participating venues. reviving the support of self-taught artists that it had first demonstrated in the inter war period. just as john kane and horace pippin had appeared in whitney annuals in the 1930's and 40's, edgar tolson appeared in the 1973 biannual. the museum even dedicated solo exhibitions to joseph yoakum, the darling of the chicago imagists,
and minnie evans, a maker of exuberant drawings depicting a world before the biblical flood. at this time, the high museum of art, where i work, began collecting the work of self-taught artists. starting with illuminous landscapes and portraits of mattie lou o'kelley. in 1972 roger cardinal published a book that not only revived interest in jean dubuffet's art brut movement, but was also a water shed moment in that its title, outsider art, the anglophone translation of art brut preferred by cardinal's editor put that unshakable way of describing self-taught artists into circulation. a decade later, the field was changed again
when john beardsley and jane livingston curated black folk art in america 1930-1980, which opened at the corcoran in 1982 and traveled to six american cities thereafter. the exhibition launched the careers of living artists like wood carver ulysses davis, and revived interest in the work of deceased artists like bill traylor. whose drawings were acquired in bulk by both the high and the montgomery museum of fine arts in the same year. in the late 1980's and early 1990's shows dedicated to self-taught artists proliferated with artists like howard finster, sister gertrude morgan, thornton dial, and sam doyle receiving major solo exhibitions.
as the 20th century drew to a close, the first generation of path breaking collectors of contemporary self-taught artists individuals like chuck and jan rosenak, michael and julie hall, and bert hemphill began allocating their collections. as a result, by the end of the 20th century, in addition to museums dedicated to folk art in baltimore, chicago, san diego, santa fe, and new york, general museums like the high, the smithsonian american art museum,
and the milwaukee art museum counted hundreds of works by self-taught artists in their collections. these decades of exhibitions and acquisitions have laid the foundation for the moment that we are living in now, in which the inclusion of self-taught artists is part of a much large paradigm shift brought on by the post - post modernism, post structuralism, and post colonialism, primarily. now that these shift in thinking have allowed us to confront the artificial and biased nature of our cultural canons, allowing for revisions in many different directions, academicians and curators are finding that the question, is less whether we include self-taught artists, and more how we do it.
one approach is mainstream integration. the incorporation of self-taught artists into more generalized exhibitions of american and contemporary art. this inclusive approach is how self-taught artists first entered the museum world. thinking back to john kane's 1927 appearance at the carnegie international, or william edmondson's solo show at moma a decade later. but there are many recent examples to draw upon, a few of which i've listed here. the distinct approaches of these shows vary, but they all rest upon an assumption that the art is primary and the biography of the artists including his or her access to training, is secondary or even irrelevant. one of the many positive outcomes of this inclusive approach
is a vindication of democracy in the arts. the demonstration of a kind of equity and respect that has alluded many of these artists in their daily lives that can at least be realized in the utopian space of the art gallery. museums that have rich collections of self-taught art, like saam and the high and milwaukee also have the opportunity to cultivate the integrity of this field. advancing the understanding of the impact that self-taught artists have had for more than a century of the ways that they have not only complimented, but also challenged art world norms, generating the kinds of advances we associate with trained modernists. it may on the surface seem isolating,
but its long term effect will be to give self-taught artists their rightful claim in mainstream histories of american and 20th century art. leslie's installation and her collaboration with her colleagues here at saam are proof that inclusion and integrity are not mutually exclusive approaches to self-taught artists. it can be practiced simultaneously. william edmondson, for instance, appears twice in the museum. first in sculpture curator karen lemmey's exhibition on the direct carving moment and its many practitioners - trained and untrained. and again in the newly reinstalled folk and self-taught galleries
where edmondson's crucifix is juxtaposed with another emotionally charged meditation on christ's sacrifice by joe minter. who like edmondson, installed his sculpture in a tour de force outdoor installation on his property, and he is still working on it. it's easy to get bogged down on how self-taught artists are classified and what inevitably inadequate adjective we choose to describe them. whatever i do, i think back to something that alain locke wrote about african american artists in the late 1930's at a time when the first survey's of black art were taking the country by storm. he said, "art doesn't die of labels, but only of neglect. for nobody's art is nobody's business."
it reminds me that the main objective moving forward is to do everything that we can as curators to make this art and the histories it represents everybody's business. an effort that hinges upon a variety of approaches and not a single silver bullet. thanks. first, i'd like to thank leslie umberger for the invitation to be here, and then also to recognize bill arnet, laura bickford, and folks from the souls grown deep foundation who are here with us this evening. as well as all the good folks here at the smithsonian american art museum who have brought us together this evening.
i also want to be brief, because the elegance of leslie's installation awaits us. reflecting on the art of ronald lockett, lonnie holley describes his younger friend as a universal messenger. holley explained, "he had ideas and thoughts about material. he had ideas and thoughts about the rain, the mountains, the forces of nature and all these other things that affect the human way of living." holley summoned forth a remembered a remembered moment.
one day we went walking. he was asking me, "lonnie," he said, "i don't really know anything about art. i don't really know what they want from me or what they want me to do." i said, "ronald," i showed him a piece of tin on the ground and i showed him a piece of wire, and i said, "take those two pieces of material right there and consider them. tell me what they look like to you." then what i did, i put a stick in between the tin and the screen wire and ronald, when he got through with it, he had seen something kept
and put in captivity. holley continued, addressing the beauty and things discarded, deteriorated, discovered, repurposed linking lockett's art to thornton dial's and his own. that's the whole thing if you see these works that mr. dial did, ronald did, all the things that i've done, we are trying to reduce it down to the particle debris degree. we want them to see the particle, see that right there. holley offers us a great deal to ponder in his commentaries and his art. for example, yielding to the ancestors while controlling the hands of time, from 1992.
the significant part of this challenge resides in how we position art with words and in that gesture create a space for its reception. in the areas of outsider, self-taught, vernacular, folk, etc. art that space is invariably circumscribed by what we might think of as a connoisseurship of difference, or an authority on the margins. the point is this, those labels and frameworks place significant bodies of artistic production in the orbit
of a dominate art culture that articulates its authority through assignments of otherness without ever describing itself. that dominate art culture arguably requires no modifiers. it constitutes an art world untroubled by terms that speak to social, economic, educational, class, institutional, ethnic identities. how then might we position the art of hampton, martinez, harvey, holley, dial, lockett
butler, and others represented in the smithsonian american art museum collections? the answer resides at least in part in how we encounter the work of art and the knowledge that our encounters are intensely subjective, hugely varied, and yet somehow comprehended within systems of sense making. making sense is a good place to start. when i first encountered thornton dial's african jungle picture of 1989 some years ago, i was overwhelmed by the intensity of the mixed media painting. women's faces built up from the surface,
heads reeved with snakes, possibly coral, possibly copperhead, all suggestively venomous. vividly white teeth and grimace, agitated swirls of disembodied heads. this is the lyric instant. the moment when the work calls attention to itself, as a made thing, not as an image but as a powerfully affecting presence. even as the visual power of african jungle picture overwhelms the imagination
our minds turn inevitably to the necessity of making sense of wonder. of domesticating the wildness in the work of narrating meaning. this is the narrative drive, fundamental to being human. we are creatures driven by a need for making sense even if that sense is consigned to the realm of nonsense, or folk, or self-taught, or outsider. the tension between lyric instant and narrative purpose flows through dial's art. from the top of the line (steel) of 1992,
to the beginning of life in the yellow jungle in 2005. dial's art posses an astonishing capacity to draw us into the density and intensity of its forms. materials and what we might think of as its wildness, the space between lyric and narrative. the capacity to slip the moorings of narrative certainty, and yet never escape the assignment of meaning. dial's sculptures and works on paper for example, the movie star and the tiger need one another of 1992, likewise colonize that space between affect and exegesis. if we look at the idea of affect as the universe of feeling,
we quickly recognize that feeling is something that is communicated and understood between people in ways that contribute to communities of sensibility. rendering those communities visible requires explanatory narratives and this is precisely where the art of dial, holley, lockett, and jo minter troubles us. our institutional habits leads us to situate the work outside the mainstream and to invent consigning categories around constructions of folk, self-taught, naive, outsider, grass roots, and more. but we need to remember that the art is nonmainstream because we make it so. in our critical labor, we place the art in the service of a politics of cultural power
revealing far more about ourselves then about, for example, jo minter's the dreamer of 2005. the complexity and subtlety of mintor's creation reminds us that asking what something means is not the same as asking how something means. the former establishes a kind of intellectual ownership. meaning is a thing that can be possessed and grasped. the latter recognizes that meaning is processed. a well spring for conversation, negotiation, and fluidity.
it is situation and experience. as i move towards the end of this brief meditation i want to introduce two additional thoughts that speak to our charge of fostering an appreciation for these complex and highly personal works. environment and performance. the installation of jo mintor's the dreamer pedestaled and curated in the smithsonian galleries is far removed from its origins in an equally curated assemblage of works that surround his home in alabama. like dial's african jungle picture, the impact is visceral. one object flows into another,
addressing deep histories of the middle passage the historic battles for civil rights, and the continuing struggle for racial justice and equity. these are sculptures that document bloody sunday, in the 1960's and hurricane katrina in 2005. visitors can navigate the installation on their own or they can walk with mintor who narrates the aggregated work in his role as griot. in either encounter, the viewer engages the larger rhetorical relationships that flow between the individual pieces.
the museum cannot replicate that experience. neither can the gallery visitor know that environment is a particularly site specific and embodied form of narrative. what we can grasp, however is the way in which situation embeds and directs our narrative purpose. when i engage the art of lonnie holley, i am happily reminded of the intangible performative character of the made thing. holley speaks and sings to the things he crafts throughout the making process. he literally fills the objects with words that he decants in his presentation of the pieces to viewers.
his interpretive performances cohere around themes shared with mentor dial, lockett, and other makers in the birmingham bessemer circle and beyond. central to holley's work is the belief in the transient nature of the made thing and the enduring nature of narrative complexity in the lyric instant. this is the art, the struggle, the persistence of the universal messenger. thank you. good evening. my brief talk will deal with
the life and work of an artist named melvin way and is titled: scientific meanderings in a portable universe. melvin way invented the dell computer, founded educational institutions all over the northeastern united states, and wrote songs that were recorded and popularized by the supremes. he currently owns the empire state building, but uses the guggenheim museum as his personal bedroom. these enormously important intellectual and cultural accomplishments might explain the 6.2 million dollars he made last year.
but what would you expect from a man who graduated high school 14 times, ten times in south carolina, and 4 times in new york city and who also happens to be postmortal. some of melvin's stories don't quite add up and private details about a patients life can't be legally disclosed. so instead we rely on the artists shifting explanations of the past, separating reality from fiction to the best of our ability. despite some conflicting stories and timeline gaps, a few things about the artist's past are clear.
melvin way was born in ruffin, south carolina in 1954. he traveled back and forth between there, where he was raised by his mother, flossy way, one of the best names ever created, and brooklyn where he stayed with relatives. by all accounts, way was a talented student who was particularly interested in science and music, eventually attending the rca technical school in midtown, manhattan. in the early 1970's he joined a music group with friends composing funk ballets and playing gigs in the city. he also experimented with drugs.
to make ends meet he worked odd jobs including a stint as a machinist before developing schizophrenia in his early 20's. his life became infinitely more complicated in ways shuffled in and out of state run mental institutions, half way houses, drug rehabilitation centers, homeless shelters, and the occasional correctional facility. in 1989 way met andrew castrucci an artist and educator on wards island at a workshop run by hospital audiences incorporated or hhi.
at the time, melvin was living in the psychiatric ward of the kenner men's shelter. some of the patients came from rikers others from the prison next door. there were major crack in aids epidemic and a recent outbreak of tb was crippling the shelter. the staff often had to bribe the men, if they didn't take their meds they wouldn't get new sneakers. some chose to abandon the shelter all together and live in squatter encampments in the surrounding woods. the arts program included approximately 100 men, but castrucci took special interest in way's work.
castrucci describes meeting melvin in his art classes. he was extremely paranoid about his drawings. "i don't share them with anybody else." he did, however, share them with his teacher. in turn, this is an early drawing from 1989 which i was supposed to show you earlier. in turn, castrucci showed him da vinci's notebooks and way responded by copying da vinci's words and symbols backwards insisting on his ability to decode their true nature in that way. he also shared with him books on 19th and 20th century european and american art. way was particularly drawn to the colors of the post impressionists the term fauvism began showing up in his equations.
castrucci continued to bring way navigational charts, maps, medieval diagrams, and other texts of potential interest. the words, symbols, and forms inevitably worked themselves into way's drawings. i'm going to show you. these things are actually a little bit out of order here. this is the di vinci codex and these are the fauvist drawings. if you see here, there is the word, fauvism, that appears in the drawing.
way never directly participated in the art classes offered at the shelter, but was present. showing up and often emptying his pockets filled with secret messages. he wore a large rain coat and carried dozen of drawings in its pockets. castrucci says, "you can tell some of these drawings have been through a couple of rain storms, ink bleeding, but he kept adding more markings. i always felt that his work had to go through a sort of baptism before being released into the world. speaking to melvin was like talking to walt disney on lsd. he talked about barry white, isaac hayes, the future of things to come, russia buying back alaska, the size of texas,
chemical reactions, polynomials, quadratics, and other variables." melvin's milkyway was an outerspace communicator in a jetset omniverse. way has made perhaps a few thousand drawings over the course of his life, but many have been destroyed by the elements or worn thin by the constant shuffling back and forth among backpacks, wallets, pockets, drawers and other hiding places. visually, way's drawings look like copied textbook chemical formulas, but do not ultimately describe any particular substance known to man. there are, however, moments of scientific clarity, including the often repeated formula for the principle of uncertainty.
in quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle also known as heisenberg's principle is any of a variety of mathematical inequalities asserting a fundamental limit to the precising with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle such as "x" and "p" can be known. introduced in 1927 it states that the more precisely the position of a particle is determined the less precisely its momentum can be known and visa versa. in 1928, the formula and equality relating to the standard deviation of "x" and "p" was derived by
a man named herman way. no relation. occasionally implicit references to the artist's life and his struggles do show up in the works. i've chosen a few of particular interest. here you have chocolate city, which is i guess where we happen to be this evening. the x-men, one of his favorite comic book series. the forever lucrative formula for cocaine. most of melvin's visual language is chemical notation. elemental signatures, growth patterns,
life diagrams, anatomical renderings, and physics equations punctuated by a series of letters, dashes, dots, parentheses and other random grammatical signs. in a recent article about way, jerry stahl writes, "it doesn't matter to me if way is copying these formulas or grabbing them from his involuting memory, or even if they are mad. i will never understand what he is saying any better than i understand what all the tens of thousands of unknown microbes on the edge of my cup are in relation to me, or what their life-form may be." melvin, in turn, explains his work
"i am not drawing now, i'm doing remedial science work, medical science, medical society, i work on them for three weeks each because it's all about nutrition." way speaks like he draws. connections are made and quickly passed over in favor of new connections. the artists improvisational and scientific meanderings offer us the possibility of a parallel universe. where the basic rules that govern our world are displaced, erased, redrawn, reconfigured, and covered in tape. those new truths are stashed deep in the artists pockets or hidden away somewhere for safe keeping.
way's drawings are frequently referred to as cryptograms, but by definition, cryptograms can be solved. whereas way's drawings have no beginning, end, or decodable message. instead they speak to the infinite possibilities of both imagination and science. visually describing other realities and ways of seeing. the opposite of truth is not necessarily a lie, or error, but forgetfulness. indeed, in a newly released short film about the artists, melvin way says, "i live in a state of amnesia. i've been living in a state of amnesia for 35 years."
he further explains, "i was the first person to walk on the moon, jupiter, mars, pluto, i named those myself, since i am mr. universe. he occasionally signs his drawings as melvin milkyway way. they are now entering, much like the artist himself, into major private and museum collections, including, the smithsonian american art museum and the american folk art museum in new york. but regardless of any critical acclaim,
melvin way still travels with his drawings, digging into his pockets for them as others would dig for a cell phone. eager to record the next reaction or spark with his pen, on textured, sweaty, tape colored transcriptions of his highly personal highly portable universe. these drawings surely, if temporarily free the artists from his position on earth and give him peace in a life generally ruled by uncertainty and chaos. we are going to take just a minute to put some chairs out for our speakers and then we will
open it up for questions. okay, i think you can come on up, you guys. those were all really interesting presentations from, as i said, really different perspectives. these people know the artists they work with very well. this is a fantastic opportunity to ask them very specific questions about these artists. would anybody like to start us off? if not, i will start. okay, i will start.
oh, yes, ma'am go ahead. hi, i don't have a question about a specific artist, but i do have a question that some of your wonderful presentations brought to mind. i was thinking a lot about the concept of the market in relation to outsider art, which katherine johnson touched on. it made me think about how a lot of the contemporary art that's being made now is taking place in the digital sphere and i think that that's true of a lot of contemporary, self-taught, and outsider art.
an interesting thing about that, to me, is that it bypasses the market, or has the potential to bypass the market. it is in some ways, uncommodifiable. i'm wondering if any of you are doing any work around in particular memes as outsider or self-taught art, or if you have any thoughts about that possibility. about the possibility of digital work being done by? specifically memes. if any of you all are looking at or have any thought about the possibility of memes as self-taught or outsider art? it's a hyper contemporary question,
and it's okay if the answer is pass. i can return to my seat. well, i guess as the lone commercial gallery director, i can attempt to, but i don't really think that memes particularly enter into our particular field of study. i mean, the very few digital works that exist within this so-called field i think would be limited to things that people like lonnie holley have done
and others that i can think of. but they are few and far between and they are not really the kind of sarcastic, social, media driven things that i think of. i don't know fully what you mean by digital work, but we have a digital program both in terms of film and video animation, digital drawings and other sorts of work that our artists are doing. we have found that particularly young adults on the autistic spectrum respond better to screens and digital imagery than they do to traditional materials. that's an area that we are actually increasing engagement with our artists in
and it brings up just regular contemporary questions about how it presents, and if it sells or not. we are doing some digital out printing of some graphic digitally constructed drawings. they way that, i think, contemporary galleries are struggling, or not, with presentation and pricing. yes ma'am, do you want to go to the microphone? i really don't know how to word this. i've been teaching art to children for
several decades. i work with very fine children that have some processing issues. we were doing designs last spring, and this one student drew in pencil something very simple, it was symmetrical, it had some free form lines, but i walked by his seat and all of a sudden i couldn't move and i felt a whole moment of just pause, and felt this circle here. out of my twenty-five years of teaching,
i've never had this. that fact that you all are so progressive, how do we nurture this for certain children? the parents might have hope that the kid might go to college, and this and that, but the kid is very bright but he has some severe i don't know if it was severe, but some learning problems. as a teacher, i didn't know what to do, i called the mother, but i don't think she really got it. in my experience, the parents don't get it. in my experience the parents don't get it. as someone who went to art school, no ones parents were happy that they went to art school.
- no audio - it's really about a cultural shift in value and aesthetic and art in a way that's important. it's not just within the self-taught, it's within the field that's really important. but that moment of seeing the connectivity or creativity that moment is such a great visceral human experience. why we don't value it more in society, i don't know. we really just have to try to work within institutions of artists and different kinds of situations to really value our artists in their work.
i wanted to say that a lot of the artists whose work is featured in the galleries. people who were artists as children and their creative impulse was something that they nurtured their entire lives, but often didn't have the opportunity to really dedicate themselves to until later in life. it's really amazing when that impulse gets returned to you later in life. it's wonderful and can be nurtured throughout. it's great that we have teachers like you out there who recognize it and try to make that happen. but it's a happy thing, because for a lot of these artists it's something that they do go back to.
it stays with them for their entire lives. i have two questions, they are related. katie mentioned self-taught artists from the 20's, 30's, and 40's which were very popular at the time, but many of them are not known now. why is that? do you think the same thing will happen with the thornton dial's, the contemporaries, the well known artists from this time period? if so, or if not, why? is this working? it's interesting, because i think that part of what happened
after, basically a post war period. technical issues with audio. we also get in that same moment a lot of specialized institutions that come into being. some of that was in my talk. the museum of american folk art was founded in the early 60's. you have the collection of another really important self-taught art collector who had been on the board of moma give his collection to the fenimore art museum in cooperstown. the legacy of these artists gets primarily stewarded by these specialized institutions, which is great because
thanks to them we have decades of exhibitions and preservation efforts that have made it possible for the general interest museums to come in and pick up the torch. yeah, i think part of what happened in the post war period is you get a specialization of the field. artists like john kane or horace pippin who were once a part of contemporary art get sidelined into this self-taught category. i don't think it's going to happen in the same way with what we are experiencing now, with our recognition of incredible artists like thorton dial, because
he is already having an impact in so many museums all across the country. we are just too conscious of it now, of the fact that these artists as much as it's important that we continue to have these specialized institutions that are dedicated to stewarding their legacies, they are everywhere. i think a thread that kind of ran between everyone's talks is that we are living in a moment where these artists are being embraced. not just as self-taught, not just as outsider, or whatever you want to call them, but as great contemporary artists,
as great 20th century artists. i don't see the same thing happening that happened earlier in the century in our near future. actually, i can think of more recent examples of folks who lost currency. lee gore, eddie arning, both had these extraordinary moments. they have faded from a lot of the conversation. the question about mr. dial, or lonnie holley, or jo mintor i think is a very different kind of question.
in part is the way in which we position artists in these categories often in terms of isolates or solitary creators. what we are really seeing in light of the work of dial and others is something along the lines of a school or a circle. which is every bit as dynamic say as the abstract expressionists were in their day. are all the abstract expressionists held in equal esteem? no. but is the movement one that is transcendent and of continuing vitality and importance? absolutely. i feel very strongly that that is the kind of conversation that we are in now. i also had one more thought. part of why the moment we are living in now is different is that
the way that we define american art and our cultural canons is something that i was alluding to in my talk is something that has changed so tremendously since the 1980's. you look around this institution and the definition of american art that you see in its galleries, not just the folk and self-taught galleries, but throughout the entire institution is amazing. you really see representation of african american artists, you see representations of native american artists , you see representation of women artists. you wouldn't have seen that in the 20's and 30's in the moment that the self-taught artists were first being embraced. they, in a way, were ahead of their time when they came into the contemporary art picture in the 20's and 30's. institutions really had to catch up with that and start to broaden their perceptions of who can be an artists.
that's the moment that we are living in today, and we are not going to go back from that. carl, did you have a second question? that was it, ok. philip, i have a question for you about melvin way. his art is unconventional in so many ways, but it's incredibly visually compelling and complex. but it doesn't really offer many footholds for its audience. how do you think it's possible to develop an appreciation for his work, but also, how do you evaluate it and create standards for understanding what it's about, how to talk about it, and how to make people appreciate it?
that's more than a question. that's like seven. that's sort of my job, i think. a lot of that is sort of your job, too. the role of gallerists is maybe not as specific as i would like it to be. you end up being an advocate. you end up doing all these other kind of things. once you get the works into the institutions, and once they arrive here, then it's that whole business of assigning them into different categories and places and educational programming around it and all those kinds of things.
my experience with melvin's work was actually very personal. i'm not sure how you do that. my talk was obviously showering and bathing everybody in context which some people would probably not like and others would love. there is that debate of how much of the bio, and what to lead with, and what's really important, and can these objects live on their own, which of course they can, but neither can you divorce these objects from the way in which they were made, and by whom. somebody is sitting in a room. a lot of that is actually, way's work, people have tried to compare it to john cage
and other people who were doing visual notations. it just doesn't really, for me, make a lot of sense. you are really trying to make it into something it's not or relate it to something or of parallel visions. it's all there in way's work. there are those personal touches and there are things about pop culture and his personal life that that are readily available, but it's also not an easy work to immediately grasp. if you don't feel it, and you don't see it, and you don't read it i don't know, isn't that kind of the problem of art, right?
that kind of leads me into a question that i have for tom. in a 2015 new york times article by nathaniel rich he noted, that the curator and museum director, florence render "flatly rejects the direct connection between unusually biographies and inherently fascinating art." which i understand as an argument that the artists made valid work that we are not simply interested in some element of difference only. i think you agree with him on these specific points, and you also argue that a culture of disability informs the work.
can you explain the nuances of that? yes, i'm very interested in the culture of disability and how it informs the work, because i think that there is, i just see anecdotally, almost like a clinician, the artists with certain kinds of disabilities have a certain kind of aesthetic qualities in their work that i think are interesting to look at. if we look at some of the serial repetition of people on the autistic spectrum, some of the tactile, bundling, touching
kinds of components to people with down syndrome. the similarities that i see that cross through programs that we have worked with in japan and australia, and in american, and in ireland, and in morocco. you see people with similar kinds of disabilities working in similarly aesthetically interesting ways, i think there is a thread there that is a really compelling one. i think it's its own culture. i think we accept that certain cultural traditions bring an aesthetic forward.
i'm just interested in how this, if it is a cultural distinction with people of disabilities, how the thread runs through them universally as opposed to a within a cluster of a community or particular place. i've been working with some researchers at the university of california at san francisco about how the brain works. they are looking at what part of the brain actually triggers creativity. in some people with developmental disabilities there are some parts of the brain that are stronger and less and i think that there might be, the research on this field is still very new, but it might be that there are certain, just like monica valentine who can feel the color in her hands because she can't see,
that there are certain parts of the creative brain that come forward or are more pronounced with certain kinds of disabilities. i'm just curious to hear from the panel on how they define a folk artists or a self-taught artists? if the definition is something along the lines of somebody who lacks formal training and is disconnected from the art world, is it possible that a person that's a folk artists can then transcend that and cease becoming a folk artists once they get training, or get connected with the art world? i'm just interested in how useful this label is, and why a folk artists isn't just an artist? katie, you want to tackle that? sure.
you kind of mentioned what the basic common denominator among self-taught or folk artists is, which is that they didn't go to art school. but i do think that many of them transcend the notion that they are separated from art history in some way all throughout their careers. there are so many ways you can access art history not in art school. you can go to the library, you can see reproductions done on postcards, etc. etc. and there are tons of examples in the galleries right now. leslie has work by eddy mumma, who painted his work based on rembrandt and other kind of golden age, dutch republic painters of their depiction of burgers and this kind of thing. there are really plenty of examples of how self-taught artists do transcend that sense that they
have been isolated in some way. i don't think that it's important that we continue to call them self-taught artists exclusively, i think embracing them as american or contemporary artists is really where we are going. the fact that they didn't go to art school, that they developed their creative process in some way outside of a trained studio practice will come out at some point when you are exhibiting their work. it kind of goes to what phillip was saying just a second ago that you can try to present the whole art object and the whole body of work without making any reference to biography, but we enjoy the biographies of all artists.
whether they are trained or untrained, we like knowing where they went to school, where they are from, what kinds of issues interested them, all that sort of thing. eventually it does come out. with self-taught artists i don't think that we are ever going to really try to redact the fact that they have this idiosyncratic way of developing their ideas that didn't happen in art school. yeah, i'm going to disagree slightly here. the problem with framing it this way is this idea of school, which is essentially that of a formal learning institution. the work that i've done with a number of artists would lead me to the conclusion, in fact,
there are all sorts of schools that might not look like our understanding, our individual understanding, of what constitutes a school. the quilt makers of gee's bend have one of the most extraordinary sophisticated curricula in composition in making. i think of the way in which folks in the birmingham bessemer circle really exist in a long stream, a long continuum of creative practices that are learned, that are not autogenous in the sense of spring fully formed from the earth. i think part of this is around this question of what constitutes institutions.
we are in a moment where we are positioned to question the nauture of what those institutions are and to offer perhaps more generous, expansive, and inclusive frameworks. i would add though that part of the reason, why i wanted to go back in time and show you the way that self-taught artists have been an important part of the cultural landscape for so many years is to help us understand... there are self-taught artists all over the world, and all throughout time. obviously, but in america they have had this special resonance because of the way that the notion of being self-taught really resonates with our cultural values of being self made
americans. in the 1930's when they were really being embraced, this was a time when the american art world was searching still for a great american art, and looking for authenticity in art, and looking for what made american art, american, and not just derivative of european, generations of european art. self-taught artists became embraced in that time period because they seemed to represent this important, completely indigenous way of making art. of course, there is folk art in every country. this was the way that it was being framed and the way that it became seen as important in that moment.
the notion of being self-taught is something that i don't think is only something that we should just see as being a negative. something that makes you not an artists, but is something that had been culturally important in this country for so many years. okay, next question. yes, i'm a self-taught artist, and my works are in several of the museums, and i've got a sensitive question here. i grew up in the south and i grew up in a biracial family.
for example, in my family, i have a sister that's african american, and identifies as african american, and yet, i'm in the american folk art museum, i'm in the art brut museum in switzerland, and yet i've never been really recognized by the high museum. i've always felt uncomfortable about that. she just took her job. he threw down the gauntlet. i've only been there for a year, sir. give her a chance.
i grew up in rural in the rural south and also in the inner city. i know the american black experience, i've lived it in my family. now, i'm a cross over artists. i'm white, and i'm educated and i've traveled all over the world, but i've always felt uncomfortable about some of that dialogue. where do i fit in that? i grew up in poverty, and i lived on the streets. i was an outsider artists from 1986-1992
and i'm not longer an outsider artist. i'm somebody who has gone on and been fortunate i've been able to have a life. it just feels uncomfortable for me sometimes, some of that. my sister makes art. she is an outsider and she'll never really be recognized, i suppose, because she doesn't care about that. i just feel like the high art museum should broaden that conversation some. that's my opinion. thank you. i look forward to learning more about your art.
next comment, or question? hi, i'm a former student of bernie's. say, hi susan. hey susan. i would point out, it's partly due to him, i think it was probably 30 years ago that i sat in on one of the first classes bernie offered on folk art, when i was a graduate student. one of the things that struck me then, and has struck me ever since and it hasn't come up yet today, which is why i'm up here. it's the use of materials. specifically, i think especially in some of the environments, but in a lot of the art that we saw going by today
we are seeing a sort of re-purposing of everyday materials. that maybe a slight difference from artists that come through a more formal training and are brought up in the tradition of using specific art materials. i wonder if that's another convergence within outsider art? i also just have a thought if the 20th century has something to do with it in the sense of this post consumer society where we are at the point where we have all this stuff lying around that can be so easily repurposed. i just wondered if anyone had any comments on that. we certainly deal with artists at creative growth that are repurposing. judith scott, for example,
really collected, we say she appropriated objects, which means she stole them from everywhere and just bundled them into sculptures. it poses a question around conservatorship as well. i was talking to leslie about a large dan miller piece, and how our artists aren't pristine. it is often things collected and bundled from other sources, and i think with what i've seen from the creative growth artists is that there is an interest in in some of the artists, things that are discarded, things that are repurosed, things that are second generation, things that are remade. in many ways, those are metaphors for what they are doing and what their lives have been.
they see things and they don't have a quest for pristine materials because they don't necessarily have that tradition or those values that everything had to be clean and perfect. a lunch bucket and a piece of cardboard, and a piece of rubber hose is as interesting as something you get from an art store. i think it's just the whole range of how an artist approaches objects is in a self-taught field or particularly within artists with disabilities perhaps is just everything gets turned upside down. there is no right. yes? my question is about how you title or label this kind of art.
folk art, well, it isn't really folk in the usual sense of the word. we now have prisoners, we have mental patients creating this sort of art. then outsider art. outside of what? yes, art school for sure, but museums? no, not museums anymore. again, there is contact with art reproductions and art sources. to me some of the worst is self-taught art. i mean, an artist doesn't teach himself or herself. to me, that is maybe the worst title. i wondered if you had any
thoughts about this, how you describe this art, how you title it, etc.? i have a very straightforward answer to that. it's all art to me. i'm not being flip about this. you have to ask yourself, what do the cultural and political work that the terms do? typically, what they tend to do, as i mentioned in my remarks is offer a platform for a connoisseurship of difference, of otherness. then you have to ask yourself, why do you need to do that? it has a lot to do with the location of power. not just in art worlds, but in the larger worlds that we inhabit.
trying to bound these works with those kinds of socially conditioned labels is hugely problematic. it never describes the art, it only describes the people that use the labels. that dovetails a little bit with what the artists george widener brought up a few minutes ago. which is that sometimes the specifics are very nuanced and difficult and that they don't fit into an easy definition. that you could be presented in a variety of galleries in a variety of contexts depending on how the work was going to be spoken about. that gives it a lot of flexibility, but it also challenges the way museums
and viewers think about it. i don't think that's a bad thing, i think that's exciting and what we are here to talk about. i thank you for bringing it up. yes? well, the thinking was that we liked to both break out the galleries in very specified ways so that people can think differently and in depth about what that kind of material might be and how broad it might be. that is isn't this neat and tiddy category, but that it's actually quite complex and difficult. that means that almost any of it could be appropriate in a different place in the museum. in fact, there is a lot of work by self-taught artists throughout the museum.
we have grandma moses in the experience america galleries, as katie pointed out, william edmonson in direct carving and george as a living artist who is extremely interesting and really working with things that challenge people conceptually and are visually stimulating. we thought that that would be a wonderful place to put his work. you know, probe those questions about who goes where, and why? and to put it in a place where it was also stimulated by some of the work surrounding it, which had to do with also like his particular piece with texts and numbers and sort of a more conceptual context for it.
i think that concludes our program. we are greatly thrilled that everybody came tonight. i am really appreciative. thank you so much for coming. enjoy the rest of your weekend.