Month: December 2022

Untrained and subject to the dual, almost insurmountable, constraints of economics and Jim Crow, the artists on display in “Of Another Canon: African American Outsider Art” at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center possessed a creative fire. Despite cruelly stacked odds, Mozell S. Benson, Rudolph Bostic, Bessie Harvey, Anderson Johnson, Mary Proctor, Bernice Sims, Jimmy Lee Sudduth, Annie Mural Tolliver, Mose Ernest Tolliver (aka Mose T), and Ruby Williams persevered in their art, creating work that brims with raw authenticity, joy, and passion.

With the show’s title, the curators place the work, from the collection of Richard and Ellie Wilson, in its own alternate, yet equally valid canon to that of Western art history. They also raise questions about the term “outsider art.”

While it’s a generally accepted way to refer to art made by self-taught artists who operate outside the traditional art world, in this case, the work speaks not just to the individual artist’s experience, but to similar experiences shared by a large group of people. It was a 1982 exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery, “Black Folk Art in America, 1930–1980,” that played a significant role in elevating the art of self-taught African American artists and creating a market for their work. Nearly all the artists represented in this show are now featured in major museum collections. Mose T is widely known, and Williams, who sold her paintings off the back of a truck along with her produce, was the subject of an extensive New York Times obituary in August of this year. With this recognition, I wonder if the artists benefited in any substantial way from their artwork. It’s likely they did not, but it gives me hope that other, similar artists coming up behind them will.

Entering the gallery space, the eye is immediately snagged by Williams’ electric “Piano Playing Cow I Give Better Buttermilk.” I’m betting Picasso, who reputedly once said, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child,” would envy this odd-footed orange bovine sporting black and white keys running along its back and a toothy, mask-like face. Nearly as riveting, “Ms Bonnie Bon Bonnie with Purse” is a simple composition made exceptional by her weird and wonderful hands.

Mose T, Sudduth, and Johnson share a similar approach. For the most part, they rely on vibrant color and bold shapes to render figures against flat expanses of pigment or just plain plywood—as in the case of “Self-Portrait with Willie Mae.” T’s sophisticated sense of color and composition is laid bare in this painting and in his “Portrait of a Woman with Baby.”  A similar sensibility is echoed in the work of Sudduth, who used a combination of house paint and mud from his yard to create his jaunty self-portrait, and his likeness of a girl sporting a stylish hat and holding a violin. Annie Mural Tolliver (T’s daughter) and Sims take this approach and expand it into spiritual and narrative directions. Tolliver’s stylized “Garden of Eden” employs a dramatic palette and striking arrangement of forms, while Sims’ “Edmund Pettus Bridge,” painted from memory (as was all her work) with childlike simplicity, is made more powerful knowing the artist was an eyewitness to the seminal event.

Harvey’s “Garden of Eden,” the only sculpture in the show, is made from a tree root. The label describes how root sculpting plays an important role in African American vernacular art. Here, Harvey daubs paint across the surface, and uses the longest root for her serpent. It seems to veer like a malevolent tube man toward the viewer. Harvey takes advantage of a knob in the wood to form the nose, adding stuffed animal eyes surrounded by painted lashes, a row of pearls for teeth, and a jaunty orange earring. This almost human face is creepy, thanks largely to the teeth, with a totemic quality that suggests a spiritual purpose.

Bostic’s “Egyptian Scene” and “Garden of Eden” take us even further into visionary territory. The first, a tondo painted on the cover of a flour container (Bostic worked at a baking company), is studded with Egyptian iconography that identifies the reclining figure as a dying pharaoh. Bostic mixes his colors to add volume and highlights, and to produce a range of hues that tend toward the richer jewel tones. Indeed, the works, with figures outlined in a Sharpie, resemble stained glass. The second painting, on a rectangular piece of cardboard, features an ornate composition, chockablock with the wonderfully rendered animal and human cast of the Judeo-Christian origin story. Bostic tops it off effectively by creating a trompe-l’oeil gilded frame with yellow squiggles on a black border.

Other artists also used materials that were at hand and free—odd bits of plywood, leftover house paint, a tree root, or worn-out clothes. Though employed out of necessity, these humble materials have a grittiness that add both visual and emotional weight to the work. In addition to information about the works, the accompanying labels also provide brief accounts of the artists’ lives. They were universally challenging, rife with enormous obstacles. And yet, from these terrible circumstances art was produced—a vital outlet for the artists and a record of their existence. It’s an extraordinary testament to the creative drive and to the resiliency of the human spirit.

The exhibition “Power Play: Reimagining Representation in Contemporary Photography” at UVA’s Fralin Museum of Art brings together the work of multiple female artists as they deconstruct and condemn classic presentations of feminine identities in popular culture. 

From the first moment that museum-goers enter the exhibition curated by Hannah Cattarin, Adriana Greci Green, and Laura Minton, they are assailed by a motley of bright colors coming from the photographs, and the introductory text at the center of the display. 

“For us, the works and the artists are what’s really at the forefront of the show,” says Minton. “….the concepts are also conversing with each other—because each artist is engaging with these concepts—but in a totally different way from each other. There’s overlap, but at the same time, they’re all doing something that is very unique, and that’s one of the really cool things about this show.”

In the work of British artist Sarah Maple, the artist centers herself in classic Disney princess costumes, presenting these iconic female figures in contemporary leadership roles—Snow White as a football coach, Sleeping Beauty as a surgeon, Ariel as a CEO. Through this series, she criticizes the relegation of women to the domestic sphere, and combats patriarchal definitions of femininity. 

The adjoining wall features innovative Atlanta-based artist Tokie Rome-Taylor. Her photographs spotlight young Black children dressed in rich fabrics, and sporting assortments of pearls and other accessories denoting extreme wealth. The photographs feel reminiscent of Renaissance paintings of wealthy European women from prominent families, while also incorporating elements of African diasporic material culture, as seen through her 2022 piece “Promising Sight.” Rome-Taylor thus combats the lack of African American representation in art history—she gives Black people, particularly Black women, a vision of a past that is not defined by subjugation. By reclaiming the past of Black femininity in this way, she also subverts the common reductive representations of Black women that appear in the media landscape. 

As a member of the Chemehuevi Indian tribe, Cara Romero works to deconstruct stereotypes of Native women in her photographs. Indeed, her pieces all feature a Native woman at the center, surrounded by an assortment of cultural items. Significant colorful patterns frame the photographs, further evoking the packaging in which children’s toys are sold. Her 2019 piece “Amber Morningstar” catches the onlooker’s attention with its vivid blue backdrop and red framing adorned with intriguing Native American symbols, the model at the center dressed in traditional clothing—a commentary on the commodification of Native femininity in popular culture. 

American artist Martine Gutierrez’s diverse work deconstructs classic representations of femininity as seen in magazines and dolls. In her 2014 piece “Line Up 4,” Gutierrez stands motionless among a group of mannequins—she is indistinguishable from them, a sharp criticism of femininity within the capitalist system. Gutierrez also subverts representations of femininity in contemporary media in her 2018 piece “Queer Rage, Imagine Life-Size, and I’m Tyra, p66-67 from Indigenous Woman.” In an excerpt from Indigenous Woman, her imaginary magazine, Gutierrez depicts the ever-shifting identities of a queer woman and her infinite potential as she reclines in her self-portrait in traditional Guatemalan dress, surrounded by vegetation, photoshopped animals, and dolls, among other things. 

Wendy Red Star is a Native artist from the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana. Her photograph series “Four Seasons” shows her over the course of different seasons. She is always in traditional attire and surrounded by nature, and is often looking directly at the camera with an air of defiance. These portraits evoke the life-sized dioramas commonly found in natural history museums; they usually depict extinct and near-extinct animals or insects. Though the natural elements that surround the artist are imitations, she is very real. Red Star thus asserts the continuing existence of Native women, and the value of their culture and heritage. Her final piece in the exhibition, 2016’s “Apsaalooke Feminist #4,” features the artist with her daughter. They are surrounded in Apsaalooke aesthetics and symbols, and adorned in traditional garb, with pensive looks on their faces. The piece draws attention to the importance of passing down Native culture and knowledge, particularly through matrilineage. In Red Star’s exhibition, Native femininity is invigorated both by its refusal to succumb to extinction, as well as its value in preserving Native culture through time. 

“What I love so much about all of these contemporary artists and their work is that there’s so much questioning happening,” says Cattarin.  “And we don’t want to come in with some idea of control or authority that tells you what you should think about.”