Detail View: University Art Galleries (UMassD):

Gifted Visions: African American Folk Art

January 27 - February 24, 1990

1990

University Art Gallery (UMass Dartmouth Galleries)

Sal Scalora

Presented in celebration of Black History Month, the Southeastern Massachusetts University Art Gallery brings the 'Gifted Visions: African American Folk Art' exhibit displaying works by Leroy Almon, Zebedee B. Armstrong, Steve Ashby, William Dawson, Walter Flax, Ralph Griffin, Bessie Harvey, Lonnie Holley, Inez Nathaniel-Walker, J.B. Murry, Royal Robertson, Mary T. Smith, Henry Speller, Jimmy Lee Suddath, Mose Tolliver, and Luster Willis.

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Luster Willis

American

1913 - 1990

Many African American artists have similar memories of school days in the rural South. Luster Willis recalled attending the Egypt Hill Elementary School near Crystal Springs, Mississippi. "The teacher would be talking and I'd be drawing. I mainly liked to draw flowers and outdoor things, and pictures of the other children. Teacher would catch me and fuss. . . . There was a lot of stuff that I wanted to learn in school but what they was teaching wasn't it."1 He quit school after the eighth grade. Later, he entered the military, travehng through France and Austria, where he saw "high" art for the first time. He returned home after three years abroad, became a barber for a while, and started a new life near Terry, Mississippi, with a wife and foster daughter. He continued making art, using whatever material was available to him, as long as it was free. He painted on fabric scraps, old pieces of embroidery, plywood, cardboard, and school tablets, and he made collages ("set-ins") from his own drawings. He once identified all the types of pigments he had employed, "watercolors, cheap little paints from the hardware store and the drugstore, some oil paint people give me that I didn't hke using, fingerpaint, shoe polish I used to use, and I reckon anything I could get my hands on." Many of Willis's first ideas for art came from visual media sources—commercial art that he found in print, newspaper comic strips, television, and billboards, and mass-produced reproductions of paintings. The act of mimicking the original allowed him to express differences from the views provided by the mass media. His earliest extant painting is such an act of transformation, in which the orange flowers cancel out the past life of the manufactured image, and at the same time assert the importance of the artist's touch. A collage (Merry Christmas 1960) depicts Willis and his wife in the style of a popular comic strip of the day, "Maggie and Jiggs." Willis's penchant for copying and tracing, seen in much of his early work, becomes a modus operandi later. In the early eighties, he started receiving numerous requests for certain of his subjects that had been reproduced in books and exhibition catalogs and seen by collectors. Bored with replicating his own drawings and paintings but needing to fill the orders for economic reasons, Willis developed the idea of Plexiglas templates from which he could trace his stock images. The two most frequently requested subjects were portraits—of the artist himself or of black luminaries—and This Is It. The Big One featuring a fish,which itself was probably originally traced from a photograph of a salmon. His Two Sides of Myself, a double-sided painting on Plexiglas in which he pictures himself in both serious and clownlike aspects, became the template for many later portraits, including Rev. Jesse Jackson. Willis was extremely sensitive to racial issues, particularly black-on-black prejudices, and he disguised his sly commentary as glitter-covered, cartoonlike paintings on poster board. In one such work, although he discusses the subject as a depression era encounter, he exposes an ongoing community malaise. The men pictured in the watercolor that Willis describes are both African Americans: I was sitting up one night, and I just pictured in my mind a story from the Bible. The one I had in mind was about Lazarus and the rich man. You know that Bible story was in my imagination when the panic was on back in '32. Lots of people were handicapped by not having enough food, not enough nothing. So later I made a painting to demonstrate what that Bible story really meant. I call it "The Rich and The Poor:" I did it a long time ago. . . . It shows a fellow that's been chained down. He wants something to eat and all he can get is a bone. There's also a rich man, one of them big money men, a man that has everything. Instead of having a bone in his mouth, he's smoking a cigar He's burning up his wealth and the poor man has nothing but a bone. The rich man has the power to give or to release, but he's not interested in the poor fellow down on his knees with nothing . . . all he can do is hold a bone in his mouth. He doesn't even have any meat, just a bone. The bone is rotten, it's not fit to be eaten, except by a fly. . . yet that's his way of life. He's like an animal because of lack of opportunity. He desires a better way of life, he desires something, but the rich man isn't much interested in giving anything up. He doesn't even have a smile on his face—all he's interested in is his big cigar.2 Willis repeated this theme in 1986 in Rich Man, Poor Man. The incisive characterization of the two men is clearly indicative of the artist's grounding in portraiture. Even if not actual portraits, these renditions draw on people the artist knew. His ability to capture a likeness with economy of line probably results from his experience as a carver of figurative wood canes. The spareness of his work, his reliance on line, and a notable appreciation of space are all characteristic of a sculptor's vision. In a work related to Rich Man, Poor Man, entitled Standing Together, a light-skinned, well-dressed woman looks disdainfully at a darker, simply dressed couple. But all are without shoes. Willis's message: We are the same. All of us need more than we have. We should stand together. In the ironic Tribal People, Willis dismisses the popular myth that groups so designated (Native Americans, Africans) are savage or uncivilized. The "tribal people" upon which the painting focuses form a loving and harmonious family, while a nearby group of "civilized" folk (not identified as, but intended to represent, members of the African American community) engage in a hostile skirmish. A rowboat separating the two groups is a reference to the slave ship that was the original link between them. Perhaps the last fully developed work by Willis (Death Man) deals with one of his favorite themes. The artist spent most of the last decade of his fife in a wheelchair, having suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. The subject of death was never far from his attention. "We all think about death," he noted. "We all going to die. I like to show it coming." In this late work, his Death Man, who strongly resembles Willis's earlier personifications of death as a mummy, a skeleton, or a zombie, walks out of an unspecified structure above which hovers a dark cloud. The figure wears a beret and is dressed like a mercenary soldier. Here, Willis seems to be recalling an image from the past and pressing it into service as a menacing subject for this painting. (It is likely that he observed the Paris Metro during his military service in Europe, and watching people emerge from a subterranean cavern must have impressed the young rural man.) Two pairs of people can be seen outside the building. One pair is fighting, the other caressing. Death, the mercenary soldier figure, turns to the left as he emerges, moving toward the combatants. "Make love, not war" is the message. The body of work produced by Luster Willis over his lifetime provides convincing evidence of the change that the freedom movement brought about in the lives of blacks in the South. Positive political and social advancements are obvious, but artistic advancements are equally real and consequential. Willis's work prior to the movement was more conventional: still lifes, portraits, esoteric cartoons. However, from the late sixties on, Willis made strong though subtle statements about racial inequality and the converse, the absurd prejudices among blacks against other blacks. Willis's subtlety was more a function of his sense of humor than of a fear of consequences. His work is in many ways the forerunner of the potent and bold social outcries of later artists such as Thornton Dial, Joe Light, Purvis Young, and Lonnie Holley.

http://soulsgrowndeep.org/artist/luster-willis

Mose Tolliver

American

ca. 1915 - October 30, 2006

Celebrated folk artist Mose Ernest Tolliver (ca. 1920-2006) was one of the most well-known and well-regarded artists to achieve fame in Alabama in what has come to be known as the genre of Outsider Art. His vibrant and colorful pieces often depicted fruits and vegetables, animals, and people and were always signed "Mose T" with a backward "s." His style fluctuated between the simplistic and pastoral to the abstract and erotic. His body of work is represented in galleries in Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and New York. The exact year of his birth is unknown, but Mose or Moses Tolliver was born in the Pike Road Community near Montgomery on July 4 around 1920. His parents, Ike and Laney Tolliver, were sharecroppers and had 12 children. He attended school through the third grade until he and his family moved to Macedonia, Pickens County. Eventually, his parents found that they could no longer afford the farming life and moved the family to Montgomery in the 1930s. Tolliver took on a number of odd jobs to help his family financially. He tended gardens, painted houses, and worked as a carpenter, plumber, and handyman. In the 1940s, he married Willie Mae Thomas, a native of Ramer and a childhood friend. The couple had 13 children in all, but only 11 survived to adulthood. He continued working odd jobs to support his family. Tolliver worked on and off for the Carlton McLendon family for 25 years. In the 1960s, he was injured in an accident at McLendon's Furniture Company, when a half-ton crate of marble fell on him. He was left unable to work and had to walk with crutches. Several sources cite Tolliver's accident as the impetus for his turn to art. Tolliver, however, claimed that he painted well before the accident. His initial works were made from tree roots, which he sculpted and painted. Later, he moved on to painting landscapes, a subject with which, as a former farmer and gardener, he was particularly familiar. The accident provided more time for him to devote to his art. Tolliver also saw paintings by McLendon's brother, Raymond, which convinced him he could do just as well. McLendon offered to pay for art lessons for Tolliver, but he declined, opting to find his now signature style on his own. Tolliver began selling his art in the 1960s. He hung his finished pieces in his front yard and sold them for a few dollars, believing that the art is done when someone buys it. His works often feature brightly colored watermelons and birds. His wife was also a frequent subject, and he painted a number of self-portraits, complete with crutches. Some of his more popular paintings were his Moose Lady pieces. The recurring Moose Lady figure is an erotic figure of a woman with spread legs, which is roughly based on an Egyptian piece that Tolliver saw in a discarded book. The picture featured a Ka, the Ancient Egyptian symbol for a soul, ascending from a body with elongated arms. Tolliver occasionally added a little of himself into his erotic paintings, sometimes attaching his own hair to them. Given his raw, self-taught style, Tolliver's paintings fall into what is known as the Outsider Art genre. He used house paint on cardboard, wood, metal, Masonite, and even furniture and frequently used bottle caps for mountings. He often used solid colors in his backgrounds and was partial to bright hues, such as red, yellow, and orange. He was particularly fond of purple. In 1981, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts mounted a one-man show of his work, but Tolliver did not rise to national prominence until the following year. His artwork was featured, along with the work of fellow Alabama Outsider artist Bill Traylor, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The show was titled "Black Folk Art in America: 1930-1980." Some art critics and historians believe that Traylor, who was discovered after his death in 1947 in Montgomery, was a significant influence on Tolliver. Tolliver's work has appeared at such renowned institutions as the American Folk Art Museum in New York, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. Tolliver and his artwork were the subjects of two books: Mose T from A to Z: The Folk Art of Mose Tolliver by Anton Haardt and Mose T's Slapout Family Album by Robert Ely, an English teacher, Montgomery native, and friend of Tolliver's, who wrote poems to accompany the paintings included in his book. Tolliver's work has also appeared in books on Outsider Art and African American art. Early in his career, Tolliver sold his paintings for a few dollars. Later, his prices depended on his mood. Today, Mose T paintings sell for thousands of dollars. By the 1980s, despite painting 10 pieces a day, Tolliver could not keep up with the demand for his work. He hired his daughter Annie Tolliver to duplicate his signature style and subjects and even to sign his name to the pictures. Later, she developed as an acclaimed artist in her own right. Tolliver also encouraged his other children to paint, and his sons Charlie and Jimmy began painting in the early 1990s. Tolliver died of pneumonia on Oct. 30, 2006, at Baptist Medical Center East in Montgomery. His wife, Willie Mae, preceded him in death in 1991.

http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-1544

Jimmy Lee Suddath

American

March 10, 1910 - September 2, 2007

Jimmy Lee Sudduth was born March 10, 1910 in Caines Ridge, Alabama. At the age of 97, he passed away, leaving a legacy of folk art behind him. His mother was a "medicine doctor" and Jimmy Lee loved to accompany her out to collect herbs, roots and berries for her "cures." He recalled painting on trees as early as three years of age. Jimmy Lee dug up mud from under a cane grinding and noticed that the mud adhered to the trees longer even through rainstorms. He had what he wanted. Jimmy Lee began mixing his mud with sugar and came up with a medium he calls "sweet mud." A few early paintings were colored with pigments of grass, berry juice, or plants, but he soon combined paint with the mud when his paintings became in demand. Today, Jimmy Lee is one of the most recognized southern folk artists. His art can be found in the Smithsonian National Museum of American Art, the American Museum of Folk Art in New York and in galleries around the world. Most recently, Jimmy Lee has been a major focus of the book, Souls Grown Deep, African American Vernacular Art of the South, Volume One.

http://www.jtfolkart.com/artist/jimmy-lee-sudduth/

Henry Speller

American

1900 - 1996

The twentieth century and Henry Speller were born six days apart. Speller grew up on a plantation in a tiny Mississippi Delta community he refers to as "Pannabun," near Rolling Fork, his birthplace. Because he cannot spell Pannabun and no one can find it on a map, it is omitted from Speller biographies. The area where Henry Speller grew up is on the map as "Panther Burn," a few miles from the Mississippi River, a few miles from Rolling Fork, Anguilla, Nitta Yuma, and Grace, and a long way from almost anywhere else. Speller was born to Rosie Edwards and Robert Speller, a man he saw only once. He was raised by his maternal grandmother Zannie, whom he called Mama, and her husband, Ike Simpson. Like almost everyone else there, the Simpsons were sharecroppers. The impulse to make things came early: "When I was a boy I thought about trains, and I'd take some bed rails and call it a track. Get me some wheels and put them on there, call it a section car. Put me some cross ties. I'd ride all around the house, make me some little buildings, call them the stations. Never could get them trains out of my head." Other images that would later appear in Speller's drawings were forming in his head: I used to put the telegram posts down, make the cups and find the wire, put it up. I worked on the river, too, over in Vicksburg, working on the levee. Tote sacks with sand in them, two hundred pounds, on your shoulders with two sticks. Loaded cotton bales. Stand out there in that cold water sometime up to your chin, thinking, "Don't want to drown." Then them boats come by, wheel rolling, music, ladies, things going on. It give you some ideas to think about, forget the other stuff. Henry Speller gives a reason for making drawings: "They just consolate me when I'm back here by myself." Speller draws sexual fantasies, of long-haired, big-breasted women. Such fantasies kept him sane and functioning when he stood in the Mississippi: and drawing them helped to "just consolate" him in the presence of the monotony and internal anger he had to deal with each day. Speller also describes his continuing fascination with the century's changing technology, especially as it relates to transportation. Speller has watched and recorded he development of boats, trains, motorcycles, automobiles, and airplanes. As a boy, Speller sensed that an education would help him get out of the Delta. He often thought about the possibility of migration to the North. He knew about Clarksdale, heard a lot about Memphis, even saw people leave for St. Louis and Chicago. But there was never enough time for school; sharecropping required long hours of work, and the classroom was too far away. He recalls, "The doctor came one time and said to my mama, 'That boy got a good head on him. Give him to me and I'll put him in school.' Mama say, 'I can't let you have my boy.' Doctor say, 'He learn to write he could make you some money.' Mama say, 'I can't stand for him to go off from me like that!'" So an opportunity for education, like a Delta train or a Mississippi riverboat, came into Speller's world, passed in front of him, and kept going while he stayed on the land. The depression came, and Speller worked on a small farm in Leland, a larger Delta town, growing cotton and corn. He had two children then, a boy and a girl, from two unsuccessful marriages, and he was caring for his grandmother, Zannie Simpson. The farm lay between Highway 61 and the Illinois Central Railroad tracks. Speller's son, William, recalls that the train ran right by the door every day carrying passengers, and also cotton, livestock, and coal to Memphis. Cars went down the road on the other side. Daddy would take an hour every day for lunch and sit on that porch watching. He drew what he saw go by. There was a man sold candy, would leave it with Daddy, and give him a commission for selling it to his friends. That's how Daddy got money to buy paper and pencils to do the drawing with. Speller finally tired of subsistence farming, left the Delta and settled in Memphis in 1939. "I didn't have no job at first," he says, "started as a junk man. Had a push wagon, go along the tracks, pick up coal that fall off the train, sell it for twenty cents a bucket. Wife Mary take in washing and ironing. I do the washing, she do the ironing." Later he worked as a landscaper and a garbage collector for the city, and as a janitor for a trucking company. Speller lived just a few minutes from Beale Street, where a statue of W.C. Handy looks down from a pedestal in the park. "Music always been in my head. I heard it, played it, sung it. Memphis got music. It regulates the way people do things." Speller regulated his own life with music and art. He often sat on his porch, slowly moving back and forth on a metal glider and playing his harmonica and his guitar, strumming, humming, and talking the blues. And drawing. His music and his drawings convey the same persistent, driving blues rhythm of a paddle wheel striking the water of the river, or a locomotive bumping along the straight long miles of crossties. It is the sound that Delta blues singer Sonny Boy Watson knew when he wrote, Rumble go the train, rumble go the train, Passing the field, passing the town, Passing the tall grass turning brown. Rumble go the train, rumble go the train, Just see her smoking through that piney land. Speller knows the life. He knows the leaving, the rambling, the search for something different, the desire for change, the frustration when it does not come. He feels, but never shows, the anger of separation and alienation. Standing in the water by the levee or cleaning up the city's office buildings, Speller's world was not his to enjoy, only to serve: "White people would always try me out when I was cleaning up their place. They leave money under the desk, and I'd give it to them and say, 'Here's that money you left' and they'd say, 'Why'd you give me that? Where you found it?' And I'd say, 'Where you left it!' I never wanted nothing that wasn't mine." Speller created inventive metaphors for the society which dangled before him more than it was willing to deliver. The women he draws are one such metaphor: fancy-dressed, snarling, threatening and certainly tempting. Exposed breasts and genitals form a grotesque mask. These women are usually white, and they are free. Speller's anger, though, is not directed at free white women, nor at any women; these women are merely graphic reminders of the freedom he cannot experience, of the gap between races and classes he cannot bridge. Speller adds ironic touches and comments. Nude women, for example, wear crucifixes and high-heeled shoes. To embellish the forbidden fruit simile, Speller refers to their breasts as "Christ apples." He gives the most lascivious women the simplest southern "white lady" names: Jean, Sally, Marie, Peggy. He occasionally portrays black women, but still unattainable ones: fancy dressed women of the streets; straight-haired "high yellows"; and educated woman in graduation attire. Still, William Speller says, Daddy was always easy going. He never let anything get to him. The only time he let himself loose was for music. Muddy Waters, he was also from Rolling Fork and he lived over in West Memphis, in Arkansas. So did Howlin' Wolf. Daddy would meet them on Saturday night down in Walls, Mississippi, and play with their bands. When Howlin' Wolf moved to Chicago so he could make more money, he wanted Daddy to go play with him, but it was too cold up there for Daddy. Henry Speller and Georgia Verges met in the early sixties, married in 1964, and had a marriage that both described as "just about perfect." She died in 1988. She had learned to draw as a child but became actively involved in her art only after being encouraged by her husband. It was an important element of their life together. Often, they engaged in playful yet serious competition, drawing the same subjects and comparing results. "I ain't near as good as Henry" was her assessment. "She done come to be a whole lot better than me" was his. Georgia Speller grew up the daughter of a blacksmith in Aberdeen, a town in northeastern Mississippi, and her art frequently retains memories of a happy childhood there. But she clearly enjoys herself most when creating outrageously erotic, orgiastic scenes--imaginary, she insists--which presumably go on around the clock (the sun and the moon often appear overhead at the same time). Women are never subservient in these tableaux. They may menace; they often dominate. Music is significant. She shows dancers who line up or join hands in a circle. Singers serenade. Guitar players provide rhythmic accompaniment. By her own reckoning, Georgia Speller experienced far less disappointment in life than did her husband. Yet she was as aware as Henry Speller of the social position in which they were both trapped, with no reasonable expectation of escape. With poignancy, but without self-pity, she describes her feelings in House Up On the Hill, Off of the Highway, which shows a fancy house, a well-dressed couple, and airplane. All of these were unapproachable for Georgia Speller--they were up on the hill, off of the highway, out of reach. Henry Speller remembers: "We sit on the porch in the summer drawing pictures and making music. I made me up a song once. Georgie had a round piece of wood, made a drum and beat on it. One night, her mama's spirit come to her, told her she'd be coming. She told me, 'Mama come to me in a dream. I won't be out here next summer." William Speller, her stepson, says that "Georgia accepted things, and she didn't see no need to complain because she could enjoy what she had. She didn't have too much, you know, but Daddy and her knew how to get by." Henry Speller's mind reaches back, and he speaks of a cold winter's day in the Delta: When I was long about eighteen, Ike Simpson--he raised me, he was married to my mama--he was working for a white man cutting some railings. White man was named Acey, tall man, wore pointed shoes, had a long old raincoat used to wear all the time. Man check on Ike, Ike told him he had the railings and told the man the number he cut. Man say, "How come you got that number; that ain't what I got." Ike says "'Cause I cut them and I counted them." and the white man got mad, went off and got a mob, got a gang of them off the river; come out to kill Ike, get him out of the way. A white man had a store and liked Ike. Mr. Paul Stratton, big fat man. Told his son to go warn Ike, get him out of there. Ike got in a car with Paul Stratton's son and they took him somewhere to a white widow lady's place and he stayed there. Saved his life but he couldn't come back where Mama was 'cause they would have killed him. They used to do that all the time. Run a man away from his wife and his crops. I didn't know where Ike was. I moved to Memphis a long time later, so I got somebody to write me a letter down to Clarksdale 'cause I knew Ike had a brother-in-law down there, and Ike had moved down to Missouri and had done married again and was farming up there. And his wife died, and his other wife, my mama, come up to Memphis, and I told her I had heard from Ike Simpson. But she couldn't get nobody to carry her up to Missouri, so she never got to see Ike no more. He found out I was in Memphis and he written me a letter and told me to come out to Missouri and get some meat. He was raising hogs. I couldn't get nobody to carry me up there. I decided I could make it my own self and started out, and couldn't read no signs and couldn't find nobody to tell me which way was Missouri except up the river, so I had to come back. Later, Ike went down to Clarksdale to stay with the man that married his sister. I went down there to see him, and he said, "Son, they ain't treating me right. I want to come up to Memphis and live with you and die with you." They didn't want him to move, but he say, "Yeah, I'm going with him. I raised that boy and I'm going!" So he come up to Memphis and lived with me and died with me, and my pastor buried him. Speller tells this story without a trace of anger. He then returns to his bedroom to sit and draw. On a sticky summer night in Memphis, Henry Speller, past his ninetieth birthday, asked some friends to take him "down to Beale Street for one last time." Though Speller lived only five minutes away from that famous gathering place, with its lively music, food and souvenirs, he had not seen it for twenty years. Once Beale Street became a tourist attraction, its distance from Speller's ghetto increased dramatically. When Henry Speller arrived at Beale Street this night, some blues musicians were performing in the park to a crowd of several hundred. Across the street Henry Speller sat down to eat some barbecue, and he cried. He missed the old life. He missed his wife, Georgia, who had died two years earlier. He missed music. He missed barbecue and French fries. After dinner Speller (who suffered from arthritis, diabetes, and who knows what else) walked across the street--"slowly shuffled" or "inched his way" describes it better--to get close to the band. People were friendly. Couples were dancing everywhere. The crowd, mostly black, acknowledged the old man as if he were a celebrity, though none of them knew who he was. Gradually, as the music entered Speller's pained feet, joints, soul, he started to move, to dance, very slowly. Clearly he had danced before. The crowd responded. One by one they stopped talking, stopped dancing, to watch this little old man. Speller continued his soliloquy for half an hour, and then he stopped. The crowd, which had circled around him like aficionados at a Spanish bull ring, gave him an ovation that could not have been more enthusiastic if the performer had been B. B. King or Elvis Presley. Speller cried again. "I'm done jiggling. Take me home now," he whispered to his friends. A few yards away stood a statue of W. C. Handy. It probably enjoyed the evening as much as anyone. William Christopher Handy was born in Florence, Alabama, in 1883. Music was his life. As a child he composed and performed with a harmonica (of course) and with a comb, a broom handle, a nail (struck on a dead horse's jawbone), and a jug. As a young man Handy traveled through the South earning a meager living as a musician with small bands. He developed a scholarly interest in the music of his own African American people, carefully listening to and documenting the sounds and words of the road. His mission was to legitimize the blues, understanding as he did its significance to African American cultural history, and the need to remove its stigma as the music of poverty and ignorance. He established a music publishing company in Memphis and was instrumental (as it were) in spreading interest in jazz and blues. Several of his own compositions, including "St. Louis Blues" and "Beale Street Blues," are classics of American music. Around the turn of the century, Handy explored the Mississippi Delta region. He was there in 1900. Henry Speller was born there in 1900. Handy, in describing the music of Delta blacks said, "Trains, steamboats, steam whistles, sledge hammers, fast women, mean bosses, stubborn mules—all become subjects for their songs. They accompany themselves on anything from which they can extract a musical sound or rhythmical effect, anything from a harmonica to a washboard." Henry Speller's guitar is his diary. It contains the memories, and allows them to be conjured forth. His drawings preserve them. They are illustrated musical compositions, improvisational but ordered, structured. The instruments are there, look for them. The wavy lines, droning harmonicas. Staccato drum beats, dot dot dot. The plunk of the banjo. The vibrating, resonating guitar strings, literally drawn in. Look for William Henry Roscoe Cummingjoe Is Ready, one of the most outrageous self-portraits out there. It tells you most of what you need to know.

http://soulsgrowndeep.org/artist/henry-speller

Mary T. Smith

American

1904 - 1994

Mary T. Smith was born in Brookhaven, Mississippi, and spent the majority of her life working as a tenant farmer and cook. In her thirties, after a brief marriage to a sharecropper named John Smith, she settled in Hazlehurst where she worked as a domestic servant. Around 1978, Mary Smith began to fill her one acre yard with painting and constructions bearing bright colored figures and animals on sheets of wood and tin. Her work is in permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the American Folk Art Museum.

http://www.christianberst.com/en/creator/smith.html

Royal Robertson

American

October 21, 1936 - July 5, 1997

Except for a few years spent traveling in the west, Royal Robertson lived his entire life in Louisiana . A former field hand and sign painter, Robertson said that he was "born drawing." In 1955, he married Adell Brent and fathered eleven children with her. When abandoned by Adell after twenty years of marriage, Robertson descended into an uneasy existence, scorned by his neighbors and overcome by misogynistic rage. Armed with magic markers, paints, colored pencils and ball point pens, Robertson immersed himself in creating a fantasy world depicted on poster board, responding to God's command that he condemn the evil ways of women. Each drawing is a window into the tormented world of the self-proclaimed "Prophet" Royal Robertson. Bible verses and religious references mix with futuristic visionary images in highly eccentric, provocative works chronicling his paranoia and unsettled mental state. His themes include images of aliens and spaceships, architectural drawings of dream houses and temples in futuristic cities, superhero figures, and portraits of Adelle and other Amazon women. Robertson embellishes the colorful drawings with rambling, ranting texts, sometimes in cartoon-like balloons, that leave no doubt about the judgment reserved for adulterous whores and unfaithful spouses. Many of these works include calendars chronicling agonizing memories of his unfaithful wife and their spoiled marriage in brief journal notations scribbled in each date's block. Robertson's preoccupation with numerology and biblical prophecies of earth's final days as found in the book of Revelation are also evident. Robertson created an extraordinary environment within his modest home in Baldwin, Louisiana. On the exterior, painted signs warned "whores" and "bastards" to stay away. The interior of his home was densely crowded with his drawings pinned to every available wall. In August 1992, the home was completely destroyed by Hurricane Andrew. With the help of two collectors who helped him file papers with the federal government, he recovered from his losses. In 1997, Royal Robertson died suddenly, just as he was finally reconciling his relationship with two of his children.

http://www.cargofolkart.com/Artist%20Pages/RobertsonR.htm

J.B. Murry

American

1908 - 1988

African American artist J.B. Murry was a brilliant colorist who wrote and drew obsessively, and his prolific output resembles a kind of vernacular version of illuminated manuscripts . Born in Sandersville, Georgia in 1908, having no formal education, J.B. Murry labored from childhood to the age of sixty-five as a tenant farmer in rural Glasock County, Georgia. Murry married Cleo Kitchens in 1929 and with her raised a family of eleven children. At the time of his death Murry had sixteen grandchildren, thirteen great grandchildren, and three great-great-grandchildren. In 1977 Murry, suffering from a hip problem, came under the medical care of Dr. William Rawlings, Jr., who took an interest in his patient's personal as well as physical well-being. Soon after becoming acquainted with Dr. Rawling's, whom Murry described as his "spiritual doctor," Murry had a vision in which he was charged with spreading the word of God through the creation of "spirit-script." After the vision, Murry produced and brought reams of "script" to Rawling's office. A deeply religious man, Murry avowed the arcane script that he produced while in a trance represented direct communication with God. A session of prayer always preceded Murry's deciphering the spirit script, which he accomplished by viewing the script through a glass of well water. Initially Murry produced the script on market receipts, bank calendars, or whatever material he had at hand. Eventually adding abstract linear figures representing human beings to the script, Murry produced stunning calligraphic drawings always concerned with good and evil, heaven and hell. Becoming increasingly interested in Murry's creations, Rawlings provided him with a small sum of money to purchase drawing supplies in 1979. From that time on Murry drew continuously with obsession zeal. The drawings were shown to artist Andy Nasisse, who considered them marvelous and made available to Murry a variety of drawing materials, including colored pencils, watercolors, pastels, and marking pens, In the ten years before his death from cancer Murry produced hundreds of abstract drawings, all imbued with a gentle and ethereal beauty.

http://foundationstart.org/artists/j-b-murry/

http://www.phylliskindgallery.com/self-taught/artbrut/jbm/

Inez Nathaniel-Walker

American

1911 - 1990

Inez Nathaniel Walker was born into poverty in Sumter, South Carolina. Early on in her life she was orphaned and became a young mother to four children. Her visionary talent was not born until her time spent in Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County, New York, where she served a sentence for a homicide conviction. Walker spent her free time in prison drawing on whatever paper she could find. A stack of her drawings was discovered by Elizabeth Bayley, an English at the facility, who subsequently showed them to Pat Parsons, an art dealer. With the help of Parsons, Walker had her first show upon her release from the correctional facility in 1974. Her work has since been represented in folk art books and museums around the world including the Smithsonian and the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland.

http://www.inezwalker.com/

http://www.art.org/2013/07/walker-inez-nathaniel/

Lonnie Holley

American

February 10, 1950 -

Lonnie Holley was born the seventh of twenty-seven children in Birmingham, Alabama. He was moved around from foster home to foster home, until he ran away to Louisiana when he was fourteen. He drifted around the South working as a short-order cook in Louisiana, Florida and Alabama. Eventually Holley settled in Birmingham where he lives today with five of his fifteen children (and a grandchild.) When his sister's two children died in a house fire in 1979, Holley became so depressed that he almost committed suicide. In the weeks that followed, he decided to do something constructive with his grief. As the family could not afford to buy tombstones for the children, he decided to make them himself. "I asked God to give me something so that I may go to the top in life, and he did. I use the setting sun, the stars, the hills--all that has affected my imagination and what I put in my work. The Tombstones were Holley's first works of art. He soon began to create an environment of found materials that he assembled in his yard. Eventually he took some of his carvings to the director of the Birmingham Museum of Art. who was so impressed that he contacted the Smithsonian. This resulted in Holly's work being included in the exhibition, "More Than Land and Sky: Art From Appalachia," which originated in 1981 at the Museum of American Art in Washington. Holley's work is in the permanent collection of the Birmingham Museum of Art after first being exhibited there in 1980. For the first few years, Holley worked almost exclusively with industrial-made sandstone. He then began to work with other found materials such as discarded wire, scrap materials, and wooden objects. In what is considered a natural progression of his work, Holley eventually began to paint. In his conceptualization of human and animal forms and his strong emphasis on the spiritual world and his ancestral heritage, Holley gives us a glimpse of West African, Egyptian and Pre-Columbian influences. Yet his more abstract, geometric forms relate to the works of other Twentieth Century artists such as Arp, Lipchitzs, Moore, and Picasso. Holley has emerged from the depths of personal despair to be regarded as a major national artistic force in our day. --G.H. Vander Elst (Interview Summer 1989)

http://www.marciaweberartobjects.com/holley.html

Bessie Harvey

American

October 11, 1929 - 1994

Bessie Harvey was born in 1929 in Dallas Georgia and died in 1994 in Alcoa, Tennessee. She was a folk sculptor who created powerful, sometimes grotesque figures from tree branches and roots. She once said that her clay pieces and masks portrayed souls. Her paintings depicted faces of the tormented to African kings and queens. Bessie had a vision, a gift. She could close her eyes and see things others couldn't. Bessie achieved star status with collectors for her powerful and mysterious works. Some scholars in the field of black studies believe that her style had African and/or voodoo origins. Bessie was the first self taught artist to be included in the Biennial of the Whitney Museum in New York since Edgar Tolson was selected for the show in 1973. And her work has been included in just about every African American show since 1990. Since her death collectors are in search of her work.

http://www.blountweb.com/Expression2/harvey/harvey_bessie.htm

Ralph Griffin

American

1925 - 1999

In 1925, Ralph Griffin was born in Girard, Georgia. With his wife, Loretta, he settled in the rural community of Girard and raised six children. He worked as a janitor and at a variety of other jobs. Griffin said, "The boll weevils did all the work," on his family's cotton farm and that he went "bankrupt" because of them. So he quit farming when he was thirty and started to travel, taking construction jobs. "I had to work to bring up the kids," he explains, "But I ended up right back in Girard, Georgia, as a janitor for Murray Biscuit Company." Griffin worked at that company for twenty-three years. In the late 1970's he began scavenging roots and weathered tree trunks and using black, white or red paint to turn them into sculpture like creatures. When he retired in 1989, he said he intended to," get me Social Security and work full time on art." His work is in the permanent collections of many museums including the Birmingham Museum of Art and the Rockford Art Museum. Ralph passed away in 1992.

http://www.orangehillart.com/ArtistInfo.asp?ArtistID=1126

Walter Flax

American

1896 - 1982

A patriot and a visionary artist, Captain Walter Flax built his very own fleet of ships. He lived in the midst of his fleet, forever sailing at sea. For more than 50 years, Captain Flax toiled away, creating many vessels; those who knew him say he could commonly be found building and humming a patriotic tune or singing a favorite church hymn. Walter Flax was born to African American parents in Philadelphia in 1896. When he was young, his family moved to Newport News, Virginia. Drawn to the water, Flax rode his bicycle to the Norfolk and new port News docks to watch the ships. He always longed to be a sailor but was denied entrance into the U.S. Navy, which fueled his obsession with ships and all things nautical. Flax worked as a handyman, which gave him a small income – all he needed for a life with few possessions. He routinely visited the docks to collect discarded parts, scrap metal, and wood. However, the recycled parts he used for his art were not limited to those from other ships; he also used household items, such as toaster ovens, kitchen tools, clocks, ashtrays, and flashlights. Flax built ships from nearly any kind of material he had, eventually filling the land surrounding his home with a fleet of about 50 ships through some sources cite that there were as many as 100 ships at one point. The vessels included steamers, tugboats, battleships, and submarines. He started by constructing miniature versions of the U.S. Navy fleet, which he floated in an old refrigerator behind his modest home. Once the tiny ocean was full of seafaring vessels, he got the notion to create the sea crafts on a much larger scales, some of them as long as 25 feet. He lived simply in a one-room dwelling located along a Virginia highway. It was completely camouflaged by trees and bushes. Just past the thick woods, his magnificent fleet was seemingly afloat on the dry land, the result of more than 50 years of construction. After many years, the small city of Yorktown learned about his special fleet, and he became known as Captain Flax. Eventually, the U.S. Navy heard about Flax's accomplishment and patriotic dedication to his country and to the navy. A local U.S. Navy captain honored him by inviting Captain Flax aboard his ship for a real cruise on the open water. After Captain Flax died, the ships remained intact, but over time, they were engulfed by the Virginia woods. Only one of Captain Walter Flax's ships exist today, which is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution's National American Art Museum in Washington D.C. It is uncertain how Captain Flax would have felt about the museum preserving his ship, because his primary concern was with the construction process, and he had a little regard for the final product or the safeguarding of it. Despite his passion for warships and the water, Captain Walter Flax only experienced one day at sea courtesy of the U.S. Navy.

http://books.google.com/books?id=UxIDyRGcMjsC&pg=PA188&lpg=PA188&dq=walter+flax+folk+artist&source=bl&ots=BCyietbXVz&sig=4bp1lBALiil60XtKSmmO4p-4PTE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=h2CCUoqeEtOvsATRooHYBA&ved=0CCkQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=walter%20flax%20folk%20artist&f=true

William Dawson

American

1901 - 1990

Born in 1901 in Huntsville, Alabama, William Dawson was raised on his grandfather's horse farm. In 1923, he moved to Chicago and made a thirty-five-year career as a well-regarded manager of operations at the E. E Aron Company, a wholesale produce distributor located on South Water Market. A man of the city with rural roots, Dawson turned to artmaking in his retirement years, taking adult education classes in ceramics and metalwork at a senior center, before gravitating to wood carving and painting. "I just see something lying in the street and I know it could be turned into something…I don't know what I'm going to do when I pick up a piece of wood, but the longer I look at it, it comes to me." Dawson thrived on the praise his work began to receive. To his astonishment, an exhibition of fifty works at the nearby Lincoln Park Library in 1972 sold out, bringing admiration and increasing visits from local collectors. These relationships developed into lifelong friendships with Susann Craig, Bert Hemphill, Marjorie and Harvey Freed, Chicago Imagist Roger Brown, and gallery owner Phyllis Kind, among others. According to Dawson, "It was the people liking my work that gave me the spirit to do more." His sculptural subjects range widely from the Bible, current events, television characters, folk tales, as well as a vast menagerie of animals—carved and painted, highly varnished, and sometimes adorned with glitter. Perhaps his most well-known works are the totems, carved from single pieces of wood, featuring frontal faces with his trademark wide, round eyes. "It's something that's revealed to me," he explained. "That's the way it is with my work. Like a lot of them artists try to copy things or take pictures. That I can't do. I sit down and it just come to me. Some things I make is from memory. Some are things that you never seen. Sometimes as I'm working, things change. I start with one idea, then wind up making something entirely different than I intended." The work of William Dawson became internationally renowned as part of the 1982 travelling exhibition "Black Folk Art in America 1930-1980," first presented at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC. Dawson became famous for taking First Lady Nancy Reagan's arm at the show's opening reception and personally leading her through the exhibition. He had certainly transformed himself dramatically over the course of his life: from rural farm kid with barely a grade-school education to successful urban produce manager; and then from aging blue-collar retiree to world-class self-taught artist.

http://foundationstart.org/artists/william-dawson/

Steve Ashby

American

1904 - 1980

Born in Delaplane, Virginia, he lived his entire life in that area of Fauquier County near Washington D.C. His work reflected none of the sophistication of the area. He was a rural folk sculptor whose day-jobs were that of farm hand, hotel waiter and gardener. He began carving seriously after the death of his wife in 1962. He did small figures from saw-cut plywood that are painted and embellished with found objects. He also did almost life-size humans and animals, carved from tree trunks. Some of his work is pornographic in anatomic detail, revealing his fondness for "girlie literature."

http://www.askart.com/AskART/artists/biography.aspx?artist=110106

Zebedee B. Armstrong

American

October 11, 1911 - 1993

Z.B. Armstrong was born in Thomson, Georgia. He went to school until eighth grade. He married in 1929 and had two daughters. For much of his life, he worked picking cotton on the local Mack McCormick farm. After his wife died in 1969, he began to work at the Thomson Box Factory, staying there until 1982. In 1972, he claimed to be visited by an angel who warned him that the end of world was coming soon. Armstrong began to construct various "doomsday calendar" calculating machines that would attempt to determine the exact date of the end of the world. Many of the calendars are made of wood and have clocklike designs with hands used to calculate dates.

http://www.art.org/2011/07/armstrong-zebedee-b-%E2%80%9Cz-b-%E2%80%9D/

Leory Almon

American

1938 - 1997

Leroy Almon spent most of his life in Tallapoosa, Georgia, where he was born and died. A nondenominational evangelical preacher, Almon began carving his inspirational interpretations of spiritual and contemporary secular themes during an apprenticeship with Elijah Pierce, a well-known African American lay minister and wood carver in Columbus, Ohio. Almon met Pierce when he moved briefly to Ohio to take a job with Coca-Cola. First collaborating and then making his own works of art, Almon returned to Tallapoosa for another job. Like his mentor Pierce, Almon has become famous for his painted bas-relief depictions of African American life and religious imagery.

http://www.art.org/2012/03/almon-sr-leroy/

11/12/13

jtrinh