Gee’s Bend

In antebellum times, the area tucked within a hairpin curve of the Alabama River southwest of Selma contained several cotton plantations and acquired its name—Gee’s Bend—from the best known of those estates. After the Civil War, ex-slaves in “the Bend” took the names of the Gee’s Bend plantation’s later owners. For example, the Pettways stayed on the land as tenant farmers. Geographically isolated, with little day-to-day influence from the surrounding world, the African American residents of Gee’s Bend created a distinctive island of culture replete with its own customs, religious traditions, and—incubating for several generations—patchwork-quilt aesthetic.

The Gee’s Benders’ pioneer-style existence—with its hand-built log cabins, mule-driven wagons, and nearly self-sufficient economy—was not insulated from fluctuations in the price of cotton, and during the Great Depression the Gee’s Benders were thrown into cataclysm. Their goods were repossessed along with their food stores and livestock; the population was on the brink of starvation when the federal government intervened, eventually establishing Gee’s Bend as a New Deal experiment that enabled locals to purchase land and acquire new homes and that founded an agricultural cooperative, a school, and a clinic. A long-term effect of these government programs (besides the famous photographs that Farm Security Administration photographers Arnold Rothstein and Marion Post Wolcott took of Gee’s Bend in the late 1930s) was that many townspeople left behind their status as tenants; the presence of so many homeowners allowed Gee’s Bend to endure mostly intact through the second half of the 20th century, when many other southern rural communities and their traditions dissipated or disappeared.

Among the cultural survivals in Gee’s Bend was its quilt tradition. Quilt making had long been a part of young girls’ preparations for womanhood, and children frequently apprenticed at the feet of mothers and other female relatives and friends. Eventually a girl would make her own quilt, incorporating skills of cloth salvage, design, and sewing. Gee’s Bend quilts were traditionally made from recycled clothing, primarily denims and cotton twills. A reliance on archetypal patterns, especially variations of the “Log Cabin” or “Housetop” designs of concentric squares, fed into the use of heavy, resistant fabrics and Gee’s Benders fundamental thrift to create an aesthetic reminiscent of minimalism—spare, austere meditations on elemental geometric forms. At the same time, many Gee’s Bend women measured themselves by their originality and flair as quilt designers, so the Gee’s Bend aesthetic brims as well with surprising juxtapositions and shifts of scale, color, and visual rhythm. The distinctive qualities of Gee’s Bend quilts—minimalism in tension with dynamism—fit into the spectrum of African American patchwork quilts: the loose “Gee’s Bend style” seems a fusion of the individual, the family, the community, and ethnicity considered more broadly—as well as including patterns and techniques that are shared with or borrowed from Anglo-American quilts.

In 2002 Gee’s Bend quilts found international prominence when they were the subject of a major exhibition, The Quilts of Gee’s Bend, that traveled to 12 American museums. A second traveling exhibition, Gee’s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt, premiered in 2006.

PAUL ARNETT
Lafayette, California

Paul Arnett, William Arnett, Bernard Herman, and Maggi Gordon, Gee’s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt (2006); William Arnett and Paul Arnett, eds., Gee’s Bend: The Women and Their Quilts (2002); William Arnett et al., The Quilts of Gee’s Bend: Masterpieces from a Lost Place (2002).

 

Gibson, Sybil

(1908–1995)

Sybil Gibson said that her sweet and colorful paintings of flowers and children were childhood memories. The sad and haunted portraits of women’s faces seem to portray the fears and anxieties of her tumultuous adult life.

Born Sybil Aaron in Dora, Ala., on 18 February 1908 to a well-to-do family, she was educated in Alabama, eventually receiving a B.S. degree in elementary education from Jacksonville State Teachers College. She married her high school sweetheart, Hugh Gibson, in 1929 and had a daughter, Theresa, in 1932. The couple divorced in 1935, and Gibson left her daughter in the care of her parents. She taught school in Alabama and then in Florida, where she married David DeYarmon, who later moved to Ohio without her and died in 1958. Gibson’s painting career began in Miami in 1963, after she had seen some striking gift-wrapping paper. She soon became so prolific that she painted up to 100 paintings a day. Many of the thousands of works she produced, however, were lost as she moved from place to place.

Gibson often said that she preferred to paint on paper she took out of the trash bin rather than on good art paper. Considering the volume of her output and the sometimes precarious state of her finances, her approach is understandable. Although Gibson painted on any paper at hand, including newspapers, she preferred to use tempera paints on damp grocery bags. Her delicate wet-on-wet technique stands in contrast to the bold painting often seen in the works of southern folk artists. In addition to tempera, Gibson also used oils, house paint, acrylics, and watercolors. Her subjects included still lifes, landscapes, flowers, birds, cats, children, groups of figures, and striking portraits of women. She also painted a number of abstracts. Her impressionistic work has been praised by art critics as lyrical and tender, and it has been compared to that of Milton Avery and Odilon Redon. Believing that art could not be taught but must come forth intuitively, Gibson did not make sketches of her proposed subject. She said that she let the paintbrush dictate both subject and technique.

In 1971 the Miami Museum of Art organized a one-woman show of Gibson’s work. The artist, however, never saw the exhibition. She had returned to Alabama to “study weeds.” Over 20 years, Gibson’s circumstances continued to deteriorate. She lived in a seedy hotel in Birmingham, in a trailer with her cousin in Florida, and then in a facility for the elderly in Jasper, Ala., which expelled her because of disruptive behavior. By 1981, when she moved into the home for the elderly, Gibson had stopped painting because of poor eyesight. In 1991 Gibson’s daughter, Theresa, rescued her and arranged for a cataract operation. Gibson then moved to a nursing facility in Dunedin, Fla., near her daughter. With her eyesight restored, she was soon back at work on new paintings. She died on 2 January 1995. Gibson’s work has been included in many exhibitions and is in the permanent collections of such museums as the American Folk Art Museum, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, the Mennello Museum of American Art, and the New Orleans Museum of Art.

JOHN HOOD
New York, New York

John Hood, Folk Art (Winter 1998–99); Kathy Kemp and Keith Boyer, Alabama’s Visionary Artists (1994); Alice Rae Yelen, Passionate Visions of the American South: Self-Taught Artists from 1940 to the Present (1993).

 

Golding, William O.

(1874–1943)

William O. Golding, an African American seaman, created nearly 70 lively drawings of sailing vessels and ports of call while a patient in the Marine Hospital in Savannah, Ga., during the 1930s. Golding recounted that as a boy he was shanghaied, tricked aboard a ship, at the port of Savannah in 1882 and did not see his home again until 1904. After close to 50 years at sea and visits to far-off corners of the globe on a variety of vessels, Golding began making art in 1932. Glimpses of Golding’s life and experiences are found in two letters written to Margaret Stiles, a Savannah artist who organized recreational activities at the hospital. Stiles encouraged Golding to draw; provided him with pencils, crayons, and paper; purchased drawings; and sold them on his behalf.

Golding’s detailed, fanciful drawings largely depict exotic ports and sailing ships, many of which he apparently had seen or served on. His depictions of specific vessels include the USS Constitution, which visited Savannah in 1931, and the USS Nourmahal, once owned by John Jacob Astor. Occasional works, for example, a drawing of the Alabama, a Confederate vessel, commemorate craft that he could not have seen. Golding’s drawings usually include drawn frames and nameplates complete with screws, details suggesting that he was familiar with framed nautical paintings or reproductions.

Stylistically, Golding reinvents the marine painting tradition in personal terms. Like professionally trained marine painters, he is concerned with identifying details such as rigging and signal flags. Golding also relies on individualized conventions, however, such as lighthouses, buoys, and his signature detail, a vibrant sun resembling a compass rose bursting forth from clouds. In his images of ports, Golding captures the flavor of a place by exaggerating landmarks, labeling sites of interest to a seaman, and populating these scenes with tiny human figures. Golding depicts ports of call, including his hometown of Savannah and ports in China, the Philippines, Java, Newfoundland, Trinidad, Cape Horn, the Rock of Gibraltar, and England. Golding claimed to have visited many of these spots and wrote to Stiles that he could not draw Hawaii or Bali because he had not seen them.

Golding died in the Marine Hospital in 1943 during surgery, after which public interest in his work continued intermittently. A 1947 photograph in Town and Country magazine shows numerous works by Golding decorating the Manhattan apartment of socialite Margaret Screven Duke, a professionally trained artist and niece of Golding’s mentor, Stiles. Golding’s work surfaced again in a 1969 exhibition at the Miami Art Center, in a 1970 article in Art in America, and in the traveling exhibition Missing Pieces: Georgia Folk Art, 1776–1976. The artist has since been the subject of solo exhibitions at Georgia museums including the Telfair Museum of Art (Savannah) and the Morris Museum of Art (Augusta). His work is also included in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

HARRY H. DELORME
Telfair Museum of Art

Pamela King and Harry DeLorme, Looking Back: Art in Savannah, 1900–1950 (1996); Anna Wadsworth, Missing Pieces: Georgia Folk Art, 1776–1976 (1976).

 

Gudgell, Henry

(1829–1895)

Kentucky-born Henry Gudgell was a mulatto slave who spent most of his life in Livingston County, Mo., where he became a blacksmith and wainwright and sometimes worked as a silversmith and coppersmith. Gudgell is best known, however, as the skilled wood-carver of two beautiful walking sticks, one now in the Yale University Art Gallery and the other in a private collection in Kentucky. The cane at Yale is the best documented of the two works. Writing in a seminal 1969 essay titled “African Influence on the Art of the United States” in Black Studies at the University: A Symposium, Robert Farris Thompson, a scholar of the arts of the African diaspora, suggested that Gudgell probably made the cane in 1867 for John Bryan, an army officer from Livingston County. Fighting on the side of the South, Bryan was shot in the leg and crippled in the early years of the Civil War, at the siege of Lexington, Mo., in 1861. Handed down in the Bryan family from one generation to the next, the cane was cataloged and illustrated in 1940 for the Index of American Design, housed at the National Gallery of Art, and then sold to Yale in 1968. The provenance of the second walking stick, which was discovered in 1982 and attributed to Gudgell on the basis of style, subject matter, and technique, is unknown.

Both of Gudgell’s canes, approximately 3 feet in height, carry similar abstract and figurative motifs. The designs carved in low relief near the handles of each cane consist of serpentine grooves, circular bands, and diamond-shaped patterns. Crawling up the shaft of each is a tiny caravan of reptiles: a lizard leads the procession, and a tortoise follows. Both are portrayed from above. Bringing up the rear of the convoy is a coiled serpent that glides effortlessly upward. The cane in the Yale collection carries two additional motifs: a branch with a single leaf and the tiny figure of a man. Both are placed just below the turtle and across from each other on opposing sides of the cane’s shaft. The man is viewed from behind and positioned just above the snake’s head. Dressed in a short-sleeve shirt, trousers, and shoes, the figure grasps the cane’s shaft with his arms and bended knees.

The peculiar combination of reptilian motifs and the human figure on the cane at Yale led Thompson to consider the role of canes and walking sticks and the meaning of turtles, lizards, and serpents in African and African American art, folklore, and folk belief. Thompson established the African roots of Gudgell’s cane, situating it as the earliest known example of an African-derived visual tradition best known in the carved canes of coastal Georgia. In The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts (1978), John Michael Vlach further explored this connection, discussing similar works not only along the coast of Georgia but also in the Georgia Piedmont and in Mississippi. Referring to Gudgell’s cane in the Yale collection, Vlach observed, “It is ironic, although not incomprehensible that the greatest piece of Afro-American walking stick sculpture should have been made in north-central Missouri, in Livingston County, over a thousand miles from the geographic focus of a black carving tradition.”

In “An Odyssey: Finding the Other Henry Gudgell Walking Stick,” published in Folk Art (Fall 2008), Alan Weiss, the owner of Gudgell’s second cane, updated and expanded Thompson’s findings. Weiss discovered that Gudgell was born in 1829 in Anderson County, Ky., that his 15- or 16-year-old mother was named Rachael, and that his owner and probable father was Samuel Arbuckle, a wealthy white Kentuckian. In 1830 Arbuckle left in trust to his daughter Elizabeth Arbuckle several slaves, including Rachael and her infant son. In the same year Elizabeth and her husband Jacob Gudgell Jr. moved their household to Missouri, where they ultimately settled in Livingston County. In the coming years Henry Gudgell became the property of various members of his extended white family. He married, raised his own family, obtained his freedom after the Civil War, purchased 22 acres of land in 1870, and apparently flourished as a master of the metal arts and a maker of carved wooden canes.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Gudgell’s work is its connection with the healing arts of West Africa that survived in the traditions of the African American South. Thompson associated the conspicuous presence of lizards, snakes, and turtles on African American walking sticks, such as Gudgell’s, to the prevalent role of reptiles in African American folk medicine or what is known as conjure. He noted, for example, the existence in Charleston, S.C., of a carved walking stick embellished with an entwined serpent that was called a “conjure stick.” He also observed that, in the folk beliefs of African Americans in early 20th-century Georgia, reptiles carried a negative connotation, and he concluded that the presence of such animals on a cane may “constitute a coded visual declaration of the power of the healer.” Writing in an essay titled “Defining the African-American Cane,” in American Folk Art Canes: Personal Sculpture, Ramona Austin, art historian and curator of African and African American art, defined two major forms of African American canes, conjuring canes and walking sticks. “Conjurer and root or hoodoo doctor are names for a ritual specialist. This specialist manipulates canes to cure, protect, or afflict.” Austin went on to say that Africans and African Americans recognized reptiles, which are able to live in water and on earth, as mediators between the spirit and the living worlds. Conjuring canes are “mediums of contact to a spirit world that can affect the psychic and physical disposition of people and things in the nonspirit world.” Gudgell’s canes, which exemplify this tradition, may have been intended and understood as objects that invoked the power to heal.

CAROL CROWN
University of Memphis

Ramona Austin, in American Folk Art Canes: Personal Sculpture, ed. George H. Meyer, with Kay White Meyer (1992); Betty J. Crouther, SECAC Review (1993); Georgia Writer’s Project, Drums and Shadows (1940); Betty Kuyk, African Voices in the African American Heritage (2003); Regenia Perry, in Black Art Ancestral Legacy: The African Impulse in African-American Art, ed. Robert V. Roselle (1989); Robert Farris Thompson, in Black Studies in the University: A Symposium, ed. Armstead L. Robinson, Craig C. Foster, and Donald H. Ogilvie (1969); John Michael Vlach, The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts (1978); Allan Weiss, Folk Art (Fall 2008).

 

Guilford Limner (Dupue)

(fl. 1820s)

Although records show that itinerant portraitists worked in North Carolina and Kentucky between the 1770s and the mid-19th century, scholars have not yet discovered the name of the artist known as the Guilford Limner. This artist, active during the 1820s in the vicinity of Greensboro, Guilford County, N.C., and also in Kentucky, signed none of the watercolor portraits attributed to him. The artist did not advertise services in local newspapers as did many itinerants, and because newspapers did not report the visit of a female painter, it is unlikely that the Guilford Limner was a woman. Indeed, the only hints at the artist’s identity come from a letter by the granddaughter of a North Carolina client referring to “a traveling French artist” and a note on the back of the portrait of Mr. and Mrs. James Ragland of Clark County, Ky., that reads “taken August 1820 on Clark Co., Kentucky by Dupue.” The stylistic similarities between the North Carolina portraits and the Kentucky works are sufficient to attribute the portraits to a single artist or perhaps to an artist and a close follower.

The Guilford Limner’s watercolor portraits, more affordable than oil paintings, depict middle-class patrons who lived in a time of community growth and increasing prosperity. Whether the sitters were men, women, or children, the limner paid close attention to the subject’s faces, and even though almost all have rounded eyes, well-defined eyebrows, short straight noses, diminutive cherub lips, and contained expressions, the artist manages to differentiate subjects from one another. Sometimes the artist also personalizes the portraits by painting the patrons’ names within a cartouche or within the composition as though the name were a wall decoration. The number of commissions the artist received in Guilford County—some 30—implies that patrons were pleased with their likenesses.

The conventional settings of the portraits undoubtedly fulfilled the desires of relatively affluent middle-class patrons to document their worldly and spiritual successes. Just as the artist repeated a limited repertoire of stylistic devices to render faces, he also placed most of his sitters within conventional and well-furnished 19th-century interiors that may not reflect the actual possessions of the sitters or the décor of their individual homes but suggest their affluence. Wainscoted walls, Windsor chairs, faux-painted decorations, and carpets with exuberant designs all display middle-class comforts. The sitters’ dress likewise indicates social status, age, and gender roles. Men wear white stocks, waistcoats, and cutaway jackets, while women wear modest but fashionable clothing. The portraits of members of the four generations of the Gillespie family are excellent representations of social identities. Colonel Gillespie, “Gilaspi” in the artists’ spelling, has chosen to present himself in the uniform and high-feathered hat of a Revolutionary War officer. Margaret, Daniel’s wife, wears a ruffled cap, wide scarf, and dark dress to display the modesty and rectitude of a grandmother. The Gillespie daughters, Nancy and Thankful, wearing jewelry and slightly less concealing clothes and sewing or knitting, advertise their industry and piety. In the portrait of Robert Gillespie, the married son of Daniel and Margaret, the limner indicates the young man’s success as a farmer through an unlikely display of corncobs that lie upon a sitting room’s paint-grained table. Robert’s wife, Nancy Hanner Gillespie, sits beside an abundant arrangement of flowers. The youngest member of the family, John Patterson Gillespie, wears a dark suit and carries a book, both conventional emblems of a boy’s preparation for adulthood. Other portraits contain additional emblems of attainment and virtue. Men may sit at desks and review their account books. Women holding bouquets and children standing in gardens are conventional depictions that represent the children’s flourishing and their parents’ careful nurture. The Raglan portrait places the couple out of doors; a winding road leading into the distance may represent the extent of their property.

Works by the Guilford Limner, or Dupue, are held in the Greensboro Historical Museum and in private collections.

CHERYL RIVERS
Brooklyn, New York

Karen Cobb Carroll, Windows to the Past: Primitive Watercolors from Guilford County, North Carolina from the 1820s (1983); Nina Fletcher Little, The Magazine Antiques (November 1968), Little by Little (1984); McKissick Museum, Carolina Folk: The Cradle of a Southern Tradition (1985).

 

Hall, Dilmus

(1900–1987)

Dilmus Hall, an African American self-taught artist from Athens, Ga., is best known for his small- and large-scale sculptures created out of concrete and found or scrap pieces of wood and for his drawings executed in colored pencil and crayon. His subject matter includes simple, charming depictions of animals and humans, ambitious allegorical and religious narrative scenes, and important figures from local history.

Hall grew up in rural Georgia, born into a farming and blacksmithing family, one of more than a dozen children. During his childhood he sculpted birds and other animals, often out of flour mixed with sweet gum sap. Hall’s mother encouraged her son’s early artistic pursuits, but his hardworking father found little merit in them. Hall left the family home and found work on a road gang and in a coal mine. In 1917 he joined the United States Army Medical Corps and transported injured soldiers across the battlefields of France. This experience allowed Hall to view European art, memories of which inspired later sculptures.

After leaving the army, Hall lived in Athens, Ga., where he worked as a hotel captain, a waiter, a sorority house busboy on the local University of Georgia campus, and a fabricator of concrete blocks for a construction company. Hall was a deep thinker, a philosopher, and a man of fierce faith. He believed that the teachings and happenings in the Bible were never far from contemporary life. In the book O, Appalachia, Ramona Lampelle describes Hall’s speaking style as that of a backcountry revival preacher and quotes Hall’s Old Testament inspired insights on art making and daily life. Many works reflect Hall’s interest in exemplary heroes whose virtues reflect biblical precepts. The artist’s small concrete tableau entitled Dr. Crawford Dying, for example, is a tribute to the Athens-based 19th-century surgeon Dr. Crawford W. Long (1815–78), who first discovered the effect of ether and used it during surgery. Long was also one of the few white doctors of the time who cared for African Americans.

In the 1950s Hall began to gain local attention for his architectural adornments and “yard art” outside his small cinder block home. The work entitled The Devil and the Drunk Man depicts two life-size drunkards and the devil in an allegorical environment. Hall believed that the devil was everywhere, encouraging people to commit sins. Hall saw these sculptures as protections from the devil. Much comparison has been made between Hall’s art and the African American conjuring culture, a vernacular religion that mixes aspects of Christianity with African traditions of empowering objects. Hall was drawn to, and believed in, the power of objects and symbols, although he was unaware of their African cultural allusions. To illustrate this point, Hall’s oeuvre includes sensitive and powerful depictions of the Crucifixion, many of which use a simplified, tripartite, y-shaped cross. This symbolic shape closely relates to a root sculpture constructed of a twisted branch, scraps of wood, metal, nails, and paint (ca. 1940), which Hall always referred to as his personal emblem.

In the 1980s, Hall’s work began to receive wider recognition when its originality and iconographic content became better understood. The High Museum and the American Folk Art Museum include Hall’s work in their collections.

JENINE CULLIGAN
Huntington Museum of Art

Paul Arnett and William Arnett, eds., Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art of the South, vol. 1 (2000); Chris Hatten, Huntington Museum of Art: Fifty Years of Collecting (2001); Ramona Lampell and Millard Lampell, O, Appalachia: Artists of the Southern Mountains (1989); Frank Maresca and Roger Ricco, American Vernacular: New Discoveries in Folk, Self-Taught, and Outsider Sculptures (2002); Lynne E. Spriggs, Joanne Cubbs, Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, and Susan Mitchell Crawley, Let It Shine: Self-Taught Art from the T. Marshall Hahn Collection (2001).

 

Hamblett, Theora

(1895–1977)

Theora Hamblett was born 15 January 1895 in the small community of Paris, Miss. Hamblett lived the first half of her life on her family’s modest farm in Paris. Her experience as a white woman growing up and living in the impoverished rural South was typical of her times, with the exception that she never married or had children. From 1915 to 1936 Hamblett taught school intermittently in the counties near her family home. In 1939 she moved to the nearby town of Oxford, where she supported herself as a professional seamstress and converted her home into a boardinghouse.

Hamblett began painting in the early 1950s, fulfilling an interest in art that had begun in her youth. Although she enrolled in several informal art classes and a correspondence course during her later life, Hamblett was largely self-taught. Her first paintings depict memories of her childhood, and she painted scenes of southern country life for the next two decades, culminating in a series of paintings about children’s games. Hamblett’s most unusual works are the over 300 religious paintings representing biblical subjects and Hamblett’s own dreams and visions. These paintings began in 1954 with The Golden Gate, later renamed The Vision. Today, this first painting is owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York; most of Hamblett’s religious paintings and many memory paintings were never available for sale and were bequeathed by the artist to the University of Mississippi Museum in Oxford.

Hamblett’s religious paintings and interpretations of her dreams and visions were firmly rooted in her personal religious history. The popular, transdenominational southern Protestantism practiced in the churches, revival meetings, and hymn sings Hamblett attended in and around Paris, Miss., all emphasized the possibility of unmediated encounters between God and communicants, usually taking the form of visionary or dreamlike experiences. Church services were often structured around testimonies in which the worshipers described these experiences, and hymn lyrics regularly referred to them. Hamblett’s vision and dream paintings bear structural similarities to traditional testimonies, and many of her paintings employ images from the popular southern hymnody.

Hamblett’s aesthetics and working methods were also largely products of her background. The needlework skills she learned as a southern rural woman are evident in her art. Hamblett’s characteristic tiny brushstrokes of unmixed color resemble embroidery stitches, and many of her images suggest lacework and tatting. Her work provides a record of a vanishing regional history, and the complex associations of her religious paintings raise Hamblett from the status of an amateur to that of a significant artist of popular southern traditions.

ELLA KING TORREY
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

William Ferris, Local Color: A Sense of Place in Folk Art (1983), Four Women Artists (1977); Theora Hamblett, in collaboration with Ed Meek and William S. Haynie, Theora Hamblett Paintings (1975); Ella King Torrey, “The Religious Art of Theora Hamblett, Sources of Attitude and Imagery” (M.A. thesis, University of Mississippi, 1984).

 

Hampton, James

(1909–1964)

Working in an unheated, dimly lit garage in a run-down neighborhood in Washington, D.C., James Hampton, a janitor employed by the General Services Administration, crafted a dazzling, shrinelike sculpture: a huge altar radiant in gold and silver and touched in colors of wine red and green. Styling himself Director for Special Projects for the State of Eternity, Hampton fashioned The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly, a huge 180-piece construction. Made of cast-off objects such as old furniture, desk blotters, cardboard, jelly jars, and burned-out light bulbs, the Throne is ingeniously wrapped in gold and silver foil scavenged from store displays, wine bottles, cigarette boxes, and rolls of kitchen foil. From discarded junk, Hampton created a shimmering vision of dazzling light and color.

Born the son of a vagabond preacher or gospel singer, Hampton, who was raised a Baptist, claimed he had experienced religious visions throughout his life. He believed Moses had appeared in Washington, D.C., in 1931. Another vision in 1950 centered on the “Virgin Mary descending into heaven.” Drawing inspiration from his visions, he set to work on the Throne, which he may have intended to install one day in a storefront church. Today, however, Hampton’s creation is housed in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. It has been described by art critic Robert Hughes, writing in Time magazine, as perhaps “the finest work of visionary religious art produced by an American.”

Little is known about James Hampton. He grew up in Elloree, S.C., a small rural community just south of Columbia. Sometime in the late 1920s, Hampton moved to Washington, D.C., to join his elder brother. He worked at a variety of odd jobs and in 1942 was inducted into the army, where he served in a noncombatant unit as a carpenter. Returning to the nation’s capital in 1945, he rented a room in a boardinghouse. A year later, the General Services Administration hired him as a janitor. A quiet, soft-spoken, and unassuming man, Hampton never married, had few close friends, and maintained the same address and job until his death in 1964.

Sometime in 1950, saying he wanted a large work space, Hampton rented a garage in the northwest Washington neighborhood known as “Fourteenth and U,” near Howard University, the center of black business, religious activities, and nightlife. There, after his evening shift ended at midnight, Hampton worked on his astonishing liturgical assembly. As the focus of his symmetrical and bilateral design, Hampton erected on a 3-foot-high wooden platform an elaborate winged throne with a burgundy cushion and 7-foot-tall back panel crowned by the command “Fear Not.” Other furnishings, flanking it to left and right and situated in three parallel rows, recall the pulpits, altars, pedestals, offertory tables, and plaques of contemporary storefront churches. Hampton labeled many of the objects. Those on the viewer’s right of the throne refer to the Old Testament, while those on the viewer’s left relate to the New Testament. Other labels reference the millennium and the book of Revelation, the Bible’s most important prophetic book.

Hampton’s fabrication of The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly relates not only to the book of Revelation but also to early 20th-century fundamentalist beliefs known as dispensationalism. Teaching that the Bible is the literal word of God, this religious teaching divides history into ages or dispensations and promises the fulfillment of God’s prophecies in Christ’s return to earth, the millennium (a thousand years of bliss), and, ultimately, the New Jerusalem where God will reign forever. Calling himself St. James, Hampton may have seen himself as a modern-day counterpart to St. John, Revelation’s purported author. Like St. John, Hampton left behind a written text, which he entitled the Book of the 7 Dispensation of St. James. Each page is marked with the word “Revelation,” but the rest of the text is written in a script of Hampton’s own making that has not been deciphered. Even so, there is enough evidence to suggest that, like St. John’s text, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly is intended to function as a visual prophecy of Christ’s return and God Almighty’s eternal reign.

CAROL CROWN
University of Memphis

Linda Roscoe Hartigan, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (1997), American Art (Summer 2000).

 

Harding, Chester

(1792–1866)

Born into poverty, Chester Harding was truly a self-made man. He worked as a chair painter, housepainter, sign painter, cabinetmaker, and tavern keeper before he took up portrait painting. At that time Harding had seen only the work of an obscure itinerant painter. By the end of his career, he had become an academic society painter in Boston hailed as a “marvel from the backwoods of America.” His success has been attributed not only to his inherent talent but also to his charming personality, confidence, and steadfast determination.

Born in Conway, Mass., in 1792, Harding began making “truthful likenesses” when he and his wife joined his brother in Paris, Kentucky, in 1815. After attempting his first portrait with sign paint, Harding was eager to leave behind his former careers. During this early period he learned by copying the portraits of itinerant but esteemed painters and attempting to replicate their techniques. Aware of his shortcomings, Harding managed to spend a few months during 1819 and 1820 at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts “studying the best pictures, practicing at the same time with a brush.” Although Harding was dismayed to see that his portraits were greatly inferior to the polished works he had seen in Philadelphia, he commenced his career as an itinerant artist. Over the next thirty years he traveled extensively, visiting and revisiting cities such as St. Louis, New Orleans, Washington D.C., and Philadelphia to generate business. He also made two trips to Great Britain (1823–26 and 1846–1847) receiving many important commissions during these years that reflect the influence of Sir Thomas Lawrence. In 1830 Harding settled his wife and nine children in Springfield, Mass. He maintained a studio and gallery in Boston but also continued to travel in search of commissions. Harding’s gallery hosted many art exhibitions and was also home to the school founded by the Boston Artists’ Association. The artist died in 1866, leaving behind a lively personal memoir and numerous portraits of many prominent men and women that demonstrate his popularity and his natural talent.

From the fabled Daniel Boone, who sat for him in 1820, to Gen. William T. Sherman, whom he painted in 1865–66, Harding strove to accumulate a notable list of clients during his lifetime. No American painter of his generation could boast a more impressive list of patrons. They included three American presidents (Adams, Madison, and Harrison); statesmen John Calhoun and Daniel Webster; numerous governors, senators, and their wives; and fellow artist and close friend, Washington Allston. Regardless of their professions or positions, Harding chose to render his sitters with the truthful clarity that commonly characterizes the work of self-taught portraitists; in most of his paintings, a simplified plain background or drapery assures that the subject’s face is the center of attention. Harding’s full-length portraits again reveal his beginnings as a self-taught painter. Although these portraits may distort perspective and proportions, Harding had honed his skills to produce paintings that were accepted into annual exhibitions at London’s prestigious Royal Academy and at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

CAROL CROWN
University of Memphis

CHERYL RIVERS
Brooklyn, New York

Chester Harding, Margaret E. White, and W. P. G. Harding, A Sketch of Chester Harding, Artist, Drawn by His Own Hand (1970); Leah Lipton, A Truthful Likeness: Chester Harding and His Portraits (1985).

 

Harris, Felix “Fox”

(1905–1985)

Felix “Fox” Harris was born in 1905 in Trinity, Tex., a small east Texas sawmill town. As an adult, Harris lived in Beaumont, where he worked at various lumbering and railroad jobs, all hard physical labor. Like many other self-taught artists, Harris began art making late in life.

Harris’s inspiration for his dense, fantastic forest of shining metal sculptures and 20-foot-high totems came one night as he lay in bed. According to Harris, God appeared to him in a vision, holding in one hand a sheet of brown paper and in the other hand a sheet of white paper. God spoke to him of the sorrows and struggles of his life, which were symbolized by the brown paper. Laying that paper aside, He told Harris that his old life would also be laid aside and that he would receive the gift of new life symbolized by the white paper. As Harris put it, “God took nothing and made something.”

That phrase, “Take nothing and make something,” became the theme of Harris’s work. For more than 20 years, the artist took the broken and discarded objects of everyday life and transformed them into an environment alive with color and movement. He worked intuitively and confidently; and although the individual pieces are singular, the work as a whole conforms to a strong and consistent vision. His environment displays aesthetic preferences associated with other African American yard shows: flashing metal, circular objects like hubcaps, diamond shapes, and kinetic elements that indicate spirit and potentiality.

Although Harris was certainly familiar with implements that could have speeded his work, his tools were few and handmade. For his metal cutouts, the artist preferred to use what looked like an ordinary table knife that he had modified by flattening the handle with a ball-peen hammer and by sharpening the tip of the blade. He customarily made a stencil with pencil and paper, traced it onto the metal, and then painstakingly cut out the design by placing the sharpened knife tip along the drawn line and gently tapping out the figure with the hammer. He also fashioned a pair of wooden stilts and used them when working on the tall totems. He called them his “tom-walkers.” To see him, nine feet tall, striding through his forest on those tom-walkers was a heart-stopping, indelible sight.

Harris continued to work until his death in 1985. After his death, family, friends, and art collectors preserved a portion of the environment, moving it and installing it on the grounds of the Art Museum of Southeast Texas. Because of concerns about hurricane damage and deterioration, the environment was reinstalled inside the museum, where it is on semipermanent display.

PATRICIA CARTER
Beaumont, Texas

Ray Daniel (introduction), Patricia Carter, and Lynn P. Castle, Felix Fox Harris (2008).

 

Harvey, Bessie Ruth White

(1929–1994)

Using little more than roots, shells, and paint, visionary artist Bessie Harvey assembled a diverse cast of figures that appeared vividly before her mind’s eye. Biblical characters, African ancestors, mythological creatures, and episodes from African American history materialized under her touch with equal intensity. Each reveals the richness of her imagination, the depth of her spirituality, and her extraordinary gifts as a storyteller.

Born Bessie Ruth White on 11 October 1929, Harvey was the seventh of 13 children born to Homer and Rosie Mae White in Dallas, Ga. In her early 20s, she moved to Tennessee, briefly living in Knoxville and then permanently in nearby Alcoa, where she secured a job with Blount Memorial Hospital in order to help provide for her children and grandchildren. Although aware of her own creative gifts as a child, Harvey did not devote her full-time energies to making art until her late 40s. Seeking solace from life’s challenges, she found strength and comfort in her faith and also began to discern spirits in seemingly ordinary pieces of gnarled wood. Whorls and knots might indicate the eyes or a mouth of a biblical character just as an attenuated branch might suggest a serpent. In her makeshift basement studio, Harvey added paint, wood putty, shells, hair, cloth, and other items to each piece of wood in order to give vivid physical form to the spirit she perceived within. Her earliest creations tended to be small, simple figures decorated only with black paint, human hair, and shells or beads. Collectors began to recognize the raw expressive power of her strange, dark figures, and Harvey’s reputation soared by the early 1980s.

Troubled by local rumors that her work was the product of voodoo, Harvey, one day in 1983, burned the contents of her studio. After a few weeks of self-reflection, however, she went back to work with the newfound realization that her sculptures were important messages from God to a troubled world. Her works became increasingly large, colorful, and elaborate and enriched by glitter, cloth, beads, and jewelry. She also embarked on a loosely autobiographical series, Africa in America, which she intended as a teaching tool for children in her community. By the time of her death in 1994, the series included more than 20 sculptural dioramas depicting the African American experience and race relations during and after the era of slavery. Unlike Harvey’s earlier spirit sculptures, the works in Africa in America are highly descriptive and can be seen as carefully planned episodes in an epic narrative. However, they too reflect the artist’s ability to transform ordinary materials into objects of uncommon aesthetic power infused with moral concepts of universal relevance.

In 1995 Harvey’s work was chosen for inclusion in the Whitney Museum’s Biennial. Museums that hold Harvey’s works in their collections include the Whitney Museum, the Milwaukee Museum of Art, the American Folk Art Museum, the Knoxville Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

STEPHEN C. WICKS
Knoxville Museum of Art

Paul Arnett and William Arnett, eds., Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art of the South, vol. 1 (2000); Alvia J. Wardlaw, Black Art, Ancestral Legacy: The African Impulse in African American Art (1989); Stephen C. Wicks, Awakening the Spirits: Art by Bessie Harvey (1997).

 

Hawkins, William Lawrence

(1895–1990)

William Hawkins, one of America’s most important African American artists, was a short, stocky man and a great talker. He was supremely confident and as exuberant as his monumental paintings and his lesser-known drawings. His principal subjects were animals, architecture, and narratives.

William Lawrence Hawkins, Last Supper #6, 1986, enamel on Masonite with collage, 24″ × 48″ (Collection of Robert A. Roth)

Hawkins was born in rural Kentucky. After his mother’s death when he was two years old, he, along with his brother, was raised on the farm of his affluent maternal grandparents. He learned all the skills necessary for farming and was especially good with animals, claiming he could break the wildest horses. He drew constantly from at least seven or eight years of age, often copying pictures of horses his grandfather saved, thus using printed source materials as compositional models, just as he would later in life.

Hawkins moved to Columbus, Ohio, at the age of 21. Thrust into city life with only a third-grade education, he took on many different jobs to support himself. He married and divorced twice and supported numerous children and grandchildren during his long, vigorous life. His most steady early employment was as a truck driver for building contractors. The changing skyline he saw while driving constantly intrigued him and contributed to the urban settings of his paintings.

In the 1930s and 1940s Hawkins occasionally sold a few paintings for small sums. An inveterate scavenger, he collected cast-off materials, which he used for many of his later works. His earliest surviving paintings date from the late 1970s to 1981. Landmark buildings and the American Wild West were his usual subjects. The latter may be accounted for by Hawkins’s claiming American Indian and white blood, a mix that he proudly said made him special.

Hawkins’s early paintings had unmixed colors, limited to black, white, and gray for the most part. Their scale was small, and their compositions were freely adapted from pictures in magazines and newspapers. Because he could not afford frames, he often painted one around the edges of his paintings, adding his name, birthday, and often his place of birth—(“William L. Hawkins born KY July 23, 1895”)—as an elaborate signature.

In 1981 Lee Garrett, a trained artist, discovered the works of William Hawkins and shortly thereafter a New York Gallery introduced his work to the public. With Garrett’s encouragement, Hawkins began experimenting. He used a range of bright colors, larger surfaces, and applied paint more freely, sometimes adding a paste of corn meal and enamels. Variations on the printed letters of his signature became larger, and bolder, to form integral parts of his compositions. Around 1986, Hawkins added collage and three-dimensional elements to his works. By this time, Hawkins’s average paintings ranged from four to six feet or more in height and width. His preferred support was Masonite, which he worked with a single brush. Hawkins wanted to give each of his clients something distinctive; he never copied his work even if he returned to a subject more than once. He once said, “There are a million artists out there and I try to be the greatest of them all.” Today his works can be found in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the High Museum, and the New Orleans Museum of Art.

N. F. KARLINS
New York, New York

Columbus Museum of Art, Popular Images, Personal Visions: The Art of William Hawkins, 1895–1990 (1990); Frank Maresca and Roger Ricco, William Hawkins: Paintings (1997); Riffe Gallery, William Hawkins: Drawings in Context (2000).

 

Heltzel, Henry (Stony Creek Artist)

(birth and death dates unknown)

Henry Heltzel, formerly known only as the Stony Creek artist, produced fraktur for members of the German Lutheran and Reformed Zion Church at Stony Creek in Shenandoah County, Va. H. E. Comstock identified the artist in 2005 while examining a copybook made for George Peter Dobson of Shenandoah County. This copybook, now in the collection of the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley, contains the signature “H. Heltzel” and the date 16 February 1826. The 40 works attributed to this artist date from 1805 to 1824 and include both German- and English-language examples. Most of the artist’s frakturs were made for children in Shenandoah County, Va., although at least six are from the area of Shepherdstown, W.Va. Scholars such as Klaus Wust have suggested that the artist may have been the schoolmaster at the parochial school associated with Zion Church on the Schwaben Creek, located near Stony Creek. Fraktur attributed to Heltzel include birth and baptismal certificates as well as bookplates.

Scholars have based attributions to Heltzel on several distinctive motifs: hand-drawn curtains at the top and sides of the certificate that often flank a central large heart containing the text; winged angels’ heads drawn above the heart; floral borders that frame the text; and devices such as four- or five-petaled blooms, either roses or pansies, and fleurs-de-lis that occupy the corners of floral borders. However, as other southern fraktur artists, such as the Virginia Record Book Artist, also drew curtains and fleur-de-lis, attributions cannot be made on these elements alone. The Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library hold examples of Heltzel’s fraktur.

LISA M. MINARDI
Winterthur Museum and Country Estate

H. E. Comstock, Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts (Winter 2005–Winter 2006); Russell D. Earnest and Corinne P. Earnest, Papers for Birth Dayes: Guide to the Fraktur Artists and Scriveners (1997); Cynthia Elyce Rubin, ed., Southern Folk Art (1985); Klaus Wust, Virginia Fraktur: Penmanship as Folk Art (1972).

 

Hesselius, John

(ca. 1726–1778)

Around 1711 Gustavus Hesselius, a Swedish artist, and his wife, Lydia, were among a large number of Swedes who settled in the Christiana-Wilmington area of Delaware. Others in the family went first to Pennsylvania. Gustavus moved to St. George’s County, Md., at an undetermined date and sold his land there in 1726. John Hesselius, his son, was probably born that year, presumably in Philadelphia, Pa., where his parents had moved and would live until their deaths.

John’s father, Gustavus, painted portraits in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and possibly Virginia, because one work from that colony is attributed to his hand. In Philadelphia he advertised that he was from Stockholm and that, in addition to painting portraits, he painted landscapes, coats of arms, signs, and showboards. He was also skilled in ship and house painting, gilding, and restoring pictures. John learned how to do all of these branches of painting, decorative and utilitarian, from his father. John’s earliest likenesses, however, show the strong influence of another artist, Robert Feke, who visited Philadelphia in the 1740s. Feke’s rich colors and more fashionable compositions impressed the younger, ambitious painter, who quickly adopted them in some of his earliest portraits.

Hesselius may have painted in Virginia as early as 1748. As many as 12 portraits have been identified as his work for the 1748–49 period in Virginia; many others were painted after this. His father’s death in 1755 seems to have provided a greater opportunity for the young Hesselius to make painting trips to Virginia and Maryland. By 1759 he had moved his residence to Maryland. On 30 January 1763 he married Mary Young Woodward, the widow of Henry Woodward of Anne Arundel County. The couple raised eight children, including a son named Gustavus. Either this year or the previous one, Hesselius traded painting lessons to Charles Willson Peale for a saddle.

Sometime around 1756, Hesselius’s portrait compositions and painting style changed dramatically and became based on the highly successful work of the London-trained painter John Wollaston. The latter worked in the Mid-Atlantic region from about 1755 to 1758. Hesselius softened his colors to more pastel shades and switched to more graceful, flowing poses for sitters in imitation of the rococo style that Wollaston practiced.

Hesselius continued to work in this fashion until the last years of his life, changing his approach to one of greater realism and eliminating the opulent and mannerist characteristics associated with the rococo. The artist’s late work was probably influenced by neoclassicism, first introduced in America by studio-trained painters like Henry Benbridge and Hesselius’s former pupil Charles Willson Peale.

At the time of his death on 9 April 1778, Hesselius left an impressive estate of household furnishings, cash, and land holdings. Many museums, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, hold Hesselius’s works.

CAROLYN J. WEEKLEY
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

Richard K. Doud, “John Hesselius: His Life and Work” (M.A. thesis, University of Delaware, 1963); Virginia Magazine of History and Biography (April 1967).

 

Highwaymen

The story of the Highwaymen is an unlikely one. This group of young African American artists living near Fort Pierce, Fla., during the early years of the civil rights movement rose above existing societal expectations and produced a large body of oil paintings that document the mid-20th century landscape of the Sunshine State. For most of their careers, the artists worked anonymously, remaining unrecognized and uncelebrated until they were given the name “Highwaymen” in a magazine article in 1994, some 30 years after the beginning of their loose association.

Alfred Hair, who had begun painting on his own in 1955, enlisted and encouraged friends and family members to join him, so that they might escape their likely destinies working in Florida’s orange groves and packinghouses. They painted in their yards, often collectively through the night, and then took their still-wet creations to the streets to sell. These self-taught painters were entrepreneurs who became artists by default. Creating fine art was never their objective; acquiring wealth was their goal.

The artists worked feverishly for more than a decade. To them, time was money. The haste with which they painted each picture, often less than an hour, resulted in a distinct style that was misunderstood by many art fanciers. Characterized by early critics as “motel art,” the wind-swept palm trees, billowing cumulus clouds, moody seas, and intensely colored sunsets seemed to idealize Florida in archetypal tropical scenes meant to appeal to the masses. Nonetheless, the paintings became popular representations of how residents and tourists alike viewed the state.

Through their practice of fast painting, the Highwaymen created, or at least contributed to, a fresh approach to the tradition of American landscape portrayal. Their images are not generally detailed or treated in a grand manner; rather, they reveal temporal places in the process of becoming fully formed. The gesturally painted images, stripped of artifice, encourage viewers to lend their own inspirational meanings to these works of art.

Today the story of the Highwaymen is a significant part of Florida’s folk life and history. Even larger, perhaps, is the contribution that this tale makes to our national story. After all, the accomplishment of the Highwaymen is a saga about American dreams realized by a disenfranchised group of young people during a most oppressive time. Their visual legacy of Florida, depicted in as many as 200,000 paintings, has come to symbolize not only the beauty of the area but also the hopes and aspirations of its inhabitants. Works by the Highwaymen appear in the collection of the Museum of Florida History.

GARY MONROE
Daytona State College

Gary Monroe, Extraordinary Interpretations: Florida’s Self-Taught Artists (2003), Harold Newton: The Original Highwayman (2007), The Highwaymen: Florida’s African-American Artists (2001).

 

Hill, Kenny

(b. 1950)

In 1990 Kenny Hill of Chauvin, La., began to transform his property on the Bayou Petit Cailou into a complex art environment. Having moved to the undeveloped lot in 1988, Hill camped while building himself a small but unusual home. Little is known about the reclusive Hill, but he insisted to neighbors that his work was a personal endeavor not meant for an audience; he regularly declined requests from would-be visitors and photographers. He stated, simply, that the project was “a story of salvation.”

Indeed, Hill’s project, envisioned and executed in the final decade of the millennium, is devoted to the artist’s complex apocalyptic vision. Some one hundred concrete figures and architectural features, baroquely posed and brightly painted, populate a series of tableaux describing an eternal fight between good and evil. Hill’s vision is both personal and prophetic. Representing his own visage repeatedly throughout the site, he casts himself as the penitent seeking redemption.

The overall atmosphere Hill created is one of drama and action, intensified by Hill’s bold colors and the lush bayou landscape. Angels are omnipresent, guarding, flying, uplifting, some benevolent, others condemning. On one path, tarry black figures of the damned writhe in agony. Other pathways lead to nine circular platforms, each of which features nine spheres relating to a radiating orb, generally read as the nine planets that revolve around one shared sun. Much of Hill’s symbolism is arcane, but throughout the site it is possible to discern an intentional layering of the patriotic, the spiritual, and the cosmic.

The central feature of the site is a 45-foot-tall brick lighthouse in which Hill’s expertise in the trade of masonry is evident. The tower, ostensibly referencing the Tower of Babel, is covered with figures both heavenly and earthbound. American history is referenced through Christopher Columbus’s ship the Santa Maria, cowboys, Native Americans, World War II soldiers at Iwo Jima, and even a jazz funeral. Angels hoist mortals—Hill among them—toward the heavens as God surveys the scene. The tower itself is topped by a flying eagle, an emblem not just of the United States but—and perhaps more significantly here—a symbol for St. John the Evangelist, author of the book of Revelation (or Apocalypse of John) in the Bible’s New Testament.

In January 2000 Hill abandoned the site and fell away from the church that had once been central in his life. Perhaps disillusioned when the Apocalypse did not arrive, Hill never returned to his remarkable environment. By the time the artist left, parts of the site were already decomposing. The Kohler Foundation undertook the site’s preservation and built a bulkhead to stave off the encroaching bayou. In 2001 the Kohler Foundation gave the conserved site to Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, La., which agreed to see to the art environment’s ongoing care. The site features a studio building and art gallery and is open to the public. From the artist’s family, the Kohler Foundation has acquired in 2010 a recent sculptural self-portrait and donated it to the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.

LESLIE UMBERGER
Smithsonian American Art Museum

Deborah H. Cibelli, Raw Vision (Winter 2008); Leslie Umberger, Sublime Spaces and Visionary Worlds: Built Environments of Vernacular Artists (2007).

 

Holley, Lonnie

(b. 1950)

The works of Alabama-bred artist Lonnie Holley ably demonstrate how African American vernacular traditions adapt to sociological and technological change. Rooted in the cultural practices of yard shows and yard art, Holley has, since he began to make art in 1979, expanded his creative vision to embrace media as diverse as sandstone carving, found-object assemblage, oil and acrylic paintings, photography, computer-based art, and music. Holley has also worked in a range of scales, from miniature to monumental. When in the company of admirers, Holley further vitalizes his art with brilliant spoken-word performances that situate his work—so concerned with current events and societal wounds—within black American customs of preaching and storytelling.

The seventh of 27 children, Holley was born in Birmingham, Ala., which has remained his center of operations for six decades. Holley grew up in a series of foster homes and reform schools, lived his teenage years on the edge of the law, and ultimately worked as, among a series of jobs, a short-order cook at Disney World. In the late 1970s he drifted back to Birmingham, where, tormented by the deaths of two nieces, he made his first carvings, small grave monuments for the girls. He then moved onto ancestral property, then used as a communal dump, close to the Birmingham airport. There he continued making commemorative carvings from a sandstonelike slag cast off by Birmingham’s industrial foundries.

Holley’s carvings honoring the dead soon sought to understand death in the context of the deceased’s social and personal situations, interlacing biographies with critiques of racial and economic injustice, examinations of family responsibilities, the family unit, and the paradoxes of human nature. By the early 1990s, Holley’s site had grown to more than an acre, sprawling beyond his property lines to interact with its neighborhood, a stereotypically poor, crime-encumbered, and nearly all-black quarter of Greater Birmingham. Numerous works erected in half-seen or abandoned spaces connected the most local of stories—friends’, neighbors’, and family members’ lives—to grander cultural narratives. Scavenging not just debris but significant remnants of the stories of people he knew, the artist created, on a scale perhaps unparalleled in American art, a conceptual tapestry of seemingly infinite intricacy. His yard and surroundings dehisced thousands of artworks whose overarching theme was degradation—of peoples, of the earth, of history, of gender, of race, and of class—and the inexplicable will to endure. Perhaps nowhere else has the rupture of the civil rights movement been so lyrically inscribed on the physical world.

Holley’s site finally found itself, in the mid-1990s, fatally and tragically entangled with the very social forces it had documented: the local government targeted Holley’s neighborhood for demolition in preparation for a planned expansion of the municipal airport. After a long holdout and legal struggle, during which his site was continually vandalized, in 1997 Holley relocated what portions of his work he could to the rural community of Harpersville, Ala. His new locale never embraced his presence or his art, and while the artist set about making a yard show there in the vein of his earlier one, by the 2000s he was spending most of his time in a rented studio in Birmingham. In 2011 he moved to Atlanta, where he continues to create visual art in many mediums and has developed a following for his genre-bending music. Holley’s work is in the collections of many institutions, including the American Folk Art Museum, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Museum of Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the New Jersey State Museum.

PAUL ARNETT
Lafayette, California

Paul Arnett and William Arnett, eds., Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art of the South, vol. 1 (2000); Andrew Dietz, The Last Folk Hero: A True Story of Race and Art, Power and Profit (2006).

 

Hoppe, Louis

(b. 1812; d. unknown)

Louis Hoppe is little known in the field of Texas art. Biographical information is scant, and Hoppe’s paintings are scarce. Only four paintings—all watercolors currently in the collection of the Witte Museum in San Antonio, Tex.—are known. Images of these paintings, along with a handful of facts about Hoppe’s life and career, were first presented in Cecilia Steinfeldt’s landmark Art for History’s Sake: The Texas Collection of the Witte Museum. Steinhardt’s research revealed that Hoppe was a German immigrant who worked as a laborer on the east Texas farms of Johann Leyendecker and Julius Meyenberg.

Although Hoppe is often described as an “itinerant” laborer, additional information about Hoppe, including a very thoughtful letter he sent back to his hometown of Koblenz, Germany, after his arrival in the United States, presents the image of a man who was well educated and well spoken. Hoppe was born the son of a soldier in the Prussian army in 1812, and in 1851 he was married. Just two months later his wife passed away. Hoppe left Germany the following year, arriving in 1852 in New York, where he decided to become a painter.

Shortly after his arrival in the United States, Hoppe traveled to Texas, where in the early 1860s he painted all of his known works. One of the watercolors, Julius Meyenberg’s Farm, includes on its front a painted caption, which, in English, reveals that the farm is located on a bluff over William Creek in a settlement by La Grange. A more important function of this, and indeed all of Hoppe’s paintings, is the wealth of pictorial information on a place and time neither frequently depicted by artists nor readily captured by camera.

The main elements of the painting—the farmhouse, garden, animals, and family members—are executed in the simple, linear style and frontal perspective typical of the work of self-taught artists. While the house, the center of family and farm life, is the largest element in Hoppe’s painting, the elements of nature, most notably the garden, surrounding trees, and family horse predominate. The supremacy of nature is further underscored by the representation of Meyenberg’s family as dwarfed by his property and the many natural blessings of Texas.

Whereas Hoppe obscured the farmhouse in the Meyenberg painting, in his depiction of the Leyendecker farm the farmhouse is given a much more prominent role. In Art for History’s Sake, Steinfeldt describes in detail the architectural and historic importance of the house, and Hoppe himself was clearly aware of the importance of this building, as it is the house and cleared land around it that dominate the painting. Nature is lushly displayed on the perimeter, but on center stage are the industrious efforts of humans.

The two other paintings by Hoppe—still lifes of bunches of wildflowers—reflect Hoppe’s German heritage. These two watercolor and ink works, one entitled Zur Errinerung, or In Memory, belong to a Germanic tradition of commemorating life events with small works on paper. These works, which may have been made as personal commemorations or given as gifts, draw on the same precedents as frakturs. Like his landscapes, these still lifes return to a celebration of nature. Though not as dense with detail as the two farm paintings, Hoppe’s still lifes reflect his commitment to an earnest pictorial description of the world he inhabited. When combined with his farmhouse paintings, the work of Hoppe may be seen as perpetuating a myth of the West where on the frontier Mother Nature meets the taming efforts of human nature.

A. KATE SHEERIN
Witte Museum

Pauline A. Pinckney, Painting in Texas: The Nineteenth Century (1967); Cecilia Steinfeldt, Art for History’s Sake: The Texas Collection of the Witte Museum (1993).

 

Hudson, Julien

(ca. 1811–1844)

Most likely the son of London-born John Thomas Hudson, a ship chandler and ironmonger, and Suzanne Désirée Marcos, a free quadroon, Julien Hudson is thought to have been a free man of color. However, he is not listed as such, as was the custom, in the 1838 New Orleans City Directory. Like his racial identity, the date of his birth has been a matter of intense scrutiny for many years, but scholars have recently determined his birth date as 9 January 1811. Hudson’s father apparently did not live with the family after about 1820, but his mother maintained a comfortable standard of living, owing to presumed support from her husband in addition to her and her mother’s real estate investments. Julien probably studied grammar, mathematics, and other subjects with a private tutor in the French Quarter at their home on Bienville Street near Bourbon. In 1826–27 he studied art with itinerant Antonio Meucci, a drawing instructor, restorer, and painter of miniatures and opera scenery. Upon his grandmother’s death, Hudson inherited part of Françoise Leclerc’s $7,000 estate in 1829, which allowed him to pursue further study in Paris. When he returned in 1831, Hudson advertised his services as a portrait painter, noting both his training with Meucci and a “complete course of study . . . as a miniature painter” in Paris.

Hudson remained in New Orleans until at least 1832. He may have traveled to other cities in the United States before returning to Paris in 1837 to study with Alexandre-Denis Abel de Pujol, a student of Jacques-Louis David. The second trip was cut short, perhaps because of the death of his sisters and legal difficulties incurred by his mother, and Hudson returned to New Orleans. He maintained a residence at 120 Bienville Street, though he appears in the City Directory as an artist only in the years 1837–38. All of the surviving paintings with secure attributions date to the late period. George David Coulon studied, at least briefly, with Hudson in 1840. Hudson died in 1844.

Only two works can be securely attributed to Hudson; one portrait has been identified since the 1930s as a self-portrait, and the other is a verified likeness of Jean Michel Fortier III. Two additional paintings have recently been discovered with plausible attributions to Hudson’s hand. Hudson’s portraits possess a stasis and rigidity that betray an intractable connection to folk painting. Strikingly absent is any sign of Parisian academic training. The Self Portrait in particular, given its tiny scale and cut-off oval format, suggests Hudson’s training as an artisan maker of miniatures. Minute wisps of paint delineate each hair with the rigorous precision of one accustomed to working on a very small scale. Hudson’s crisp modeling and the unflinching gaze of his sitters imbue his polished, gemlike compositions with an undeniable power and make compelling statements about self-perception, identity, and social status.

RICHARD A. LEWIS
Louisiana State Museum, New Orleans

Patricia Brady, International Review of African American Art (1995); New Orleans Bee (6 June 1831); David C. Driskell, Two Centuries of Black American Art (1976); Robert Glenck, Handbook and Guide to the Louisiana State Museum (1934); John Burton Harter and Mary Louise Tucker, The Louisiana Portrait Gallery: The Louisiana State Museum, vol. 1, To 1870 (1979); Historic New Orleans Collection, Encyclopedia of New Orleans Artists (1987); Regina A. Perry, Selections of 19th Century Afro-American Artists (1976); James Amos Porter, Ten Afro-American Artists of the Nineteenth Century (1967); William Keyse Rudolph, Patricia Brady, and Erin Greenwauld, In Search of Julien Hudson: Free Artist of Color in Pre-Civil War New Orleans (2011); Anne C. Van Denvanter and Alfred V. Frankenstein, American Self-Portraits, 1670–1973 (1974).

 

Hunter, Clementine

(1886 or 1887–1988)

The granddaughter of slaves, Clementine Hunter was born Clemence Reuben in late 1886 or early 1887. When she was a teenager, she moved with her family to Melrose Plantation, near Natchitoches, La. Working as a field hand, as a domestic servant, and finally as an artist, Hunter remained at Melrose for most of her life. She married twice and gave birth to seven children. As a domestic worker, Hunter came to know the writers and artists that Cammie Henry, the mistress of the plantation, welcomed to Melrose. Hunter’s observations of the artwork of Henry’s guests undoubtedly inspired Hunter to try her hand at painting. Regular guests, writer James Register and François Mignon, who had been born Frank Mineah in New York but reinvented himself as a French art critic, became early patrons. These supporters helped with finances, collected art supplies, and encouraged Hunter to paint the farming scenes, river baptisms, wakes, and funerals that they knew would appeal to collectors. Mignon also suggested that Hunter paint the 1955 panoramic murals of farming, worship, and social life that decorate the African House, described by the Historical Building Survey as the only Kongo-style structure built by enslaved blacks in the United States. Scholars have also noticed possible influences from France and creolized Caribbean architecture.

Hunter’s primary inspiration was her appreciation of African American life. Clementine Hunter summed up her four-decade long career: “I paint the history of my people. My paintings tell how we worked, played, and prayed.” With bold stokes of saturated color, Hunter remembers the work performed by African Americans at Melrose: washing clothes in huge iron pots, shaking pecan trees and gathering the nuts, slaughtering hogs, and, of course, working in the cotton fields. Quilts that depict the main house and other plantation buildings demonstrate aesthetic preferences identified as African: large sections of solid, contrasting colors, irregular but rhythmic sashing, and appliqué. Equally vibrant are paintings of favorite pastimes such as fishing, playing cards, and dancing.

The remaining works, like much of southern folk art, address religious life. Hunter, however, does not share the evangelical fervor of the many Protestant preacher-artists. With French, Irish, American Indian, and African American ancestry, Hunter belonged to a distinctive community of Creoles of color who have lived in Natchitoches Parish for more than 250 years. Hunter, who spoke only French until she married Emanuel Hunter when she was in her thirties, was proud of her Creole heritage, defined not only by ethnicity but also by Catholic faith. Hunter had received her brief education from French-speaking nuns, and until her death she was a member of St. Augustine’s Catholic Church, the first Catholic parish in the United States founded by and for persons of color. Hunter’s paintings of religious life reflect her Catholic background and familiarity with Catholic sacred art.

Unlike the creations of southern Protestants, Hunter’s works are not Bible based. While Hunter certainly knew Bible stories from her attendance at the Baptist Church, where she enjoyed singing, her only biblical scenes are nativities and crucifixions. All adopt aesthetic preferences often associated with Catholic art—centrality of important figures, symmetry as shown in pairs of candles and urns, and hazy pink and blue backgrounds that emphasize the otherworldliness of the sacred figures. Holy cards, inexpensive devotional prints that have long disseminated Catholic visual culture, are likely sources. The more than 100 crucifixions Hunter painted of a black Jesus are clearly based on Catholic prints. Her masterful Cotton Crucifixion (1970) is a particularly powerful adaptation of holy cards that depict a reciprocal relationship between a localized suffering black Jesus and a community of color.

Hunter’s Catholic faith, however, did not deny her the expressive worship of Protestant neighbors. Her paintings of river baptisms and revivals attest to her familiarity with those most Protestant of services. Her paintings of wakes and funerals record shared community values. Hunter’s many wedding paintings, in which solemn brides tower over both grooms and diminutive peripheral ministers, show Hunter’s feelings toward marriage.

Hunter’s memory paintings, estimated in the thousands, are a nuanced history of a place on the verge of change. Before her death in 1988, at the age of 100 or 101, Hunter had witnessed the mechanization of farming and the migration of African Americans to urban centers. Most importantly, African Americans had become outspoken about racial injustice. In 1955 Hunter had not been allowed to attend the opening of her exhibition at a “white” college but had had to sneak in on Sunday with a professor who had keys to the locked gallery. By 1988 Clementine Hunter was a celebrated artist featured in seminal books on folk art, profiled in magazines, and collected by important museums. Hunter’s works can be seen at the American Folk Art Museum, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Louisiana State Museum, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art, the Morris Museum, and the Dallas Museum of Art. The Association for the Preservation of Historic Natchitoches maintains the Melrose Historic Plantation Complex, which is a National Historic Landmark.

CHERYL RIVERS
Brooklyn, New York

Robert Bishop, Folk Painters of America (1979); Carol Crown and Charles Russell, eds., Sacred and Profane: Voice and Vision in Southern Self-Taught Art (2007); David C. Driskell, Two Centuries of Black American Art (1976); Shelby R. Gilley, Painting by Heart: The Life and Art of Clementine Hunter, Louisiana Folk Artist (2000); Herbert W. Hemphill Jr. and Julia Weissman, Twentieth-Century American Folk Art and Artists (1974); François Mignon, Plantation Memo: Plantation Life in Louisiana, 1750–1970, and Other Matter (1972); Art Shiver and Tom Whitehead, Clementine Hunter: The African House Murals (2005); James L. Wilson, Clementine Hunter, American Folk Artist (1990).

 

Hussey, Billy Ray

(b. 1955)

Billy Ray Hussey was born in Moore County, in central North Carolina, in 1955. The great-grandson of traditional potter J. H. Owens and grandnephew of potter Melvin L. Owens, Hussey grew up steeped in the rich heritage of 19th-century utilitarian ware. By the age of 10 he was working in M. L. Owens’s shop, learning every aspect of making ware from preparing the clay to turning vessels, glazing, and firing. By age 20, he was working on his own for M. L. and for his cousin, Vernon Owens, at Jugtown Pottery. Hussey turned pottery and hand-sculpted figural pieces.

In 1979 a customer ordered several small, unsigned pottery lions based on images from William Wiltshire’s book Folk Pottery of the Shenandoah Valley, published in 1975. Some of these lions had made their way from southwestern Virginia into the marketplace, causing a stir because of their resemblance to lions made by the famous Bell potters of the Shenandoah. Once collectors discovered that Hussey was the lions’ maker, Hussey received considerable attention. He began signing his work “BH” and “Owens Pottery.” After acquiring his own kiln, Hussey dropped the “Owens Pottery” designation.

By the 1980s, Hussey was working as a full-time potter. Although it was 1988 before he completed his own operational shop and kiln, by 1986 he had begun to have kiln openings once or twice a year. Hussey began numbering the sale on each piece. In recent years he has been signing his work with a recumbent B, with the kiln sale number inscribed in the curves of the letter. Thus, pieces can be roughly dated by number and signature. In 2007, when he completed kiln no. 54, Hussey estimated that he had produced nearly 3,000 pieces.

Around 1990, Hussey began working with entrepreneurs who had established a company, the Southern Folk Pottery Collectors Society, to sell traditional southern pottery and to promote and sell Hussey’s pottery. By 1994, Hussey and his wife, Susan, were owners of the company. Twice a year they conduct sales of consigned traditional pottery, producing a catalog with information about each piece. Hussey markets his own work through events sponsored by the Southern Folk Pottery Collectors Society.

Billy Ray Hussey’s early work reflected images created by English Staffordshire potters: small animals of every kind, some on bases, some freestanding. With considerable imagination and wit, he also began to introduce new forms of turned pieces and figurals. A quirky human head serves as a bank; a wall pocket sports a grinning, bearded face; a small jug takes the shape of a toothy boar.

While Hussey works within the tradition of southern utilitarian pottery, his remarkable creativity establishes him as a major contemporary folk artist. His work may be seen at the McKissick Museum, the American Folk Art Museum, the Chrysler Museum, and the Mint Museum.

BARRY G. HUFFMAN
Hickory, North Carolina

Ellin Gordon, Barbara Luck, and Tom Patterson, Flying Free: Twentieth Century Self-Taught Art from the Collection of Ellin and Baron Gordon (1998); Stacy C. Hollander and Brooke Davis Anderson, American Anthem: Masterworks from the American Folk Art Museum (2001); Billy Ray Hussey, North Carolina Visionary Potter (1997); Chuck Rosenak and Jan Rosenak, Contemporary American Folk Art: A Collector’s Guide (1996).

 

Hutson, Charles Woodward

(1840–1936)

Charles Woodward Hutson was born 23 September 1840 into the genteel antebellum culture of Southern aristocracy in McPhersonville, S.C., only to enlist as a soldier in the Confederate effort for independence. He later studied and, after passing his bar exams, practiced law. The majority of his early adult years, however, were spent at his beloved occupation as an itinerant scholar and professor teaching a remarkable variety of subjects with erudition at mostly private schools, colleges, and universities throughout the South. He taught languages including Greek, German, French, Italian, and Spanish. His boyhood absorption of classical literature including Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, and Sir Walter Scott led to his offering courses in literature. In addition he taught metaphysics, moral philosophy, and history.

It was only after he retired at 68 and moved his family of 10 children to New Orleans that his eldest child, daughter Ethel, an artist and later administrator at the Isaac Delgado Museum of Art, encouraged him to pursue yet another career as a practicing artist. For the next thirty years, without any formal training, he engaged in this field of endeavor with remarkably successful results.

The first phase of his work focused mainly on pastel drawings, executed en plein air, of scenes of New Orleans and its City Park as well as the landscape of south Louisiana, the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and recollections of the southern countryside where he had previously lived. While faithful to the view, his artwork took on elements of reduction and abstraction. His landscapes effectively captured the environment, its light and atmosphere, with a deftness of stroke and highly inventive and beautiful color sense. Later having gained confidence as a creator, he ventured into different media, primarily watercolor and oils, with more ambitious compositions and subject matter. Mining his vast knowledge of literature, mythology, and history, he chose to illustrate scenes from those sources while seemingly making the images with their obscure iconography a deliberate test for the viewer. He worked at his art daily until the time of his death in New Orleans on 27 May 1936 at the age of 95.

The career of this self-taught artist did not go unnoticed in the art world but was lauded in the press and by the public. First presented publicly in 1917 at the Society of Independent Artists in New York and again there in 1925, Hutson was awarded his first solo exhibition in 1931 at his hometown’s museum, the Isaac Delgado Museum of Art (now the New Orleans Museum of Art), where 46 of his oils were displayed. There were two subsequent solo exhibitions presented posthumously at that institution in 1948 and 1965, the latter with a color-illustrated catalog. In 1945 Hutson was featured in an exhibition of the work of self-taught artists at the Phillips Memorial Gallery (now the Phillips Collection) where Washington, D.C., collector Duncan Phillips purchased three of Hutson’s works for his personal collection. New York art dealer and scholar Sidney Janis included Charles Hutson in his milestone book of 1942, They Taught Themselves. In 2008 the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans presented a two-person exhibition pairing the work of father and daughter.

WILLIAM A. FAGALY
New Orleans Museum of Art

William A. Fagaly, Folk Art (Fall 1997); Sidney Janis, They Taught Themselves (1942).

 

Jaquelin-Brodnax Limner

(birth and death dates unknown)

The most important paintings to survive for the first quarter of the 18th century in Virginia include 11 oil-on-canvas portraits created for the Jaquelin and Brodnax families living in Jamestown and Yorktown. Although the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts attributes these portraits to Nehemiah Partridge, the identity of the artist remains speculative. The pseudonym for the unidentified artist is based in these family names, although the same hand may have created one portrait for the Custis family. There may have been at least three painters present in Virginia during the period—Peter Wagener from London, an unidentified artist mentioned by Robert “King” Carter in 1727, and a York County resident named Robert Dowsing, whose inventory at the time of his death in 1737 contained a large number of portrait-painting materials.

Whoever the artist was, it is evident that his or her skill probably focused more on utilitarian work than easel painting. The dearth of artists in Virginia during the time surely served as an inducement to some house and ornamental painters to try their hands by creating these and perhaps other, now-lost likenesses. As a whole, the pictures are flat and linear in quality but bold in their coloration and brushwork. The manner in which the sitters are posed and some aspects of their costumes were inspired by printed images of British royalty; prints of this type were inexpensive and commonly owned in the colonies.

Large groups of family portraits executed at or about the same time and usually by one artist were especially common in the colonial South. Like these extraordinary survivals, they illustrate the cultural importance of patriarchal and dynastic relationships in colonial America.

CAROLYN J. WEEKLEY
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

Mary Black, American Art Journal (1980); Graham Hood, Charles Bridges and William Dering: Two Virginia Painters, 1735–1750 (1978).

 

Jeffery, Edwin, Jr.

(b. 1949)

Self-taught sculptor Edwin Wendell Jeffery Jr. is among a short list of noted African American vernacular artists from Memphis, Tenn., including Joe Light, Hawkins Bolden, Henry and Georgia Speller, and Frank “Preacher” Boyle. Jeffery creates wooden, mostly bas-relief works that often invite controversy while embracing religious, social, and historical themes relevant to his life as an African American who came of age during the civil rights struggle (joining Martin Luther King Jr. in a march once left Jeffery tear-gassed and beaten).

Raised by his paternal grandparents and father, Jeffery was instilled with a strong sense of faith and community from a young age; he serves as a steward at the same Methodist church he has attended from infancy. Although he was the son of a carpenter, Jeffery became a firefighter in 1973, noting with pride that he was 1 of only 39 African Americans on the force at the time. He made the rank of lieutenant before retiring.

In 1975 Jeffery saw a publication on hand-carved gunstocks and became intrigued. He read some books on the subject, bought $100 worth of tools, and spent $70 on a carving seminar, the only training he ever received. His first piece was a small pine plaque of a Case knife. Since then, he has created hundreds, if not thousands, of pieces and continues to carve almost daily.

Jeffery, who works with both prepared and found wood, says the grain often tells him what to carve. Working on his back porch, he eschews industrial tools such as band saws and mechanical sanders and instead bows, carves, and sands entirely by hand. He then paints his sculptures in acrylic and coats the finished piece in polyurethane. Jeffery prefers exotic woods, especially those from Africa including wenge, zebrawood, padauk, and his favorite, African mahogany. Symbolic connections of African wood to the African American themes in his sculptures are not lost on the artist.

Jeffery rejects the label “folk artist” and considers himself a storyteller. Acting as a witness to history, he operates not unlike Sam Doyle as a modern equivalent to the West African griot or djeli and says he feels an obligation to remember what is in danger of being forgotten. As a result, his themes are often ripe with a sense of social and moral justice, black pride, and black pain. Subjects include startling images of lynching and the Ku Klux Klan as well as iconic cultural figures from James Brown and Isaac Hayes to many that feature Dr. King and, recently, President Barack Obama. Most of his subject matter, however, is religious—an acknowledgment, he says, of his God-given talent. Sacred motifs include wooden Bibles and a variety of Old and New Testament subjects.

Jeffery admits the need for recognition as a motivating factor in his work, and he has given away many pieces to museums, churches, hospitals, and the like in an effort to become better known. Some of his more topically charged pieces are a result of this desire, of which he has said, “Maybe somebody’ll get mad enough to remember my name!” Among such pieces are an African American in KKK garb, a vision of heaven with a “colored only” sign, and a reverse image of vaudeville-era blackface entertainer Al Jolson done up in white face. Yet others have been unfairly maligned, he says, noting an effigy of Memphis’s first black mayor, W. W. Herenton, called City Boss, that was banned from a city exhibition for Black History Month because of a mistaken correlation to infamous Memphis politico E. H. “Boss” Crump.

Jeffery’s work has been likened to that of African American vernacular sculptors Elijah Pierce, Leroy Almon, and Herbert Singleton. His work can be found in the collections of the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.

WILLIAM L. ELLIS
Saint Michael’s College

“Banned in Bluff City,” Oxford American (October–November 1996); Jennifer Hambrick, Short North Gazette (July 2005).

 

Jennings, James Harold

(1931–1999)

James Harold Jennings lived in Pinnacle, N.C., a rural crossroads not far from Winston-Salem. He was a familiar figure often seen bicycling to the nearest convenience store. A loner, a recluse, an eccentric figure in appearance and behavior, Jennings was soft-spoken but intense. After his mother died, he moved into an old bus, the first of the five decommissioned school and church buses he eventually acquired. Jennings used one bus for sleeping, one for making art, and the others for storage. The comfortable brick house he inherited became uninhabitable because it was “too full of junk.”

The death of Jennings’s mother was an impetus for his art making. He began making art from cast-off lumber and house paint and marked the front of his property with a fence embellished with wooden figures and designs. Additions to the original fence became tall structures, and Jennings wore an assortment of tool belts that held everything he needed as he leaped from one structure to another, adding an Indian here, a Ferris wheel there, a jumble of whirligigs, and his trademark symbols: the moon, sun, and stars.

Home-schooled through the sixth grade, Jennings had a love of old dictionaries; he collected and often presented an unusual word to a visitor as if he were offering a magical talisman—“metempsychosis” was one of his favorites. Other sculptures, especially his “Bad Girl” series, utilized sayings such as “School Girl Sits on a Bully” and “Bad Girl Beats Hell Out of the Devil.” Many depict so-called Amazon women beating or wrestling with men. Perhaps Jennings found his subjects during a brief job as a projectionist for an outdoor movie theater that showed pornographic films.

In the early 1980s, Jennings’s colors were limited to red, yellow, blue, and white. The wood he used was rough and splintery. Animals, Indians, angels, birds, and a few self-portraits were his main themes. In the late 1980s, he started using a wider variety of colors, and his cuts were more calculated. The Amazon women appeared at that time, and he began to paint in what became his characteristic style—an all-over, optical-dot pattern, applied with the end of a stick.

Over time, Jennings became increasingly paranoid, building a fortresslike fence and occasionally shooting over visitors’ heads when they approached. He took his own life on his 69th birthday, the day of the Columbine school shootings, apparently too disturbed to continue.

Jennings’s work is in the collection of the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore and the Art Museum of Western Virginia in Roanoke.

ANN OPPENHIMER
Folk Art Society of America

David J. Brown, Folk Art Messenger (Spring 2002); Ann Oppenhimer, Intuitive Art: Three Folk Artists: Abe Criss, Howard Finster, and James Harold Jennings (1986); Ann Oppenhimer and George Jacobs, Folk Art Messenger (Spring 1999).

 

Jiménez, Nicario

(b. 1957)

Known as the “Artist of the Andes,” Nicario Jiménez now lives in Naples, Fla., where he creates traditional retablos (altars) that take as their subjects biblical stories, scenes of wooden boxes like in his native Peru, and political and humorous commentaries on life in the United States. Born in a small village near Ayacucho in the high Peruvian mountains, he comes from a family of retablo makers. He attended the University of San Cristobal de Huamanga in Ayacucho, where he says he began learning about his identity, a theme that inspired his art making.

Retablos in the form of wooden boxes that open to reveal figures in elaborately composed environments date to the 16th century, when Spanish priests carried them throughout the mountains to teach village people about Catholic saints. Indigenous people later adapted the genre to communicate their own beliefs and experiences. In Jiménez’s hometown, retablos were used to respond to the presence of the Shining Path, the military group that terrorized much of Peru from the 1970s through the 1990s. Retablos dealt with violence, destruction, and flight for survival. Dealers began purchasing Jiménez’s retablos when he lived in Lima. For fear of reprisal, the artist hid his work that commented on the Shining Path’s destruction. However, visitors who saw these political retablos encouraged him to address contemporary subjects. Unrest in the Andes eventually resulted in Jiménez’s moving with his family to Lima and, later, to the United States.

Inspired by his great-grandfather, who made retablos of St. Mark, Jiménez began making his own retablos at the age of five or six. He also learned from his father, whose retablos mostly depicted scenes of everyday life. Jiménez continues to make traditional retablos that depict the history, religion, and everyday life of the Andean people in Peru. These retablos include bar scenes, hat shops, and the Amazon jungle.

However, Jiménez also incorporated scenes from big cities such as New York and commentary on the segregated South and life under Jim Crow. More humorous retablos detail experiences such as getting a tooth pulled in a dentist’s office or giving birth to a baby. Jiménez makes his figures with a mixture of boiled potatoes and gypsum powder. The artist makes dozens of figures at a time and then selects individual pieces from his collection to tell a narrative. He fashions the figures with his hands, using only one wooden tool that looks like a large toothpick. After he dries the small sculptures for at least three to four hours, he carefully paints them.

Nicario Jiménez is now internationally known for his exuberant work. He has exhibited in Ecuador, Venezuela, Canada, Korea, the United States.

KRISTIN G. CONGDON
University of Central Florida

Kristin G. Congdon and Tina Bucuvalas, Just above the Water: Florida Folk Art (2006); Carol Damian and Steve Stein, eds., Popular Art and Social Change in the Retablos of Nicario Jiménez Quispe (2004).

 

Johnson, Anderson

(1916–1998)

While playing in his father’s cornfield in Lunenburg County, Va., eight-year-old Anderson Johnson had a vision of Jesus that changed his life and directed him on a path of preaching the Lord’s Gospel—first as a chosen child, later as a street preacher who gathered a crowd by drawing with either hand and even with his toes. Johnson joined the famous Daddy Grace (Charles Manuel Grace), founder of the United Church of Prayer for All People. Johnson preached with him in such places as Miami, Savannah, and New York. By then Johnson was incorporating music into his ministry. In the 1950s Johnson made recordings of old-time Gospel favorites such as “God Don’t Like It,” “Let That Liar Pass on By,” and “If I Could Hear My Mother Pray Again.”

After settling in Newport News, Va., in the early 1980s, Johnson opened Faith Mission, a storefront church where he regularly conducted church services and inspired his tiny congregation with his slide guitar and rowdy piano playing, accompanied by his inimitable, raspy singing. When questioned, he often said, “I don’t play the blues, I plays the Gospel.”

The exterior of the ramshackle church proclaimed God’s message in painted images and biblical texts. Interior walls were covered three- or four-deep with paintings of Jesus, U.S. presidents and their wives, and women in fancy dresses and matching hats. Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and George Washington were his favorite subjects. The prolific artist claimed to have at least 2,000 paintings on display. He painted with house paint on cardboard, canvas board, and whatever surfaces he could find, including Formica counter tops and asbestos stove mats.

Johnson’s second-floor living quarters were painted with life-size figures of men in fedoras and stylish suits, standing beside women with transparent dresses (later painted over). These murals were conserved by a grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and are in Newsome House, an African American history museum in Newport News. Faith Mission was demolished in 1997, despite efforts of local folk art preservationists. Johnson decorated a second home where he preached, but it never achieved the aesthetic quality or density level of his first church.

Johnson’s work is in the collections of Hampton University, the Baron and Ellin Art Galleries, Old Dominion University, and the Longwood Center for the Visual Arts.

ANN OPPENHIMER
Folk Art Society of America

Carol Crown and Charles Russell, eds., Sacred and Profane: Voice and Vision in Self-Taught Art (2007); David Levinson, Folk Art Messenger (Winter 1997); Ann Oppenhimer, Folk Art Messenger (Summer 1998).

 

Johnson, Joshua

(b. ca. 1762; d. unknown)

Joshua Johnson was born in Baltimore County, Md., around 1762, the son of an unidentified slave woman owned by William Wheeler Sr. Joshua’s white father, George Johnson, about whom very little is known, purchased the boy from Wheeler on 6 October 1764 for £25 current money of Maryland. On 15 July 1782 George Johnson manumitted his son, who was in the process of completing his apprenticeship to Baltimore blacksmith William Forepaugh.

Nothing is known of Joshua Johnson’s activities in the years between his manumission and the appearance of his name in the first Baltimore city directory, published in 1796. In 1798 Johnson placed an advertisement in the Baltimore Intelligencer in which he referred to himself as a “self-taught genius, deriving from nature and industry his knowledge of the Art; and having experienced many insuperable obstacles in the pursuit of his studies.” This is the earliest known use of the term “self-taught” in reference to an untrained American artist. His only signed work, Sarah Ogden Gustin, is generally believed to have been painted sometime between 1798 and 1802 in Berkeley Springs, W.Va., where Sarah Gustin lived. As a free man, Johnson could have traveled as an itinerant artist, although it is also possible that Sarah and her husband, Robert Gustin, traveled to Baltimore, where Johnson painted the portrait.

Johnson lived in Fells Point, a shipbuilding and commercial center on Baltimore’s waterfront. Many of the portraits attributed to him are of local merchants, mariners, or prosperous tradesmen. The only painting linked to him through documentary evidence is Rebecca Myring Everett and Her Children (1818). In a list of legacies made September 1831 and revised 22 August 1833, Rebecca Everett left “the large Family Painting of my self & 5 children Painted by J Johnson in 1818” to her eldest daughter.

Approximately 83 portraits are attributed to Johnson, none of them dating beyond 1825. His style is similar to that of other self-taught painters active in the Mid-Atlantic region in the early years of the Republic. These artists include Charles Peale Polk, John Drinker, Jacob Frymire, Frederick Kemmelmyer, and Caleb Boyle. Johnson’s family group portraits also show similarities with those of Ralph E. W. Earl.

Joshua Johnson last appears in the Baltimore city directory for 1824. It is unknown when and where he died. Numerous institutions hold portraits that Johnson painted; among them are the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Maryland Historical Society, the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Chrysler Museum of Art.

JENNIFER BRYAN
Nimitz Library U.S. Naval Academy

Jennifer Bryan and Robert Torchia, Archives of American Art Journal (1996); Deborah Chotner, American Naive Painting (1992); Carolyn J. Weekley and Stiles Tuttle Colwill, Joshua Johnson: Freeman and Early American Portrait Painter (1987).

 

Johnston, Daniel

(b. 1961)

Daniel Dale Johnston was born 22 January 1961 in Sacramento, Calif., the fifth child of Mabel and Bill Johnston. After a move to Utah, the family settled in New Cumberland, W.Va. Fascinated with comic books, Johnston began drawing his own comics when he was eight years old. His influences included both comic superheroes and the tenets of Christian fundamentalism.

By the time Johnston entered high school, he was exhibiting signs of depression. He spent much of his time alone drawing and playing the piano. He briefly attended Abilene Christian University in Texas and then returned to his parents’ home in West Virginia. He subsequently enrolled in the East Liverpool branch of Kent State University, where he studied art and fell in love with a woman who was engaged to someone else. His personal isolation and the pain of this unrequited love resulted in a creative period of drawing, filmmaking, songwriting, and recording cassettes that he released himself. Johnston became obsessed with achieving fame and suffered bouts of depression and mania that were eventually diagnosed as bipolar disorder.

After dropping out of college in 1982, Johnston first moved to Houston and then to San Marcos, Tex., where he lived with siblings and continued his creative activities while working odd jobs. He suffered a nervous breakdown. Fearing that his family was plotting to have him institutionalized, he joined a traveling carnival, ended up in Austin, and eventually took up residence in a back room of a church. He got a job at a McDonald’s restaurant and became a regular fixture on the section of Guadalupe Street near the University of Texas known as the Drag, where he peddled his recorded cassettes. The local press took note of Johnston’s music, and he became a favorite in the Austin music scene. However, he also dabbled in marijuana and LSD, which, combined with the bipolar disorder, resulted in paranoia and delusions and led to a series of stays in psychiatric hospitals. His condition is now under control through medications.

Johnston creates his works of art on paper using felt-tip markers, ballpoint pens, pencils, and watercolor. Many of the cartoonlike drawings seem to represent hallucinatory visions populated by the comic-book characters of his youth, especially Captain America and Casper the Friendly Ghost, and those of his own invention. Bizarre hybrid figures, female nudes, and decapitated torsos interact with one another in unusual and sometimes difficult to decipher tableaux. Much of the work includes social commentary, and the devil appears frequently. Other pieces refer to Johnston’s personal struggles. He often depicts himself as a figure with the top of its head sliced off. His most recognized character is undoubtedly a froglike creature, Jeremiah the Innocent. The subject of a mural he created in 1992, now an Austin landmark, Jeremiah has reached iconic status, appearing on commercial items, including T-shirts, and has been reproduced as a collectible toy available in several colors.

Johnston has emerged as an international cult figure. He maintains an extensive tour schedule as a musician. Numerous recording artists have covered his songs, and his visual art has received widespread recognition. The year 2006 saw the release of an acclaimed documentary about his life, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, the winner of the Director’s Award at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. Johnston’s drawings were included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial and in the 2008 Liverpool Biennial. Johnston resides in Waller, Tex.

LYNNE ADELE
Austin, Texas

Irwin Chusid, Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music (2002); Jeff Feuerzeig, dir., The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2005); Michael Hall, Texas Monthly (February 2005); Randy Kennedy, “Man-Child in the Promised Land,” New York Times (19 February 2006).

 

Johnston, Henrietta

(ca. 1674–1729)

Henrietta Johnston was the first known pastellist and professional female artist to work in the American colonies. She was born Henrietta de Beaulieu in France to French Huguenots Cezar de Beaulieu and his wife, Susannah. Cezar was a Calvinist pastor who fled to England from Quentin, France (near St. Brieuc) about 1685. Although the sophistication of her pastel drawings suggests that she may have had some formal training, nothing is known of Johnston’s education. Her work has been compared to the work of Irish-born artists Edmund Ashfield and Edward Luttrell, either of whom may have taught or influenced her.

In 1694 she married Robert Dering and moved to Ireland. The artist produced her earliest known works in Ireland after the death of her husband, about 1700. One of the most poignant of these is a recently discovered posthumous portrait of her daughter, Helena, drawn about 1704. In 1705 Henrietta married Gideon Johnston, who in 1708 became commissary for the bishop of London at St. Philip’s Church in Charleston, S.C. Evidence suggests that, once in Charleston, Johnston contributed significantly to the family income by drawing portraits of many of Charleston’s French Huguenot residents and prominent members of St. Philip’s Church. Disheartened by debt and misfortune in colonial South Carolina, Gideon acknowledged this support in a 1709 letter written to the bishop of London: “Were it not for the Assistance my wife gives me by drawing of Pictures (which can last but a little time in a place so ill peopled) I shou’d not have been able to live.”

Johnston’s work can be divided into three periods: the Irish period (ca. 1704–5), the period in Charleston prior to Gideon’s death (1708–15), and the period between Gideon’s death in 1716 and Henrietta’s own death in 1729, during which time she worked in Charleston and briefly in New York before returning to Charleston, where she lived until her death. The extant Irish works are all waist-length portraits and show the most attention to detail with well-defined facial features, careful attention to the apparel of the sitters, and dramatic background shading. Some of the Charleston portraits retain the characteristics of these earlier works, but most are bust-length and show less attention to physical features and clothing details, becoming almost ethereal in the period immediately after Johnston’s husband’s death. In the final period the portraits vary in the quality of detail. The New York portraits are waist-length. The only landscapes attributed to Johnston are those used as backgrounds in her portraits of children. Johnston is not known to have used any medium other than pastels.

Examples of her work are in the collections of the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, the Carolina Art Association / Gibbes Museum of Art, the Greenville County Museum of Art, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

JOHANNA METZGAR BROWN
Old Salem Museums and Gardens

Whaley Batson, Henrietta Johnston: “Who greatly helped . . . by drawing pictures” (1991); John A. Herdeg, Antiques and Fine Art (Spring 2005); Frank J. Klingberg, ed., Carolina Chronicle: The Papers of Commissary Gideon Johnston, 1707–1716 (1946); Margaret Simmons Middleton, Henrietta Johnston of Charles Town, South Carolina: America’s First Pastellist (1966); Martha Severens, The Magazine Antiques (November 1995).

 

Jones, Frank

(ca. 1900–1969)

Frank Jones was born around 1900 in Clarksville, Tex., a descendant of slaves brought by Anglo settlers to Texas from other regions of the American South to labor on cotton plantations. Abandoned by his mother as a small child, Jones was raised mostly by an aunt. He received no formal education and never learned to read or write. Jones made his living performing farm labor and yard work, occasionally traveling to nearby towns to pick up odd jobs.

As a child Jones was told that he was born with a veil over his left eye and that this veil would enable him to see spirits. According to this well-documented and widespread African American folk belief, people born with the veil or caul, a part of the fetal membrane, over their eyes can see and communicate with spirits. Their gift is known as second sight. Jones, who was around the age of nine when he saw his first spirit, described his visionary ability as “looking through a hole” into the spirit world. Throughout his life Jones continued to see supernatural entities, which he interchangeably called “haints” or “devils.” Jones lived quietly for the first 40 years of his life, but a series of disastrous events beginning in 1941 resulted in his spending the rest of his life in and out of prison. In the early 1960s, while serving a life sentence in the Texas Department of Corrections Huntsville Unit known as “the Walls,” Jones began salvaging paper and stubs of red and blue colored pencils discarded by prison bookkeepers. He began to draw pictures of images he visualized as the result of his veil. He called the drawings “devil houses.”

The prison in Huntsville both inspired the concept of devil houses and provided the visual source for Jones’s structures, always shown in cross section. Jones divided his structures into compartments, cells, or rooms, and bordered each compartment with “devils’ horns,” protruding claw shapes that made the compartments impenetrable. Thus, the grinning haint figures that populated the compartments were at once confined and sheltered. By capturing the haints on paper and containing them in the devil houses, Jones kept them from doing harm. Although Jones’s haints appear friendly and playful, their benign expressions disguise their true objectives. Jones indicated that they smile because “they’re happy, waiting for your soul.” He also explained that they smile “to get you to come closer . . . to drag you down and make you do bad things. They laugh when they do that.”

Jones’s color choices were originally determined by the discarded red and blue bookkeeping pencils available to him. Although he experimented with other colors, he never strayed far from his original scheme of blue and red, which he said represented smoke and fire. The alternation of these contrasting colors and the repetition of shapes create visual tension in the work and allude to the coexistence of the dual, opposing forces of good and evil.

In early 1969, Jones, suffering from advanced liver disease, was admitted to the Wall’s prison infirmary, where he died on 15 February 1969. Today, Jones’s drawings remain among the foremost examples of intuitive art and continue to serve as unique portals into our understanding of African American visionary traditions. Drawings by Jones are in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the High Museum of Art, and the American Folk Art Museum.

LYNNE ADELE
Austin, Texas

Lynne Adele, “Frank Jones: The Psychology and Belief System of a Black Folk Artist” (M.A. thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1987), Spirited Journeys: Self-Taught Texas Artists of the Twentieth Century (1997); Newbell Niles Puckett, Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro (1926).

 

Jones, Shields Landon (S. L.)

(1901–1997)

Born in 1901, Shields Landon “S. L.” Jones grew up in a family of 13 children headed by sharecropper parents on a small rural farm in Indian Mills, Summers County, W.Va. Despite the remote and rugged terrain of the Appalachian Mountains, where subsistence farming was the norm, Jones thrived: he loved the outdoors. During hunting expeditions as he waited for his dog to catch scent, the young hunter taught himself to whittle small carvings of forest creatures. He also loved music and taught himself to play the banjo and fiddle. He won his first fiddling contest before he was a teenager. After attending school for eight years, Jones quit at the age of 17, giving up his dream to become a veterinarian. He went to work for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad as a laborer and carpenter. He later became a shop foreman. Only after he retired in 1967, nearly 50 years later, did Jones return to his boyhood hobby of carving, spurred in part by the death in 1969 of his wife of 45 years. In 1972 Jones remarried and moved to Pine Hill, W.Va., where he constructed a studio behind his house and began to carve in earnest. Making statues of the animals he had loved since childhood and using native woods such as black maple, walnut, or poplar, Jones took his carvings to county fairs. In 1972 his work caught the eye of the legendary art collector Herbert W. Hemphill Jr., a founder of the American Folk Art Museum.

From the small, unpainted carvings of his early years, Jones moved in the mid-1970s to larger figures, sometimes two to three feet tall, with flourishes of paint. Broadening his repertoire to include human subjects, Jones whittled standing figures, such as a preacher holding his Bible or a hunter with his quarry. Among his most celebrated works are figural groups that form a tableau, such as a band of three musicians, each with a fiddle, banjo, or guitar; farming couples; and a man driving his horse-drawn sleigh. Jones also portrayed John Henry, the legendary steel driver, tunneling through nearby Big Bend Mountain, the site where, according to tradition, the former slave tunneled faster than the newly introduced steam-powered driving machine, prevailing against the much-loathed modern device. Jones also made a dapper, almost five-foot statue of himself in his courting days. The artist’s most widely recognized carvings, however, are his life-size and larger portraits that represent “no one in particular” but everyone in general and also include such celebrities as John Henry and Christ. Frontal in pose, abstract in style, and blunt in presentation, such portraits bear a strong familial resemblance, yet each is distinct in appearance and unique in attitude: a woman with a red bow in her hair, a jaunty man with a pipe in his mouth, a series of men with Jones’s characteristic bow ties, a black woman wearing an orange necklace, a stylish white woman with a scarf at her neck. Perhaps most evocative is the torso of the red-robed figure of Jesus, now in the Milwaukee Art Museum. To make such large-sized carvings, Jones roughed out their forms with a chain saw, then shaped them with chisels and rasp, refined them with a knife, and finished by applying various shades of opaque house paint.

For more than 25 years, Jones enjoyed a successful career as an artist. In his later years, he fell ill and was forced to make drawings rather than sculptures. Described as belonging to the first generation of 20th-century self-taught wood-carvers, Jones made extraordinary works of art, which are now found in numerous public and private collections, including the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, the American Folk Art Museum, the Huntington Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

CAROL CROWN
University of Memphis

John Drury, Raw Vision (Spring 2008); Ramonal Lambell and Millard Lampell, with David Larkin, O Appalachia: Artists of the Southern Mountains (1989); Charles B. Rosenak, Goldenseal: A Quarterly Forum for Documenting West Virginia’s Traditional Life (Spring 1982); Chuck Rosenak and Jan Rosenak, Museum of American Folk Art Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century American Folk Art and Artists (1990).

 

Kemmelmeyer, Frederick

(ca. 1755–ca. 1821)

A self-taught artist, Frederick Kemmelmeyer was born in Germany and came to America sometime in the last quarter of the 18th century. He advertised his services in Baltimore in the Maryland Gazette through the years 1788 to 1803 as evening drawing school instructor, limner, sign painter, portrait miniaturist, and portrait painter. Kemmelmeyer also painted military insignia and transparencies used in celebrations, decorated cornices for beds and windows, and gilded mirrors and picture frames. Scholars believed he died in Shepherdstown, W.Va., in 1821.

Portraits and signs of George Washington as military general are Kemmelmeyer’s best-known works. Washington sat for Kemmelmeyer on 2 October 1794. The artist is among the few who depicted Washington’s smallpox scars. Examples of Kemmelmeyer’s various versions of General George Washington Reviewing the Western Army at Fort Cumberland during the Whiskey Rebellion riots of 1794 are held by the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Other historical paintings include the First Landing of Christopher Columbus (ca. 1800–1805), at the National Gallery of Art; General Wayne’s victory over the Miami Indians in Ohio (ca. 1800), at the Winterthur; and the Battle of Cowpens 17th of January, 1781 (1809), at the Yale University Art Gallery. These works were executed using oil paints on canvas, cardboard, or paper.

Kemmelmeyer’s history paintings possess characteristics traditionally associated with a folk style: stylized forms, such as his rendering of horses with perfectly C-shaped necks; attention to minute details; and a flat picture plane. Elements common in his work include gold gilt lettering to describe the scene he depicts, a tree in the right of his compositions, and a rocky foreground with low vegetation.

After 1803 Kemmelmeyer worked as an itinerant portraitist throughout western Maryland, from Chambersburg to Hagerstown and into the Upper Shenandoah region. He also worked in Winchester and Alexandria, Va., in Washington, D.C., and in Chambersburg, Pa. As an itinerant, Kemmelmeyer created many pastel portraits, much less expensive than oil paintings. In 1790 in a Baltimore newspaper, the artist advertised that his half-length portraits, created for a middle-class audience, were “as large as life.” Two such portraits, dated circa 1810 and circa 1815, are held by the Maryland Historical Society. These likenesses, which capture idiosyncratic features such as dimpled and double chins and graying temples, show greater naturalism than his earlier military paintings. Additional examples of Kemmelmeyer’s work can be found in the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts and the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

JACQUELYN GOURLEY
Downingtown, Pennsylvania

Ann Uhry Abrams, American Art Journal (1993); E. Bryding Adams, The Magazine Antiques (January 1984); Robert Bishop, Folk Painters of America (1979); Deborah Chotner, American Naive Paintings (1992); Elizabeth Johns, in 350 Years of Art and Architecture in Maryland, ed. Mary Dean (1984); Karen M. Jones, The Magazine Antiques (July 1981); Cynthia Elyce Rubin, ed., Southern Folk Art (1985); Jean Woods, The Germanic Heritage (1983).

 

Kendrick, Eddie Lee

(1928–1992)

Eddie Lee Kendrick was born on a farm near Stephens, Ark. He lived most of his adult years in rural African American communities near Little Rock, where he was a butcher for a meat packing company. Though he created art throughout his life, the work that survives was created between 1977 and 1992.

Kendrick was an artistic child who drew on grocery sacks and box lids. In his adult years, he drew on cardboard, paper, and fabric with ballpoint pen, pencil, markers, and colored pencils, with which he was especially skilled. During the 1970s and 1980s he combined acrylic paints with drawing media before switching to oil in the 1990s.

Kendrick was inspired by dreams, the landscape of Arkansas, the Bible, and gospel music. “I draw what I dream,” he explained in an interview. “When it comes to me real plain I’m gonna draw it.” Kendrick often awakened in the middle of the night to sketch dream images that then became the bases of his works.

In his earliest extant pictures, Kendrick divided the composition between earthly and heavenly homes. The sky is dominated by large figures of Christ often set amid expressive storm clouds. Below the heavens are neat landscapes dotted with small rural cottages, churches, and urban buildings.

Kendrick included brief texts in earlier works and in the early 1990s began to replace the Christ figure with sizable texts dominating the sky. In one such drawing, Kendrick quoted the opening words of Psalm 121, a favorite biblical passage: “I WILL LIFT UP MY EYES TO THE HILL.” By the mid-1980s the artist also began to replace literal images with visual metaphors. Boats, trains, and planes, all familiar elements in Kendrick’s landscape, now showed the way to eternal life. Most often they flew along a diagonal path toward heaven or toward earth to pick up believers. Kendrick continued to use these visual metaphors until his death in 1992.

The use of heavenly vehicles was possibly inspired by a gospel song he sang, “I’m Going Home on the Morning Train.” Kendrick explained that he often created art in response to the music he loved to sing at church and as a member of gospel groups like Hearts of Joy: “When you get some good music, you can draw about anything.”

In most of Kendrick’s works, guardian angels, set amid storm clouds, observe the scene from a corner of the sky. The artist once explained that he included a guardian angel to watch over the recipient of his art both in good times and in bad times, symbolized by dark clouds.

Eddie Kendrick’s work was unknown outside Arkansas until 1993, when it was included in Passionate Visions of the American South: Self-Taught Artists from 1940 to the Present. In 1998 a retrospective of his work, Eddie Lee Kendrick: A Spiritual Journey, was organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art in cooperation with the Arkansas Arts Center, which holds six of his works in its collection. Works by Kendrick may also be found in the San Diego Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art.

SUSAN TURNER PURVIS
Little Rock, Arkansas

Beti Gunter, Arkansas Gazette (1977); Gary Schwindler, Pictured in My Mind (1995); Alice Rae Yelen, Passionate Visions of the American South: Self-Taught Artists from 1940 to the Present (1993), A Spiritual Journey: The Art of Eddie Lee Kendrick (1998).

 

Kennedy, William W.

(1818–ca. 1870)

William W. Kennedy is included among the small group of artists known informally as the “Prior-Hamblin school.” William Matthew Prior, Sturtevant J. Hamblin, and George G. Hartwell were Maine-born artists working in a stylistically related manner. Their work consisted of two modes of portraiture. Academic portraits included modeling of facial features and drapery and cost as much as $25, whereas paintings in a modified approach of “flat portraits without shade” were advertised for under $3, including the frame, and could be completed in around an hour.

Kennedy’s status within this group of artists has not been conclusively established, although advertisements, inscriptions, and city directories situate his activities near William Prior in both Boston and Baltimore. Despite a growing number of signed and attributed portraits, little biographical information about Kennedy has emerged. He was married to Julia Sarah Richardson in Lowell, Mass., on 21 October 1843. Their three children, Fred, Walter, and Julia, were born in Massachusetts. In 1844 Kennedy was painting in Bridgewater, where he signed and dated portraits of Sally T. (Gardner) Clark and Swallow Clark, whom she had married the year before. In 1845 Kennedy is documented in New Bedford, where he painted the family of rope maker Josiah Bliss. Later that year he advertised a “New Style of Portrait” in the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror (7 July 1845). The signed and dated portrait of Captain David Worth gives compelling visual evidence that this “new style” was in fact strikingly similar to the flat portraits innovated by the Prior-Hamblin School. The advertisement also stated that he was “of Boston,” lending further credence to an early association with the Prior-Hamblin circle of artists. Kennedy continued to move along the seafaring coastal towns of Massachusetts, primarily painting sea captains and other members of the maritime trades, until 1846 when he worked in Ledyard, Conn., and then in Berwick, Me., in 1847.

It is not known why the artist moved to Baltimore during the winter of 1849–50. The 1850 Maryland census lists Kennedy as a 32-year-old portrait painter, a native of New Hampshire, and married with three children. He lived at various addresses between 1853 and 1871. A series of Virginian portraits suggests that Kennedy traveled to eastern Virginia, but patrons could also have traveled to the artist’s studio in Baltimore. At least 14 signed examples of Kennedy’s work have provided the basis for the attribution of a growing number of portraits. An examination of his oeuvre reveals specific characteristics that distinguish his hand from other artists of the Prior-Hamblin School: in particular, the outlining of brows and blunt-tipped noses in a smooth, continuous stroke with uniform white highlights; thick fingers, sometimes curved, with heavy outlining; and a dark line between the upper and lower lips with T-shaped creases at the corners. Portraits attributed to Kennedy can be found in the collections of the Abbey Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum and the New York State Historical Society.

STACY C. HOLLANDER
American Folk Art Museum

Paul S. D’Ambrosio and Charlotte M. Emans, Folk Art’s Many Faces: Portraits in the New York State Historical Association (1987); Nina Fletcher Little, Maine Antiques Digest (April 1976); Beatrix T. Rumford, American Folk Portraits: Paintings and Drawings from the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center (1981).

 

Kinney Family

The Kinney family lived on a small farm in northeast Kentucky near Vanceburg, in rural Lewis County. Collectively, members of the family became well known for their accomplishments as self-taught visual artists. The two Kinney brothers were also widely recognized for their music and their role in maintaining the musical traditions of the region.

Charley Kinney (1906–91) was born with a birth defect that limited his capacity for manual labor. He made oak splint baskets as a young man and used local clay to model a variety of animals and some human busts, including Abraham Lincoln and Moses holding the Ten Commandment tablets. The artist dried his clay pieces on a wood stove, painted these objects, and sold many of them. In the 1950s he took up painting, which became his central occupation from around 1970 until his death. Charley Kinney’s style was rugged and gestural. He made no attempts at strict realism but instead gave way to a bold sense of design. His subject matter was wide ranging, including events of interest to him, scenes from traditional life such as animal-powered farming methods, wonders of nature, emerging technologies such as hot-air balloons, and local lore including numerous depictions of “haints,” “wild boogers,” and “knocking spirits” of the night.

Noah Oliver Kinney (1912–91) worked the family farm where he had been born, growing tobacco and corn and raising livestock. He liked to draw and produced many drawings during his early life. In 1960 he married Hazel Bateman. In 1970, when he retired from farming because of failing health, he began working with wood. Between 1970 and 1990 he created a variety of objects, including detailed models of early machines and equipment such as a steam-driven sawmill, tractors, figures of U.S. presidents, and animals—both local and exotic, the latter inspired by a 1980s visit to the Cincinnati Zoo.

Hazel Dee (Bateman) Kinney (b. 1929) was born in Robertson County, Ky. After marrying Noah Kinney, moving to the Kinney farm, and seeing the artwork produced by the two brothers, Hazel began painting rocks and pieces of coal that she used to decorate the outside of their house. In time, she began making paintings on scraps of wood left over from her husband’s work, typically portraying scenes from the Bible such as Noah’s Ark. In the 1980s she began painting on paper. In addition to biblical scenes, Hazel’s subjects include nursery rhymes, scenes from traditional life, and idealized images of family.

The Kinney brothers’ art attracted the attention of formally trained artists as early as the 1970s, when their work was included in Kentucky Folk Art, organized by the University of Kentucky as the first exhibition to focus on local self-taught artists. By the 1980s interest in the Kinneys’ art had grown, and collectors frequently visited to meet the brothers and make purchases. Paintings by Charley and sculptures by Noah were integral parts of the original collection at Morehead State University that eventually became the Kentucky Folk Art Center. Works by both Charley and Noah Kinney have since been acquired by many American museums.

The Kinney farm was also a popular destination for string musicians and individuals with an interest in traditional Appalachian fiddle music. Charley and Noah were both enthusiastic musicians, and the frequent musical gatherings they held in their tobacco barn attracted musicians from their area and beyond. The Kinneys helped sustain musical traditions peculiar to northeast Kentucky. They were particularly instrumental in preserving fiddle tunes that had originated in the Scots-Irish musical tradition brought in by early settlers as well as those that had absorbed elements of other traditions brought in by musicians traveling on the nearby Ohio River. Until Charley and Noah Kinney died in 1991, the Kinney homeplace was the single most significant venue for the perpetuation of a local style of fiddle playing and of a bow style specific to western Lewis and adjoining eastern Fleming counties in Kentucky.

The Kinneys lived through a period of social, economic, and technological change. They utilized their diverse creative skills to record their reactions and give context to the changes taking place around them. Through music and art, the Kinney brothers documented their lives and asserted their cultural identity. Charley and Noah Kinney still remain important figures in 20th-century Kentucky folk art and music. Works by the Kinney brothers can also be seen at the Huntington Museum of Art, the Owensboro Museum of Fine Art, the Birmingham Museum of Art, and the New Orleans Museum of Art.

ADRIAN SWAIN
Kentucky Folk Art Center

John Harrodd and Lee Kogan, Slow Time: The Works of Charley, Noah, and Hazel Kinney (2006); Morehead State University, Local Visions: Folk Art from Northeast Kentucky (1990); Museum of American Folk Art, Encyclopedia of American Folk Art (2004); Chuck Rosenak and Jan Rosenak, Museum of American Folk Art Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century American Folk Art and Artists (1990); University of Kentucky, Folk Art of Kentucky (1976); Alice Rae Yelen, Passionate Visions of the American South (1993).

 

Kornegay, George

(b. 1917)

Like many southern self-taught artists, Rev. George Kornegay, an African Methodist Episcopal Zion minister, who also worked in Alabama’s mills and foundries, took up art making after a visionary experience. Preparing to carve into a rock he had found on his property, he heard a voice saying, “Upon this rock I will build my Church.” Kornegay decided to leave the rock as it was and follow his calling to create works that would glorify God. Kornegay’s environment, which he has variously named The New Jerusalem, The Seven Holy Mountains, The Sacred Mountains, and Art Hill, was a sacred space encoded with the creolized African emblems of the American South and with numerous references to biblical stories and sacred music. Kornegay required that visitors take the time to decode the environment for themselves, warning that some of the symbols are “secrets” between him and God. Of his art, he says, “This is God’s stuff. He’s my teacher. It all comes from God.”

Kornegay’s sizable garden, which sloped from his house to a well-traveled road demarcating the property, adopted and transformed the traditional artistic practice of Atlantic Africa. Wrapped structures that recalled the medicated charms known as minkisi, bottle trees that attracted and trapped evil spirits, and large guardian figures and faces dotted the garden. Painted roots, thought to be the domain of powerful spirits, stood affixed to posts that abut a depiction of the Crucifixion made from wheels and other cast-off materials. Throughout the garden, wheels, tires, fans, hubcaps, and discarded electric fans with four blades all suggested the Kongo cosmogram, a circle or diamond divided by two axes that symbolize the four cardinal directions of the universe and the soul’s progress from birth, to maturity, to death, and to rebirth. A large assemblage of circular found objects, including chrome hubcaps, may refer to Ezekiel’s “wheels within wheels” and encodes the belief that shiny surfaces repel evil and embody ashé, the flash of the spirit that denotes the power to make things happen.

Many of Kornegay’s constructions blend African-derived emblems with Christian emblems. Kornegay’s Jacob’s Ladder combines wheels, stairs, and a television antenna with gleaming cross bars to illustrate, in the words of the spiritual, that “every rung goes higher, higher.” Another multivalent work, a large sculpture of Jonah in the Belly of the Whale attached to a bridgelike structure, alluded both to the Edmund E. Pettis Bridge in nearby Selma, where marchers were attacked by police and segregationists, and to the promise of a trans-Jordan land of milk and honey. Kornegay’s Last Supper, a long table topped with stones and crockery and surrounded with chair frames topped with bottles, audaciously conflated conventional European Last Suppers with bottle trees, African American protective charms that have become a southern vernacular recognized by both whites and blacks. Perhaps influenced by Joe Minter, whom Kornegay met through their inclusion in the same arts events, Kornegay also created numerous figures for an African village and planned to address his American Indian heritage as well.

Although Kornegay’s family has stored some of the artist’s constructions, the environment has largely disappeared. The esoteric nature of Kornegay’s creation—his secrets with God—and his suspicion of admirers certainly discouraged preservation of his “message to the world.” Kornegay has moved away from Brent. Photographs recording the site and its development, though they cannot describe the experiential framework of the site, do record some of the site’s importance.

CHERYL RIVERS
Brooklyn, New York

William Arnett and Paul Arnett, Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art, vol. 2 (2001); Carol Crown, ed., Coming Home! Self-Taught Artists, the Bible, and the American South (2004); Grey Gundaker, ed., Keep Your Head to the Sky: Interpreting African American Home Ground (1998), Signs of Diaspora / Diaspora of Signs: Literacies, Creolization, and Vernacular Practice in African America (1998); Grey Gundaker and Judith McWillie, No Space Hidden: The Spirit of African American Yard Work (2005); Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (1983).

 

Kühn, Justus Engelhardt

(b. unknown; d. 1717)

Justus Engelhardt Kühn, the South’s earliest recorded professional portrait artist, listed himself as a German, a Protestant, and a painter when he applied for naturalization in 1708 at the courthouse in Annapolis, Md., where he had settled. He soon married and became a father. In 1717 Kühn was named a churchwarden at the Episcopal Church of St. Anne’s. He died six months later. Among his possessions at death were 39 books, a flute, and a personal wardrobe of some worth—suggesting the painter’s fondness for reading, music, and fine clothes. Besides paintings, Kühn also left an unfinished coat of arms, the latter demonstrating that Kühn, like most colonial painters, augmented his income through a variety of jobs, including sign painting. Even so, he died a debtor.

The portraits attributed to Kühn, all of which date around 1710, depict members of three related Roman Catholic families, the Darnalls, Carrolls, and Diggeses, who ranked among Maryland’s most privileged class. Much like court painters of the day, Kühn fashioned portraits for these families that showcase their aristocratic pretensions. Among Kühn’s most celebrated paintings, now in the collections of the Maryland Historical Society, are two children, Henry Darnall III and his sister Eleanor, each sumptuously dressed and each the subject of a full-length portrait. Henry wears a yellow-gold brocade coat with silver buttons and a lace jabot as well as high-heeled black shoes with ornate silver buckles. Eleanor, looking much like a princess, wears a necklace of large pearls, a dark red dress with a black velvet train, and a white stomacher with bands of lace. Equally imposing are the palatial settings in which each child stands. Both are posed in front of an ornate balustrade framed by large curtains that open onto a formal garden with fountains, statues, and manor houses, the likes of which had no parallels in colonial America. Just like the children’s costly attire, most likely derived from print sources, these make-believe landscapes serve to communicate the Darnalls’ patrician way of life. Further highlighting the family’s wealth and status is an attendant figure pictured at Henry’s right side. A young African American slave offers the boy, who holds a bow and arrow, a dead game bird, apparently shot by his young master. Around the servant’s neck is a metal collar, a symbol of the black youth’s low status and a chilling reminder that slavery was already a thriving system in the South. Kühn’s painting is one of the earliest depictions of a slave in American art.

Although Kühn’s biographical information sheds no light on his artistic training, he clearly admired baroque portraiture as handed down from Flemish artists Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony Van Dyke. Not only does he employ familiar baroque formulas to emphasize his sitters’ place in society, but he also makes use of a painterly style that is rich in color and lush in brushstrokes. However, while artists schooled in the baroque style typically envision robust and strongly modeled figures existing within three-dimensional space, Kühn portrayed his figures in a much more two-dimensional and dolllike manner. He also flattened the subjects’ surroundings; the enclosed gardens that frame his youthful sitters seem to embrace the canvas rather than extend it. Sometimes described as a provincial baroque painter, Kühn is most comfortable with the two-dimensional. His art fits into a folk art idiom that favors abstraction and emblems like lavish, ornate costumes and richly decorated architectural settings as means to convey power and wealth.

CAROL CROWN
University of Memphis

Wayne Cravens, Colonial American Portraiture (1986); J. Hall Pleasants, Justus Engelhardt Kühn (1937); Elisabeth L. Roark, Artists of Colonial America (2003).

 

Lancaster, Paul

(b. 1939)

Although sophisticated in technique and composition, the paintings of Tennessee native Paul Lancaster embody the innocence of a childlike imagination. Indeed, Lancaster claims that the birds, flowers, and insects he creates are invented, even when the woods and meadows in which he sets them bear a good deal of resemblance to the west and middle Tennessee landscape where Lancaster, whose grandfather was Cherokee, grew up. Lancaster now works indoors and in complete isolation, drawing not only on childhood memories but also on art history. Well familiar with the work of artists such as Renoir, Matisse, and Rousseau, he pushes beyond their influence into a distinctive intermingling of fantasy and reality. Fireflies, fairies, and bathing or reclining female figures appear in wooded settings in which the textures of leaves, tree bark, and vegetation come alive. Lancaster’s paintings glow with deeply shadowed areas and illuminated textures. His color tonalities evoke sunset skies or luminous aquariums.

Lancaster, who has been painting since 1959, says that drawing and writing preceded his painting. By the time Lancaster was 20, he had created and illustrated a volume of his own poetry. While at an army training camp in Colorado, he was inspired to draw the spectacular western landscape and was promised a promotion if he would enroll in a medical illustration program. Lancaster declined, convinced that such training would squander his artistic gifts. Once out of the service, Lancaster worked for nearly 30 years as a framer at Lyzon, Nashville’s first fine art gallery. Gallery owner Myron King was a skillful promoter who has been credited with the rediscovery of self-taught sculptor William Edmondson and the introduction of a high-school-aged Red Grooms. Although King also attempted to promote Lancaster, he merely pushed the artist to create hand-colored etchings of Easter eggs and butterflies that would appeal to the tastes of a local clientele. Lancaster’s complex and inventive works languished in the back room of the gallery, and Lancaster was almost unknown to fellow artists in Nashville.

Since his retirement in 1995, however, Lancaster has reconnected with the unfettered world of his imagination. The result has been a prolific outpouring of imaginative paintings of a vibrant fantasy world. Lancaster’s work was first presented at New York’s Outsider Art Fair in 2001, and curator Marcus Schubert included Lancaster’s work in the exhibition Treasures of the Soul: Who Is Rich? at the American Visionary Art Museum in 2000–2001.

SUSAN W. KNOWLES
Nashville, Tennessee

Benjamin H. Caldwell, Robert Hicks, and Mark W. Scala, The Art of Tennessee (2003); Grey Carter, Paul Lancaster: Immersed in Nature (2009); Susan Knowles, Raw Vision (Winter 2002); Paul Lancaster, The Painted Woods (1992); Patrick D. Lester, The Biographical Directory of Native American Painters (1995).

 

Landry, Pierre Joseph

(1770–1843)

Pierre Joseph Landry, born in the French village of St. Servan on the Brittany coast on 16 January 1770, became Louisiana’s first known self-taught sculptor of consequence. In anticipation of the impending French Revolution, he immigrated to the Louisiana Territory with his family in 1785. His father, Colonel Pierre Joseph Landry, was a French military commander and member of the nobility. The Landry family settled in St. Gabriel, received a land grant, and became distinguished sugar planters in a region that was to become Louisiana’s Iberville Parish. Young Landry married Scholastique Breaux in 1790 and then, following her death, remarried several times. He served as a captain under General Andrew Jackson in the 1812 Battle of New Orleans and subsequently became a personal friend of the general.

In 1820 Landry was stricken with tuberculosis of the knee. Because of this illness, he was confined to a wheelchair for the remainder of his life. This debilitating event resulted in Landry’s new interest in carving small, wood figures from beech and magnolia. After his death at Bayou Goula, La., in March 1843, his small collections of figures, sculpted with a pocket knife, were distributed to his descendants. Later a majority of the carvings were reassembled as a group, along with other personal memorabilia, and presented to the Louisiana State Museum in New Orleans, where they remain.

Landry became celebrated for small carvings, which were, for the most part, single, or groupings of figures in a suggested environment. His largest and most elaborate creation, The Wheel of Life, is a circular wreathlike composition with nine groupings of figures that represent the ages of man from cradle to grave. Landry presented to President Jackson one of his sculptures, a double portrait of General Jackson and the French King Louis Phillipe, now displayed at the Hermitage in Nashville. Another tableau carving, which displays a bit of the artist’s wit, Self Portrait Observing an Indian Maiden at Her Bath, is in the permanent collection of the New Orleans Museum of Art.

WILLIAM A. FAGALY
New Orleans Museum of Art

Julia Truitt Bishop, [New Orleans] Times-Democrat (9 February 1913); Louisiana Folk Art, Anglo-American Art Museum, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge (1972); Robert Morton, Southern Antiques and Folk Art (1976); Louisiana State Museum, 250 Years of Life in New Orleans: The Rosemonde E. and Emile Kuntz Collection and the Felix H. Kuntz Collection (1968).

 

Leedskalnin, Edward

(1887–1951)

Born in Riga, Latvia, on 10 August 1887, Edward Leedskalnin attended school through the fourth grade before taking a job in a sawmill. Fifteen years later, he had little to show for his efforts. After his 16-year-old fiancée, Agnes Scuffs, jilted him, the 26-year-old Leedskalnin immigrated, first to Canada and then to the United States. He worked in lumber camps until tuberculosis forced him to move to a warmer climate. He settled in Florida City, Fla., and within a year or two began work on the project that occupied him for decades.

At first Leedskalnin hoped that Rock Gate Park would lure Agnes Scuffs to Florida. In time, however, the park, carved of huge, roughhewn coral limestone that Leedskalnin quarried himself, evolved into a roadside attraction that locals called the Coral Castle. Some neighbors, however, were perplexed by the complex, which resembled a Pre-Columbian or Polynesian temple, and by its esoteric sculptures. Some reasoned that a small man, only five feet tall and weighing less than 100 pounds, could have assembled such enormous blocks of stone only with satanic assistance.

Disputes with neighbors and encroaching development led Leedskalnin in 1936 to relocate the environment block by block to a 10-acre property in Homestead, Fla. Some sources state that Leedskalnin kept his techniques secret by insisting that the mover vacate the premises while the stones were loaded or unloaded. Although extant photographs document complex block and tackle rigs suspended from huge wooden tripods, the artist’s techniques remain obscure. Pamphlets Leedskalnin distributed during his lifetime fail to shed light on his obvious accomplishments. Fringe science websites claim that Leedskalnin levitated his stones into place through knowledge of the secrets of the pyramid builders, ancient Babylonian magicians, and space aliens. Increasingly impressive creations, such as a massive stone rocking chair, a nine-ton gate that could be opened by the push of a finger, and carvings of planets, the sun, and several crescent moons that perhaps encode secret meanings further encourage an aura of mystery.

Like many physicists, theologists, philosophers, and self-taught artists, Leedskalnin sought a unified theory that could account for everything in the universe. Magnetism, he believed, explained the movements of the sun and stars, the behavior of light, the workings of gravity, and the attraction or repulsion between males and females. Leedskalnin also dabbled in moral philosophy. His longest pamphlet, A Book in Every Home: Containing Three Subjects: Ed’s Sweet Sixteen, Domestic, and Political Views (1936), claims that girls reach their peaks at 16 while men take a decade longer to season into maturity; this assertion, of course, conveniently recalls his lost fiancée. He warned that “any girl who associates with a fellow only five years older is headed for a bad disappointment. . . . Girls below sixteen should not be allowed to associate with the boys. . . . Lovemaking should be reserved for their permanent partners. With every lovemaking affair, their hearts get bruised and by the time they grow up, their hearts are so badly bruised that they are no more good.” To avoid such an outcome, he provided one solution: “In case the girl’s mamma thinks that there is a boy somewhere who needs experience, then she, herself, could pose as an experimental station for that fresh boy to practice on and so save the girl. Nothing can hurt her any more. She has already gone through all the experience that can be gone through and so in her case, it would be all right.”

Edward Leedskalnin, who had never sought the love of another woman, died at the age of 64 in 1951. The Coral Castle, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is privately owned but open for visitors. The official website, www.coralcastle.com, offers Leedskalnin’s published writings.

ROGER MANLEY
Gregg Museum of Art and Design North Carolina State University

Edward Leedskalnin, A Book in Every Home: Containing Three Subjects: Ed’s Sweet Sixteen, Domestic, and Political Views (1936), Magnetic Current: Mineral, Vegetable and Animal Life (1980); Roger Manley and Mark Sloan, Self-Made Worlds: Visionary Environments (1997); Deidi Von Schaewen and John Maizels, Fantasy Worlds (1999).

 

Light, Joe Louis

(1934–2005)

Joe Louis Light, born in Dyersburg, Tenn., was named for the African American boxer who was just beginning his career when Light was born and who later became a hero for black Americans in the era of Jim Crow. Light considered himself a fighter whose opponents were ignorance, jealousy, injustice, hypocrisy, and other human shortcomings. He hoped to provide spiritual guidance for his family, neighborhood, and race, using his art and words as primary vehicles for communicating his messages.

Light searched for ways to make God comprehensible. First, Light wrote biblical-sounding pronouncements on sidewalks and on walls beneath expressway bridges. Then he began painting challenging (and sometimes threatening) signs in his Memphis yard, expressing his thoughts as a social critic, spokesman, and evangelist for minority races and religions.

Although his signs were meant to communicate with uninitiated audiences, many of his most profound visual expressions were directed principally toward himself. To guide his personal journey, Light compressed his worldview and next-world view into a complex visual language, put forth in brightly colored paintings on and around his house. These paintings combined iconic and often autobiographical human and animal figures, strange glyphs and calligraphy-like symbols, and metaphorical “cartoons.” Though Light intended his art to communicate to himself and appear enigmatic to outsiders, he put many works on his porch and in his yard, hoping to draw the interest of passersby. He imagined that if they approached the house because of the amusing art, they might be inclined to read the signs and, in response, straighten out their lives.

Joe Light was raised Baptist by his father, but he was highly resentful of fundamentalist Christianity, considering it a vehicle for the false promises whites had made to blacks. The stern, severe, Old Testament God ideally suited Light’s psychological and philosophical desires; in 1960, while serving a second prison sentence, Light heard a prison chaplain read from the Old Testament and decided to convert to Judaism. Theologically, he was not actually Jewish and was the first to admit it. Indeed, Light’s art relies heavily on Christian theology and iconography. His paintings are about salvation and personal transformation, imperatives important to Christianity because of its belief in the inherent wickedness of humankind.

Light’s art was born of his weekend routine. He sold miscellany in the flea markets of Memphis and then returned home to watch documentaries, cartoons, and cowboy movies on television. The flea market environment surrounded Light with society’s kitsch and bric-a-brac, the de facto pop art of the underclass. Perhaps it was Western movies, with their indelible panoramas of Monument Valley that instilled in Light the great American sense of landscape. He enjoyed adding metaphorical found objects to his paintings, calling the result “attachment art.”

Through his art and signs, Joe Light developed and communicated a private and personal code of ethics that does not fit any culture’s established rule of order. Unfortunately, in the 1990s, Light lost his house to indebtedness. When the house was confiscated, Light’s art was whitewashed away. Fortunately, the remarkable paintings on the outside and the inside walls of his house survive in photographs.

Joe Light died in 1995 at the age of 61. Light’s works are in the collections of the Georgia Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art, the Morris Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

WILLIAM ARNETT
Souls Grown Deep Foundation

STEPHANIE BURAK
Atlanta, Georgia

Paul Arnett and William Arnett, eds., Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art of the South, vol. 1 (2000); William Arnett and Paul Arnett, eds., Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art, vol. 2 (2001); Paul Manoguerra, ed., Amazing Grace: Self-Taught Artists from the Mullis Collection (2007); Phyllis Kornfield, Cellblock Visions: Prison Art in America (1997); Lynne E. Spriggs, Joanne Cubbs, Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, and Susan Mitchell Crawley, Let It Shine: Self-Taught Art from the T. Marshall Hahn Collection (2001).

 

Limners

The term “limner,” commonly used in English as a synonym of “illustrator,” derives from the word “illuminator,” an artist who decorated or illuminated medieval manuscripts with ornate details and strong color. In the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries the word “limner” was applied to itinerant portrait painters who traveled throughout the North American colonies. Limners were generally self-taught artists who periodically supplemented their incomes by working as decorative artists. Although most female artists were charged with domestic duties and therefore painted only friends and family, a few women did enjoy careers as itinerant artists.

Portraiture was an important and necessary part of life for the families of colonial towns in the New World. During the 18th and 19th centuries, portraiture continued to thrive, and the demand for family and individual portraiture offered opportunities to self-taught painters who traveled from town to town to receive commissions. Local landowners and a growing mercantile class often marked their worldly success through portraits of themselves and sometimes of their entire families. From the 18th century, limners offered their services in New England, where commerce and wealth were abundant. As southern communities flourished, New England limners traveled South, painting the portraits that provided models for aspiring southern limners. The first recorded professional portrait painter in the South is Justus Englehardt Kühn (d. 1711), an immigrant from Germany who settled in Annapolis, Md.

Most limner painters portray their figures in a flat manner. Anatomy and placement in space are often awkward, and perspective is often unrealistic. Painting primarily on canvas and wood panels, painters depicted their subjects in frontal positions wearing clothes meant to imply the sitter’s prosperity and education. While clothing and background furnishings may have been the real possessions of the sitter, artists also drew on print sources or repeated conventional emblems of material success and refinement. Should the lady of the house be lacking in appropriate finery, the painter could provide lace collars, earrings, or brooches, or stylish furniture.

Few limners could support themselves on portrait commissions alone. In addition to portraiture, limners also adorned fireplace screens, clock faces, signs, fire buckets, carriages, and interior spaces. Such decoration required that the limner be skilled in various techniques, such as striping, wood graining, drawing family crests, stenciling, and painting landscape vignettes. Itinerant painters did not always sign their works; the identification of many artists depends on intensive research into probate records, account books, and other local documents. Some limners, such as the Payne Limner or the Guilford Limner, are identified simply by their sitters’ names or by the locale in which they worked. Scholarship has not yet identified many southern itinerants, particularly those who worked in the Deep South, the trans-Appalachian region, and in other areas that developed years after coastal towns with established cultural institutions. Groups of portraits apparently painted by the same hands invite further investigation.

KATHERINE TAYLOR-MCBROOM
Shelburne Museum

Robert Bishop and Jacqueline M. Atkins, Folk Art in American Life (1995); Henry Joyce and Sloane Stephens, American Folk Art at the Shelburne Museum (2001); Nina Fletcher Little, Country Art in New England, 1790–1840 (1960).

 

Line, Marion Forgey

(1919–1999)

Folk artist Marion Line was born Marion Louise Forgey in Morristown, Tenn. There she received a public-school education and music lessons. She attended Carson-Newman College in Jefferson City, Tenn., earning a bachelor of arts degree in English and a diploma in violin. While attending college, she met her future husband, Lloyd E. Line Jr. In 1952 they settled in Richmond, Va., and raised their family. Although Line had always loved to draw, it was not until the 1970s that she focused on painting. As a violinist who could no longer play because of arthritis, she felt compelled to express her sense of beauty, joy, and spirituality.

Line’s paintings depict brightly colored, nostalgic visions of spring flowers, harvests, and wintry wonderlands as well as stories from the Bible. In the more than 300 paintings she produced, rural life in the mountains of Tennessee and Virginia plays heavily—raking leaves, harvesting apples or pears, quilts on a clothesline. A little black poodle, Sadi, serves as a signature element in a majority of the works. Perhaps for Line, Sadi was both talisman and comic relief.

Line was a memory painter like Grandma Moses (Anna Mary Robertson Moses). Her devotion to storytelling, color harmony, unyielding inventiveness in depicting subject matter, and innate sense of balance are all striking. That she did not use linear perspective is a positive attribute rather than a shortcoming. Her lack of linear perspective, which one reviewer called “delightfully cockeyed,” supports the notion that these images come from the mind’s eye. Indeed, Line’s rejection of rigid perspective is a conscious choice. She once said, “I sketch right on the canvas with a light wash of turpentine and yellow ochre. I go by shapes—I don’t have to worry about depth.” A critic noted the results of Line’s multiple perspectives: “Line’s ability to extract details from different eras and weave them into single frames results in a slightly distorted reality.”

Line also wrote poetry that provides insight into her drive to create. The poems often reflect the artist’s bouts with depression as she faced arthritis. Obviously, Line found great comfort in producing pictures of her childhood. The places she painted were her own symbolic safe havens, places where she did not feel pain.

Line’s discovery as a painter is the stuff of legends. When Anne Gray, owner of the Eric Schindler Gallery in Richmond, was delivering a cabinet Line had purchased, she saw a painting hanging in the hallway and inquired about the artist. Line was surprised that Gray was interested in her work. In 1983 Gray displayed several of Line’s works in the gallery. Then in 1984, at the age of 65, Line had her first solo exhibition.

Longwood Center for the Visual Arts in Farmville, Va., holds 31 of Line’s works in its permanent collection, the largest single collection of Marion Line paintings.

K. JOHNSON BOWLES
Longwood Center for the Visual Arts

K. Johnson Bowles, Fertile Visions: Paintings by Marion Forgey Line, 1919–1998 (2002); Jerry Lewis, Style Magazine (Richmond, Va.) (July 1986); Lloyd Line and Roy Proctor, Richmond News Leader (17 March 1984); Judith Snyderman, Richmond’s Visual Arts Magazine Gallery (July–August 1989).

 

Lockett, Ronald

(1965–1998)

Years after Ronald Lockett’s death from AIDS-related pneumonia in 1998, pencil drawings of horses and sports idols—evidence of his childhood desire to be an artist—could still be found on a few walls and houses in the Bessemer, Ala., neighborhood, known as Pipe Shop, where he spent his entire life. Lockett was born into an extended family that included Thornton Dial, a neighbor, mentor, and “cousin” or “uncle”—the family lineages are complex—who later became a renowned self-taught artist. Lockett’s parents divorced when he was young, and Dial became a kind of surrogate parent to Lockett, who spent many hours at Dial’s home.

After high school, Lockett continued to live in his mother’s house, two doors from the Dials. When Dial began to receive art-world attention in the late 1980s, Lockett, who had been making dreamlike paintings on found wood, suddenly found himself at a crossroads; too young (and worldly) to fit the existing paradigm of the folk artist, and yet removed from dialogues about contemporary art, he faced a choice between going to art school or remaining “at home” with his mother, whom he took care of, and his mentor.

Although different in temperament and style from Thornton Dial, Lockett carefully learned from the older artist’s syncretic attitude toward media and influences. Lockett’s grand theme—an irreducibly autobiographical one he applied to every subject he tackled—was displacement, most notably his generation of urban black males’ distance from earlier epics: the civil rights movement, the struggles against fascism and race oppression, and the decline of the industrial economy that had attracted Lockett’s ancestors to the steel- and iron-producing Birmingham region. Lockett’s storytelling genius was to see this theme, with all its melancholy personal and social implications, through the lens of embattled nature. He often made his protagonists threatened species, such as the whitetail deer that somehow managed to survive in the vacant lots and backyard thickets of Bessemer. His aesthetic genius was to find these issues and narratives embedded in a material—snipped and collaged corroded tin—that gradually replaced easel painting as his chosen expressive medium.

Lockett had always freely mixed materials—incorporating pieces of wire fencing, for example, into a painting of a deer to make his “Traps” series about the tragedy of the deer/black male. By the early 1990s, however, he had begun to believe that African American vernacular artistic traditions, of which Dial was Lockett’s exemplar, were themselves as embattled as any other aspect of black experience. Lockett gradually moved away from painting; when he found a decrepit tin barn that the Dials had once owned, Lockett acquired the materials for a breakthrough form of pictorial representation that would occupy his remaining years.

Oxidized tin was the DNA of the story Lockett’s art had always told. The tin embodied the conflict between old and new, between human desires and needs and the effects of time and nature, between the hardness and obduracy of the material and its gorgeous surfaces, and—most rapturously—between death and the promise of rebirth through the act of recycling.

Coinciding with his battles against HIV, Lockett’s metal collages—on themes such as the Oklahoma City bombing, the deaths of Princess Diana and Lockett’s great aunt Sarah, culture heroes such as Jesse Owens, and iconic deer, wolves, and bison—stand as testaments to the remarkable vision of a budding master. The High Museum of Art and the Tubman African-American Museum are among the museums that hold works by Lockett.

PAUL ARNETT
Lafayette, California

Paul Arnett and William Arnett, eds., Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art of the South, vol. 1 (2000); William Arnett and Paul Arnett, eds., Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art, vol. 2 (2001); Kinshasha Conwill and Arthur C. Danto, Testimony: Vernacular Art of the African-American South (2001); Frank Maresca and Roger Ricco, American Self-Taught: Paintings and Drawings by Outsider Artists (1993).

 

Long, Woodie

(1942–2009)

Woodie Long, one of 12 siblings, was a sharecropper’s son. “Daddy had us for a reason, that was to be field hands,” he said. Kept out of school to harvest crops, Long learned math by rearranging the boxes of fruit he peddled to create an extra box to sell. When Long was 13, his parents moved the family to a housing project in Tampa, Fla.; two years later his father abandoned the family.

Long began his art making while working as a tile setter in a shipyard. His first works, carefree scenes of fishermen and cavorting animals painted on the ships’ gunnels, were sandblasted away the following day. Becoming a house painter, Long continued painting on surfaces that would be covered by the next coat. In the 1970s Long worked in Saudi Arabia with a construction firm, where he met his future wife, Dot. Long continued to work as a house painter after the two returned to the United States in 1980. In 1988 Dot Long enrolled in an art class at a local junior college, and for the first time Long had access to art supplies. He began to paint every day and soon had enough works for a successful exhibition. Dot Long became her husband’s dealer, and after the couple settled in Santa Rosa Beach, Fla., they opened a gallery dedicated to Long’s work. Long estimated that, by the year 2000, he had made nearly 14,000 paintings.

Works that held special meaning for the artist are memory paintings of the lives of sharecroppers and a series called Moma’s Flowers, which memorializes his mother. Long also painted angels, chicken fights (“I tell people they’re just kissing”), children jumping rope and flying kites, women quilting, and men gambling. After visiting New Orleans and New York, he began to paint musicians and Manhattan’s skyline. The tenor of his work, however, is defined less by subject than by his elongated expressive figures. Long’s bright palette adds further whimsy to the abstracted portrayals of his recollections. Among the museums that have collected Long’s paintings are the High Museum of Art and the Mennello Museum of American Art.

GARY MONROE
Daytona State College

Kristin G. Congdon and Tina Bucavalas, Just above the Water: Florida Folk Art (2006); Kathy Kemp, Revelations: Alabama’s Visionary Folk Artists (1994); Gary Monroe and Mallory M. O’Connor, Extraordinary Interpretations: Florida’s Self-Taught Artists (2003).

 

Lucas, Charlie

(b. 1951)

Born in Birmingham, Ala., in 1951, Charlie Lucas grew up in a family of exceptional craftsmen and women. His grandmother and mother were both noted for their quilt making, needlepoint, and ceramic work, and his great-grandfather and grandfather were both blacksmiths. Although Lucas initially seemed to follow in his father’s footsteps, working as a mechanic as an adolescent, his mature oeuvre is evidence that he has inherited the scope of his family’s talent.

As a child, Lucas used his great-grandfather’s welding equipment to create metal objects. Lucas did not take up art making, however, until after he had traveled and lived on his own. Lucas left home at age 14 to work as a truck driver and construction worker and by 1968 was living in Florida, where he tried his hand at breeding shrimp. His childhood sweetheart, Annie, joined him there. The couple returned to Alabama and in 1975 settled on property in Pink Lily, near Prattville. The couple later divorced, and although Charlie Lucas lives in Selma, he maintains a studio on the property in Pink Lily, where Annie, also a folk artist, still lives.

With the make-do attitude that would come to define his sculptural oeuvre, Lucas built his house entirely from scrap metal and cast-off materials. Lucas worked as a hospital maintenance worker until he was laid off and in 1984 sustained a devastating back injury while clearing his land. During his convalescence, Lucas began to make wire sculptures. He experienced a profound spiritual transformation at this time, during which he decided to dedicate himself to his artwork. Lucas understands his artistic talent to be a gift from God.

After his recovery, Lucas began to make large, spot-welded sculptures on his property. Using scrap metal, favoring the relatively flexible metal bands typically used to pack lumber, Lucas became known as the “Tin Man.” As his nickname suggests, Lucas also uses scrap roofing tin as well as a wide range of found objects and materials discovered in local roadside ditches and dumps or brought to him by friends. A walk through his yard is a fantastic tour of a landscape populated by larger-than-life horses, dinosaurs, birds, human figures, and even an airplane. Lucas also makes small figures out of wire and paints abstracted whimsical scenes of people and animals.

The scholar Babatunde Lawal sees Lucas’s metal weaving as a novel reinvention of the African diasporic tradition of braiding, an activity that activates a symbolic connection to ancestors. Lucas has indeed noted that his weaving links him to his talented family elders. More often, however, he refers to his artwork as “toys” and asserts that art making is a form of play. Also significant is the artist’s identification with his process of recycling—giving a new life and value to materials that have been cast off or deemed worthless. This multifaceted understanding of his work allows Lucas to create richly allegorical and formally dynamic art that resonates powerfully with the creations of his mainstream contemporaries. Lucas’s work is included in, among others, the collections of the High Museum of Art, the Birmingham Museum of Art, and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art.

JENIFER BORUM
New York, New York

Paul Arnett and William Arnett, eds., Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art of the South, vol. 1 (2000); William Arnett and Paul Arnett, eds., Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art, vol. 2 (2001); Carol Crown, ed., Coming Home: Self-Taught Artists, the Bible, and the American South (2004); Kinshasha Conwill and Arthur C. Danto, Testimony: Vernacular Art of the African-American South (2001); Kathy Kemp, Revelations: Alabama’s Visionary Folk Artists (1994); Charlie Lucas and Ben Windham, Tin Man (2009); Tom Patterson, Ashe: Improvisation and Recycling in African-American Visionary Art (1993).

 

Marling, Jacob

(ca. 1773–1833)

For 40 years Jacob Marling worked primarily in Virginia and North Carolina painting genre and historical works, portraits, miniatures, landscapes, and still lifes; he also worked as an art teacher and museum director. In addition to his portrait of North Carolina governor Montfort Stokes (ca. 1830), Marling is best known today for an important federal period painting now in the Chrysler Museum entitled the Crowning of Flora (ca. 1816) and a scene of the first North Carolina State House (ca. 1820). A still-life composition of a bowl of cherries is the only known work of art signed “Marling.”

Marling claimed to have studied in Philadelphia, with drawing master James Cox for seven years from 1788 to 1795. He spent a brief time in New York City in 1795, before relocating to Virginia, where he advertised his services as a drawing and painting instructor in Fredericksburg, Richmond, and Petersburg. By 1805 the artist was living in Southampton County, Va., where he married Louisa Simmons, who also subsequently taught art to young ladies. During this period Marling painted quarter- to full-length portraits of local residents, executed historical scenes after engravings by John Trumbull depicting the battle of Bunker Hill and the death of General Montgomery at Quebec, and probably decorated at least one Masonic apron.

In about 1812 Marling and his wife moved to Raleigh, N.C., where, except for a brief sojourn to Charleston, S.C., in 1819, the artist remained until his death in 1833. Chartered in 1792, Raleigh was the state’s recently established capital and a thriving southern city when Marling moved to the region to teach art and become director of the newly founded North Carolina Museum. For the daily admission price of 25 cents, or $5 for the year, visitors, according to Marling’s 1818 entrepreneurial advertisement for this burgeoning institution, frequented an “agreeable and useful place of resort” that maintained a reading room containing newspapers, maps, and curiosities, as well as drawings and paintings, including some by the artist. During this period, Mrs. Marling taught drawing and painting at the Raleigh Academy, where her husband occasionally assisted. It was at this time that Jacob Marling executed the scene entitled the Crowning of Flora, depicting young female students and faculty from the Raleigh Academy, all gathered outdoors at Burke’s Square to crown the queen of their May Day celebration. Mrs. Marling, and possibly the artist himself, are included in this composition.

By 1825 Marling was renting rooms from John Goneke, who maintained an establishment comprising a concert hall, theater, musical-instrument shop, reading room, dancing school, and liquor shop, in addition to letting rooms for the North Carolina legislature. In this location, Marling advertised that he painted portraits and miniatures, hoping for the business of government officials. Marling stated that if they called early upon him, he would complete their likenesses by the close of session. Marling’s works are in the collections of the Chrysler Museum of Art and the North Carolina Museum of Art.

CHARLOTTE EMANS MOORE
Wilmington, North Carolina

Davida Deutsch, The Luminary, Newsletter of the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, Winston-Salem, N.C. (Summer 1988); J. Christian Kolbe and Lyndon H. Hart III, Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts (Summer 1996).

 

Martin, Eddie Owens (St. EOM)

(1908–1986)

Born to poor sharecroppers in southwest Georgia, Eddie Owens Martin was forced as a child to work in the fields, rewarded only with savage beatings by an abusive father. Finding solace with the African Americans with whom he worked, the boy adopted their speech patterns, more relaxed bearing, and predilection for bright colors. Less “uptight,” he remembered, they could “laugh and talk.” A precocious sexuality also relieved his bitter existence. Vaunting that he was “born ready to go,” Martin claimed to have been seduced at three by Tessie, “a hot little baby.” Leaving home at 14, he hitchhiked to New York City, his peregrinations financed by homosexual encounters. In 1945, Martin happened upon fortune telling, a profession that earned him enough money to paint.

His art was inseparable from his mystical proclivities, and Martin credited his creativity in part to marijuana, which, he said, broke down “all my inhibitions.” A second pivotal influence was a vision experienced during a life-threatening illness in 1935. He recalled leaving his body and seeing “this big character sittin’ there like some kinda god, with arms big around as watermelons.” Following the spirit’s admonitions, Martin regained his health and began to “reach for the occult” and “man’s lost rituals,” frequenting New York’s libraries and museums in his search.

Martin returned to Georgia in the 1950s and began building Pasaquan, the architectural complex for which he is best known. He began by ornamenting the two-room frame house located on the four acres that he inherited from his mother. Though denying an “overall plan,” Martin nonetheless revealed an idiosyncratic and sophisticated sense of architectonics, accommodating structure and decoration to purpose. He added rooms to the front and back of the original dwelling, integrating the buildings with the grounds and defining areas for specific “ritual” functions.

Martin assumed the acronym St. EOM (pronounced like the Hindu “Om”) and was given the name Pasaquan by spirit guides. He claimed later to have learned that pasa in Spanish means “pass” and quoyan in an Asian language refers to a bridging of the past and the future. He therefore saw his efforts as interpreting the knowledge of the past for subsequent generations. In addition to his directives from spirits, Martin drew upon his extensive readings about other cultures, both present and historical: Africa, Easter Island, Pre-Columbian Mexico, and Guatemala, together with the legendary continents, Mu and Atlantis.

Having crafted an ambience where he could commune with his spirits, Martin danced on his circular sand pit, chanted endlessly into a tape recorder, told fortunes for the desperate and the curious, at the same time that he continued to build. “Here I can be in my own world with my temples and designs and the spirit of God,” he said. In the 1980s, however, repeated illnesses plunged him into depression. He committed suicide in 1986 with a single bullet to his temple. Martin is buried in the town’s Baptist cemetery. He had had the granite slab inscribed beforehand with his birthday, his acronym St. EOM, and the name of his compound: Pa-sa-quan. He scribbled a final note: “No one is to blame but me and my past.” With the support of The Pasaquan Preservation Society, Eddie Owens Martin’s Pasaquan was recognized in 2008 by the National Register of Historic Places for its architectural and historical significance. The active community group sponsors events open to the public. The Marion County Society, to which Martin had willed his work, donated some pieces to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the American Folk Art Museum, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The Albany Museum of Art and the High Museum of Art also have works in their permanent collections.

DOROTHY M. JOINER
LaGrange College

Carol Crown and Charles Russell, eds., Sacred and Profane: Voice and Vision in Southern Self-Taught Art (2007); Dorothy M. Joiner, Southern Quarterly (Fall–Winter 2000–2001); Tom Patterson, St. EOM in the Land of Pasaquan: The Life and Times and Art of Eddie Owens Martin (1987).

 

Mayfield, Helen Burkhart

(1939–1997)

Helen Kay Burkhart was born 11 March 1939, in Houston, Tex., the first of six children. When Helen was in junior high school, her family relocated to a ranch near the town of Blanco, in the Texas hill country. Helen was a creative and independent child and was especially drawn to dance and performance.

Following high school, Helen entered Southwest Texas State Teachers College (now Texas State University) in San Marcos, where she studied drama and dance. But her college career ended because of “continual intense disagreements” with her instructors. In 1958, while attending college, Helen became romantically involved with fellow student, Martin Mayfield, and the two were married in 1961. They relocated to Greenwich Village in New York City, and Helen occupied herself with drawing, painting, collage, interpretive dance, and street performance.

After a year and a half in New York, Helen and Martin returned to Texas, settling in Austin in early 1964. Helen volunteered as an arts-and-crafts counselor at the Austin State Hospital, where she befriended patient Eddie Arning and played an influential role in his art career, encouraging him, providing him with supplies, and arranging the first public showing of his work. Arning went on to become one of Texas’s most recognized self-taught artists.

In 1970 the Mayfields moved to 20 acres of land outside Austin, where Martin grew marijuana and began to build a house. Helen, who found the isolation of the farm unbearable, began to suffer from severe phobias and extreme mood swings that were exacerbated by drinking binges. She returned to Austin and eventually divorced Martin. Helen’s behavior became increasingly erratic, and in fall 1985 she was evicted from her last permanent address.

During the next decade, the now homeless Mayfield was arrested more than a hundred times on various misdemeanor charges and had several stays in the Austin State Hospital. She enlisted friends to store her artwork and became a well-known fixture in the university area, recognized by colorful costumes that included hats made from discarded Styrofoam cups, twigs, paper plates, and whatever other cast-off materials attracted her, and by bizarre behavior that included casting spells on cars in rush-hour traffic with wands of her own making.

Helen Mayfield was arrested for the last time in November 1997 for swinging a fence post at a woman. Twenty-three days later, on 11 December 1997, the 58-year-old Mayfield was found unresponsive in her jail cell and was pronounced dead at an Austin hospital less than an hour later.

Mayfield’s artwork, including approximately 300 drawings and a handful of collages, stitched pieces, and masks, resurfaced after her tragic death. Her powerful and disturbing drawings in particular reveal a turbulent psychological landscape and express the artist’s growing sense of personal isolation and alienation. Haunting self-portraits expose her sadness and inner torment, while other drawings depict terrifying hallucinations, threatening storms, and bizarre creatures and document Mayfield’s intense personal struggle with internal demons. Trembling lines capture a sense of anxiety; some of the drawings are characterized by a claustrophobic horror vacui. Her powerful body of work gave physical form to the creative force that governed her life and illuminated the dark, inner recesses of her imagination.

LYNNE ADELE
Austin, Texas

Lynne Adele, Art Lies (Spring 2001).

 

McKillop, Edgar Alexander

(1879–1950)

Edgar A. McKillop was born in rural Henderson County, N.C., on 8 June 1879, one of four sons of Henry and Lena Allen McKillop. McKillop remained on the family farm and worked odd jobs in agriculture, lumber, blacksmithing, and coopering until his marriage to Lula Moore at age 27. The couple had two daughters and moved often, following jobs in the local mountain communities. In 1926 Edgar found work at the cotton mill in Balfour, N.C., and soon became known in the community as a capable machinist, carpenter, repairman, and jack-of-all-trades. Although he worked only briefly at the cotton mill, while there he patented a bobbin-cleaning device he called a “quill-skinner.”

Soon after he left the mill job, a neighbor offered McKillop the wood from several large black walnut trees in exchange for cutting them down and removing them from his property. Thus began a decade of concentrated wood-carving activity. Soon, he was working at home in his yard, night and day, making all of his own tools (mallet, chisel, and knife) and learning how to coax the chunks of walnut into expressive, lifelike sculptures.

The majority of McKillop’s carvings are animals, including eagles, a gorilla, a kangaroo, an owl, a lion, a bear, a cougar, frogs, squirrels, and a seven-headed, 10-horned dragon inspired by the New Testament book of Revelation. He also carved at least five human figures, ranging in size from two to four feet high. His subjects came from the natural world, dreams, the Bible, his patriotic feelings, and popular illustrated periodicals. Black walnut was his preferred wood, and he incorporated found materials such as bone, horn, teeth, and claws into his carvings. To attain small detailed flourishes, he often employed a wood-burning tool.

One intricate, ambitious work circa 1928–29 is Man Holding an Eagle (52 × 13 × 18 inches),now in the Collection of the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village. It shows an alert, seated man, who, with frogs flanking his boots, grasps a post with both his knees and hands. On top of the post is perched a large, stately eagle with its wings outspread. It is undetermined whether the man is actively struggling to hold the post upright or is holding on for dear life as the eagle takes flight. Another of his best-known carvings is in the collection of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Museum at Colonial Williamsburg. McKillop titled this piece the Hippocerus, a cross between a hippopotamus and a rhinoceros. The sculpture, which is almost five-feet long, is carved of black walnut wood and also features leather, glass, bone, horn, iron, copper, and a phonograph. A Victrola mechanism placed in the creature’s belly plays a recording as the leather tongue moves back and forth, saying “E. A. McKillop, a born carving man.”

McKillop was a bit of a showman. He took great pride in his work and liked to share his creations with his neighbors and visitors. He outfitted an old pickup truck with shelves and curtains and took his sculptures on the road and also set them up in a tent along the main highway in Balfour. It is possible that he regarded his carvings as a cohesive collection, a type of “environment.” Just before the death of his wife in 1938, McKillop traded, sold, and dispersed most of his sculptures and stopped carving. He bought a small farm, where he spent his remaining years. Many of his works are now lost.

His surviving works are in important collections such as the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Museum, Milwaukee Art Museum, Ackland Art Museum, Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His works bear a bold signature or inscription, usually in carved or burnt letters: “MADE BY /E. A. MCKILLOP / BALFOUR — N. C. / HAND-CARVED.”

JENINE CULLIGAN
Huntington Museum of Art

Pat H. Johnson, Antiques Journal (November 1978); Elsa Longhauser and Harald Szeemann, eds., Self-Taught Artists of the 20th Century: An American Anthology (1998).

 

McKissack, Jefferson Davis

(1902–1980)

Jeff McKissack, a postman in Houston, Tex., created the Orange Show as a monument to the orange, which he considered to be the perfect food, and to illustrate his belief that longevity results from hard work and good nutrition. Working alone from 1956 until his death in 1980, McKissack used common building materials and found objects—bricks, tiles, fencing, and farm implements—to transform a lot in the east end of Houston into an architectural maze of walkways, balconies, arenas, and exhibits decorated with colored mosaics and brightly painted iron figures. When he was finished he had built a two-level structure of over 6,000 square feet. He expected 300,000 people to come and visit his tribute to the orange and declared it to be “the most beautiful show on earth, the most colorful show on earth, the most unique show on earth.” He also claimed that “everyone is interested in the orange from the cradle to the grave. But if it had not been for me, Jeff McKissack, the orange industry and the American people would probably have gone another two hundred years without an Orange Show.”

The Orange Show opened to the public in May 1979. After the waning of initial interest, McKissack became saddened by the lack of attendance. After McKissack’s death in 1980, Marilyn Oshman and a group of Houston art patrons purchased the Orange Show. Today, not only does the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art preserve the monument, it also offers many community programs including lectures, workshops, musical and art performances, and films. In 2001 the Orange Show Center took over John Milkovisch’s Beer Can House. The Center also sponsors Houston’s Art Car Parade. The Orange Show draws thousands of visitors each year, just as McKissack had envisioned.

STEPHANIE SMITHER
Houston, Texas

Roger Manley and Mark Sloan, Self-Made Worlds: Visionary Environments (1997); Chuck Rosenak and Jan Rosenak, Contemporary American Folk Art: A Collector’s Guide (1996); Betty-Carol Sellen with Cynthia J. Johanson, Twentieth-Century American Folk, Self-Taught, and Outsider Art (1993).

 

McNellis, Laura Craig

(b. 1957)

Birthday cakes, ice cream cones, lollipops, and personal items such as clothing, sunglasses, and hot-water bottles fill the multicolored compositions of Laura Craig McNellis. Her paintings might be mistaken at first for a child’s presentation of her favorite things, but a closer study reveals an analytical consciousness at work. Indeed, for McNellis, art may be a way of reporting on her life. Classified as severely mentally retarded at an early age and often frustrated by her inability to communicate, McNellis was not diagnosed with autism until her adulthood when researchers had refined understanding of the condition. Travis Thompson, the former director of Vanderbilt University’s Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development, who organized a 1997 exhibition of McNellis’s work, believes that for some on the autism spectrum, art serves as a substitute for words. Author Temple Grandin, who calls herself a “recovered autistic,” says that she herself “thinks in pictures” and believes that a large number of people with autism are visual thinkers.

McNellis observes and describes her surroundings in a running monologue of tempera paint on paper. Small objects might take on a large scale or float in rows across the paper’s surface. Many objects jostle for space, filling large sheets of paper with their bold black outlines. No matter what captures McNellis’s fancy—from a pair of red pajamas to the contents of the medicine cabinet—she first draws it completely with a pen or pencil and then paints over it with water-based paint. During the painting process, she nearly always places a sun with rays projecting in the upper right corner; then, working from right to left, she adds an irregular line of capital letters along the bottom edge. The presence of letters may signify recognition of the importance of the words that lie beyond her grasp. It may also indicate that McNellis wants her work to be a means of communication. Although she writes from right to left, she only rarely draws a letter backwards. She sometimes copies words put before her, such as her own name or a list, but she still draws them like the objects in the paintings, with no spaces in between.

McNellis often uses the experience of coming in and going out in her work. She depicts staircase banister posts as tall as the whole row of steps—an unusual receding perspective but a real point of view for someone looking up a flight of stairs. In another stairway image, an oblong hole on the left indicates the stairwell. The huge rectangular object next to it turns out to be a light switch—critical for going up and down stairs at night.

McNellis is also careful to provide the visual information necessary to show how an object is used. She shows both front and back of a garment, for example, or a hot-water bottle with its stopper next to it, or an electric fan complete with cord. A cutout image of two gray circles depicts an open tin can seen from above. The hole in the center of one shows it is empty; the circles of the other are the ridges of the still-attached lid.

The Ricco-Maresca Gallery introduced McNellis’s work at New York’s Outsider Art Fair in 1993; Frank Maresca and Roger Ricco’s book American Self-Taught (1993) introduced the work to a larger audience. A career survey of 100 pieces, organized by Vanderbilt University’s Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development and the Ricco-Maresca Gallery, was presented by the Nashville Public Library in 2003 and by Chicago’s Intuit Gallery in 2004. McNellis has worked at Studio XI, a Morganton, N.C., studio for creative adults with developmental disabilities. McNellis’s work is in the collection of Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art and in the Collection de L’Art Brut.

SUSAN W. KNOWLES
Nashville, Tennessee

Joseph Jacobs, Vajra Kilgour, and Rena Zurofsky, A World of Their Own (1995); Frank Maresca and Roger Ricco, American Self-Taught: Paintings and Drawings by Outsider Artists (1993); Laura Craig McNellis, Laura Craig McNellis: Internal Conversations (2001); Colin Rhodes, Outsider Art: Spontaneous Alternatives (2000).

 

Meaders, Quillian Lanier

(1917–1998)

Quillian Lanier Meaders of Cleveland, White County, Ga., played a major role in the 20th-century domestic ceramics industry of the rural South. Loosely organized in cottage-industry fashion, southern potters settled near their clay sources, combining craftwork with farming. Potters generally transferred skills informally through the male line, resulting in the formation of potter dynasties spanning several generations. The Meaders family began making pottery during the winter months of late 1892 and early 1893. Lanier’s grandfather, John Milton Meaders (1850–1942), who had freighted ceramic ware, along with farm produce, for several artisans in clay-rich White County, evidently saw financial benefit in the work. He therefore directed his six sons—Wiley, Caulder, Cleater, Casey, Lewis Quillian, and Cheever—to build a ware shop and kiln on the family property where, with assistance from their neighbors, they began manufacturing stoneware preserve jars, dairy crocks, and sorghum syrup or whiskey jugs. A distinctive feature of the local product, one confined in the main to ware made in Georgia and contiguous parts of the Carolinas and Alabama, was the application of lime and wood-ash (alkaline) glazes. The family’s “face jugs”—sometimes grotesque—are striking examples of how a potter can give a simple jug an arresting human face.

Though demand for ceramic vessels subsided after 1910, as glass and metal containers penetrated local farm kitchens, the Meaders family sustained a limited market for its ware. Their persistence in this regard was first noted in Allen H. Eaton’s seminal Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands (1937). For three more decades, Cheever Meaders, the youngest of the original Meaders potters, derived a marginal livelihood from the production of alkaline-glazed stoneware, which he sold to local customers and to a new audience of tourists.

Lanier, Cheever’s son, continued to manufacture the same traditional ware, employing a similar repertoire of tools and techniques as his forebears. His preservation efforts won for him not only a devoted following of folk art collectors and crafts enthusiasts, but encouraged a brother, Edwin, and a cousin, Cleater Jr., to resume the work as well. In recognition of such efforts and the assistance he has provided folklife researchers in their attempts to reconstruct the history of southern industry, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded Lanier Meaders a National Heritage Fellowship in 1983. Meaders’s work can be found in many museums, including the Brooklyn Museum, the American Folk Art Museum, the Folk Pottery Museum of Northeast Georgia, the Atlanta History Center, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

ROBERT SAYERS
California Academy of Sciences

John A. Burrison, Brothers in Clay: The Story of Georgia Folk Pottery (1983), From Mud to Jug: The Folk Potters and Pottery of Northeast Georgia (2010); Ralph Rinzler and Robert Sayers, The Meaders Family: North Georgia Potters (1980); Nancy Sweezy, Raised in Clay: The Southern Pottery Tradition (1984).

 

Meaders Family

John Milton Meaders founded the Meaders family folk-pottery operation in the Georgia foothills pottery center of Mossy Creek, White County, in 1892–93. He worked alongside his sons Wiley, Caulder, Cleater, Casey, Lewis Quillian, and Cheever and also hired two members of established local “clay clans,” Marion Davidson and Williams Dorsey, to work in the new log shop and teach his older boys. Cheever, the youngest, who learned from his brothers, took over the shop in 1920. With declining demand for food-related farm wares, crafts enthusiasts became Cheever’s main customers, as indicated by the inclusion of Meaders family pottery in Allen H. Eaton’s seminal Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands. In the 1960s Cleeter’s wife, Arie, began to work in the pottery, producing a line of ingenious and colorful decorative wares, including wheel-thrown birds and animals. Cleeter and Arie’s sons—John, Lanier, Reggie, and Edwin—all learned the craft.

When Cheever Meaders became too ill in 1967 to participate in the making of a 1967 Smithsonian Institution film, Lanier, who had not been active in the family business, stood in for his father. When Cheever died soon thereafter, Lanier took over the workshop. Combining his father’s stubborn adherence to the old ways and his mother’s artistic vision, Lanier (1917–98) revitalized the tradition of face jugs, on which his fame was largely based, and was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1983. In carrying on and refining the craft of alkaline-glazed stoneware, he was a crucial link between the past and future of southern folk pottery, and his success encouraged others, including members of the family, to keep that tradition alive today. Among the museums with Meaders family pottery are the Atlanta History Center, the Folk Pottery Museum of Northeast Georgia, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Arizona State University Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the American Folk Art Museum.

JOHN A. BURRISON
Georgia State University

John A. Burrison, Brothers in Clay: The Story of Georgia Folk Pottery (1983), From Mud to Jug: The Folk Potters and Pottery of Northeast Georgia (2010); Ralph Rinzler and Robert Sayers, The Meaders Family: North Georgia Potters (1980).

 

Merritt, Clyde Eugene (Gene)

(b. 1936)

Clyde Eugene Merritt was born 30 November 1936, in Columbia, S.C., to working-class parents. As an infant he suffered brain damage because of an extended fever. When Merritt was 12 years old, his mother committed suicide in the family’s kitchen.

After his mother’s death, young Merritt and his father moved to Fort Mill, S.C. Upon his father’s death in 1972, Merritt was placed under the care of the Department of Social Services. He has lived in a series of difficult adult foster care environments in Rock Hill, S.C., but currently lives in an assisted-living complex where he makes his art.

It is not clear why Merritt began to draw. For most of his adult life, he had been a musician, playing the guitar in small local bands. However, in 1993, he pawned his guitar and turned to art making. Merritt made his earliest drawings either in his temporary trailer home or at Watkins Grill in downtown Rock Hill. Merritt attempted to sell his work on the street and at Watkins Grill, where he was able to store drawing tablets and supplies. For many years, Merritt’s table at Watkins was his impromptu studio. Merritt drew his first works, which he called “cartoons,” with ballpoint pen on napkins, lined writing paper, or the occasional piece of drawing paper. Like most of his later work, these early efforts were often head profiles of popular culture celebrities. In these finely delineated drawings, Merritt constructs facial features as though they are pieces in a puzzle. The drawings often possess a cubistlike perspective.

Merritt makes most of his work from memory or, as he says, “from my head.” Merritt’s drawings are inspired in part by the movies he saw as a young man working as a custodian in a movie theater and from hours of television watching. Travel, fashion, and celebrity magazines also provide source material for his work. However, the visual complexity of his adaptations of source material cannot be underestimated. The artist’s ability to recall details from the past plays a consistent role in his work, as does his ability to abstract and transform magazine images. Merritt’s contourlike drawings both reflect and amplify specific facial qualities and full-figure gestures. He further transforms images in fashion publications by adorning his drawings of models with colored pencil to represent eyeliner and fingernail polish.

In his mature work, Merritt identifies each drawn profile with distinct labeling that includes the date the work was completed. What he calls his autograph, [-“Gene,’s - Art,’s - Inc,’s,”-], typically appears underlined and bracketed at the bottom of the drawing. In later drawings his autograph has evolved to [-“Gene,’s – Art,’s – Muzieam’s – Inc,’s”-]. He refers to his drawings as “paperwork,” partly because they have served as both products and business cards.

Gene Merritt’s work is in the collections of Winthrop University Galleries, the Museum of York County, the South Carolina State Museum, the Collection de l’Art Brut, L’Aracine, the Outsider Collection and Archives, and abcd.

TOM STANLEY
Winthrop University

Mario Del Curto, The Outlanders: Forcing Ahead with Art Brut (April 2000); Bruno Decharme, dir., Art Brut: Portrait (film, 2005); Tom Stanley, Raw Vision (Fall 1999).

 

Meucci, Antonio and Nina

(Antonio, active 1818–1847/52; Nina, active 1818–ca. 1834)

Despite their extended itinerancy, the historical record is surprisingly detailed regarding Antonio and Nina Meucci, a husband-and-wife team of miniaturists and portrait painters. Although many miniaturists learned their trade as apprentices to craftsmen, Antonio claimed to have been a member of several academies in his native Italy. Newspaper advertisements state that his Spanish wife, Nina, learned to paint from her husband. The couple’s surviving miniatures are charming though unremarkable portraits stylistically indistinguishable from the work of their contemporaries. The Meuccis first appeared in New Orleans in 1818, having arrived from Rome. The earliest advertisement states that each paints portraits and miniatures “of every dimension” and that they operated an “academy for young ladies & gentleman, at [their] dwelling in Bourbon St., in the house belonging to Mr. Honoré Landreaux, near the Orleans Theatre, No. 92.” Because of the proximity, it is tempting to speculate that Antonio also may have worked as a set designer.

From 1821 to 1822, the Meuccis lived in Charleston, where the couple offered to teach young ladies and gentlemen to paint landscapes, portraits, and miniatures in 15 weeks at their private drawing academy. Antonio also advertised his ability to “repair any miniatures damaged by weather, etc.” and exhibited a panoramic canvas entitled The Death of Hias (1822). Thus began the Meuccis’ careers as itinerant miniaturists, landscape painters, portraitists, restorers, and drawing instructors. In 1823 they appear in New York City but move to Salem in 1825, returning to New York in 1826. Family records indicate that they also worked in Richmond and Portland, Me.

The Meuccis reappeared in New Orleans in 1826, after a seven-year hiatus, announcing that they have “a great variety of specimens in miniature and other style” that were to be exhibited at Hewlett’s Exchange Coffee House and Davis’s Coffee House at the Orleans Theatre. The Meuccis also offered to repair “all likenesses painted by themselves, which may be injured by the weather, damp or otherwise.”

Antonio is listed in the city directory as a scenery painter for the Théâtre de Orleans. A review of Antonio’s “full scenery & entirely new decorations” in February 1827, including a “Scottish view,” was praised in the press as presenting “the most agreeable perspective.” During the couple’s last visit to New Orleans, Antonio Meucci gave painting lessons to Julien Hudson, a free man of color.

Records suggest that the Meuccis traveled to Havana, Cuba, and Kingston, Jamaica. By 1830 they were in Cartegena, Colombia, though they may have visited Bogotá as early as 1828. It seems likely that their daughter, Sabina Meucci (ca. 1805–84), and her husband, Richard Souter, a diplomat or merchant in Colombia, encouraged the move. However, it is unclear if Nina accompanied her husband or continued working after this. She is not mentioned in subsequent advertisements. In Cartegena, Antonio painted a portrait of Simón Bolivar and made at least a dozen copies.

Antonio was in Rionegro in 1831, possibly in Medellín, and in Popayán in 1832. He advertised his skills as a miniaturist and portrait painter in Lima, Peru, on 27 February 1834. Except for occasional trips to Ecuador, Meucci seems to have spent his remaining years in Peru. No evidence of his artistic activity after 1837 has surfaced. According to family records compiled by Jorge Bianchi Souter, Antonio Meucci died in Lima or Guayaquil between 1847 and 1852. Art works by the Meucci can be found in the New York Historical Society, the Historic New Orleans Collection, and the Louisiana State Museum.

RICHARD A. LEWIS
Louisiana State Museum, New Orleans

Beatriz González, Catálogo de Miniaturas, Museo Nacional de Colombia (1993); John Burton Harter and Mary Louise Tucker, The Louisiana Portrait Gallery: The Louisiana State Museum, vol. 1, To 1870 (1979); Historic New Orleans Collection, Encyclopedia of New Orleans Artists (1987); Louisiana State Museum, 250 Years of Life in New Orleans: The Rosemonde E. and Emile Kuntz Collection and the Felix H. Kuntz Collection (1968); Carmen Ortega Ricaurte, Diccionario de artistas en Columbia (1965); Anna Wells Rutledge, Artists in the Life of Charleston (1949).

 

Milestone, Mark Casey

(b. 1958)

As a child, Mark Casey Milestone did yardwork for his grandfather in exchange for a nickel to purchase candy at a nearby country store. He says, “I remember walking across the bridge with my little bag of candy and how totally happy I was. I’ve always wanted my work to hold that same total happiness for me and hopefully for other people.” At the age of six, Milestone realized his purpose to create art, and he often reflects on this moment when he begins a new work. Born in Jacksonville, Fla., on 28 January 1958, Milestone began drawing while in elementary school, copying the masters from one of his sister’s library books on Italian Renaissance art. At 12, he amused himself and his sisters by creating sculptures of robots. Nonetheless, Milestone’s family did not support his art, and Milestone dropped out of school in the 10th grade to earn the money to sustain his art making. He worked a slew of jobs, including busboy, line cook, and automobile airbrush artist. He even wore a bull costume to attract customers to a parking lot. In 1982 he took a job at a printing company, where he worked as a prepress graphics specialist for many years.

Early in his career Milestone was known primarily for his whirligigs and robots, but at present he focuses on painting, working in both watercolor and oil. His watercolors are typically 10 × 12 inches and his oil paintings range from 24 × 32 inches to 5 × 6 feet. His watercolors are “poetic, lyrical, and whimsical,” whereas his oils tend to be more naturalistic. The subjects of his works are usually female figures, often shown with wings. Milestone also incorporates otherworldly creatures that appear to be hybrids of animal and human forms. His work displays the strong influence of symbolists such as Redon and Rousseau. Indeed, Milestone’s work includes hallmarks of symbolism: emotion, spirituality, and imagination. The artist draws inspiration both from dreams and from emotions evoked by everyday events. His palette of cool colors and earth tones adds to the moodiness of his work. He often represents himself as a cat and uses the female form to convey mysticism. Milestone begins an open-ended story with each work, leaving the viewer to draw conclusions. The artwork is completed when the painting is sent “into the world and finds a home.”

Milestone has been exhibited in Holy H2O at the American Visionary Art Museum. He currently resides in Winston-Salem with his wife, Paula, and son, Casey.

MELISSA CROWN
University of Memphis

For more information about Milestone, go to www.markcaseymilestone.com.

 

Milkovisch, John

(1912–1988)

The Beer Can House, 222 Malone St., Houston, Tex., is one of the great examples of folk art environments in the United States. John Milkovisch began to create his environment in 1968, when he started covering his yard, patio, and driveway with concrete embedded with marbles. He said that he was “sick of cutting the grass.” When Milkovisch retired from Southern Pacific Railroad as an upholsterer in 1976, he began to work on his project in earnest. Milkovisch had always enjoyed drinking beer with his friends while he worked on his yard, and he had been saving beer cans for 17 years. Over the next 18 years the artist’s suburban house disappeared under aluminum siding of his own design—flattened beer cans. It has been estimated that Milkovisch used more than 50,000 beer cans in this monument to recycling. Sometimes Milkovisch enhanced his allover design by choosing beer cans for their color. Most frequently, however, he used “whatever was on sale.” Milkovisch exploited all of the aesthetic possibilities of beer cans; garlands and curtains made of beer can tops and pull tabs hanging from the roof edges make the house sing in the wind.

While Milkovisch considered his work an enjoyable pastime, he took special pleasure in people’s reactions to his house. He once said, “It tickles me to watch people screech to a halt. They get embarrassed. Sometimes they drive around the block a couple of times. Later they come back with a carload of friends.” Although he did not consider himself an artist, he was aware that he had created something unusual when he stated, “They say every man should always leave something to be remembered by. At least I accomplished that goal.”

In 2001, the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art purchased the Beer Can House from the Milkovisch family. This group is preserving the house according to the artist’s plan.

STEPHANIE SMITHER
Houston, Texas

John Beardsley, Gardens of Revelation: Environments by Visionary Artists (1995); Roger Manley and Mark Sloan, Self-Made Worlds: Visionary Environments (1997); Leslie Umberger, Sublime Spaces and Visionary Worlds: Built Environments of Vernacular Artists (2007); Deidi Von Schaewen and John Maizels, Fantasy Worlds (1999).

 

Miller, Reuben Aaron (R. A.)

(1912–2006)

Reuben Aaron “R. A.” Miller, a former minister and resident of the Rabbittown community near Gainesville, Ga., is best remembered for his hilltop installation of figurative whirligigs and his animated cutouts and paintings.

A minister of the Free Will Baptist Church and former cotton mill worker, Miller began making art late in life after glaucoma curtailed his vision. His earliest whirligigs included mechanical figures, but he soon arrived at his signature style of flat cutout figures in gestural poses. The cutouts, made from roofing or gutter tin, were often attached to scrap wood or salvaged furniture parts and finished with tin paddles attached to bicycle wheels to catch the breeze. Miller’s whirligigs and cut tin images include church buildings, American flags, and a menagerie of animals from typical barnyard animals—pigs, chickens, and rabbits—to long-necked and carnivorous dinosaurs. His most repeated human and humanlike figures consist of red devils, angels, Uncle Sam, and a character (often sporting a hat in silhouette) inscribed with the exhortation “Blow Oscar.” The latter figure was an encouragement to the artist’s cousin to honk while driving by Miller’s hilltop environment.

Miller’s oeuvre also includes lively, sparely executed paintings on wood or Masonite panels. Like his whirligigs, these works often incorporated seemingly incongruous combinations, such as images of dinosaurs with the blessing “Lord love you” inscribed in the borders.

Folk art enthusiasts in Athens and Atlanta began to visit Miller by the early 1980s. In 1984 Athens rock band R.E.M, working with director James Herbert, filmed the video Harborcoat at Miller’s hilltop and workshop. As folk art ascended in popularity during the late 1980s, Miller’s hilltop was frequently denuded as collectors and dealers bought Miller’s inexpensive works in volume.

Later in life, Miller’s eyesight worsened to the point that he enlisted others to help paint his cutout figures. Eventually the cutouts once used to adorn his whirligigs made up the bulk of his production. Recognition from the art world came to Miller in the late 1980s. R. A. Miller’s work can be found in the Telfair Museums.

HARRY H. DELORME
Telfair Museum of Art

Jerry Cullum, Raw Vision (Fall 2001); Georgia Museum of Art, Lord Love You: Works by R. A. Miller in the Mullis Collection (2009); Paul Manoguerra, ed., Amazing Grace: Self-Taught Artists from the Mullis Collection (2007); Wilfrid Wood, Raw Vision (Fall 2006); Alice Rae Yelen, Passionate Visions of the American South: Self-Taught Artists from 1940 to the Present (1993).

 

Minchell (Isenberg), Peter James

(1889–1982)

Born Peter James Isenberg in Treves (now Trier), Germany, Minchell immigrated to Louisiana to live with his brother in 1906. There he studied at a Catholic seminary and planned to become a priest. Instead, just a few weeks before he was to be ordained, he left the seminary. Eventually he married. Minchell, hoping to become an architect, builder, or engineer, taught himself drafting skills. He also changed his name from Isenberg to Minchell, believing that his German name might hinder his success. The chronology is unclear, but Minchell is said to have left Louisiana, moving to Florida, either in 1911 or after World War II. In Florida he worked for a company that made tile, patio stone, brick, and decorative pottery. Visits to museums inspired Minchell to take up making art sometime during the 1960s. Minchell made most of his paintings after 1960, when he retired. The artist died in 1982.

Minchell’s early works draw on his knowledge of mechanical design. As his skills grew, he created drawings of lush vegetation, birds, and reptiles familiar either from his early years living near a Louisiana bayou or from his later years in Florida. Between Minchell’s retirement and death, he created three major series of paintings that take as their subjects exotic landscapes, architectural settings, space travel, and the creation of the earth. Minchell said that many of his images, such as those in Geological Phenomena (ca. 1972), Comet X, and Planet Perfection came to him in dreams. Although Minchell grounded his landscapes in the natural world, he distanced them from reality with odd colors—pale yellows, soft greens, and brownish tans—and strange plants and trees with twisted branches hung with Spanish moss. Painted in watercolor, these landscapes evoke a realm of primordial wonder. Equally mysterious are Minchell’s religious scenes, ranging in topic from the story of Judith and Holofernes to the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. He Turned the Water to Blood pictures Moses and his brother, Aaron, situated within a setting that juxtaposes an exterior view—the Nile—to an architectural interior decorated with Egyptian motifs, including a richly ornamented column. One writer suggests that the image may show the impact of a popular source on Minchell’s image making: Cecil B. DeMille’s classic film The Ten Commandments. Sometimes Minchell added commentary across the lower margin.

At first, Minchell gave away his artworks as presents; later he peddled them at local shopping centers. Lewis Alquist, who exhibited in Chicago and later became chair of the art department at the University of Arizona at Tucson, introduced Minchell’s work to Michael and Julie Hall, influential early collectors of contemporary folk art. Robert Bishop, director of the Museum of American Folk Art (now the American Folk Art Museum), also recognized the artist’s talent and included his work in Folk Painters of America. Minchell’s work can be found in the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

LEE KOGAN
American Folk Art Museum

Robert Bishop, Folk Painters of America (1979); Linda Hartigan, Made with Passion: The Hemphill Folk Art Collection in the National Museum of American Art (1991); Jay Johnson and William C. Ketchum, American Folk Art of the Twentieth Century (1983); Milwaukee Art Museum, Common Ground / Uncommon Vision: The Michael and Julie Hall Collection of American Folk Art in the Milwaukee Art Museum (1993).

 

Minter, Joe Wade, Sr.

(b. 1943)

Joe Minter, a self-taught African American artist, is the creator of African Village in America, a quarter-acre, densely packed environment in Birmingham, Ala. Comprised of roughhewn sculptures, the environment commemorates 400 years of African American history. While one section recalls an ancestral African village before the onslaught of the slave trade and another invokes a slave ship and the horrors of the middle passage, most of the site documents the history of the civil rights movement and contemporary life in America and the world. As a whole, the site expresses at once an epic historic and cultural vision and an intensely personal artistic vision.

Joe Wade Minter Sr., born to Lawrence Dunbar Minter and Rosie McAlpin Minter in 1943 in Birmingham, Ala., was the eighth of 10 children. After graduating from high school and serving in the army from 1965 until 1967, Minter worked for 28 years in a series of trades, including metalworking, painting, construction, and road building. In 1995 he retired for health reasons. During the 1980s, as Birmingham struggled to develop the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, Minter became concerned that history would not recognize the contributions of the thousands of ordinary citizens who took part in the battle for human rights—the “foot soldiers” of the movement, as he called them. Thus, in 1989 he began his own testimonial to the civil rights movement by carving trees that would become the core of an envisioned ancestral African village. Concerned about the durability of the work, Minter soon switched to metalwork constructions.

Using found objects, Minter creates individual sculptures and environmental constructions commemorating the middle passage, African American soldiers who have died fighting for America, generations of enslaved and freed black laborers, and such historic moments as the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march over Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, Dr. Martin Luther King’s 1963 incarceration in Birmingham Jail, the 1963 bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, the first Iraq War, and the attack on the World Trade Center. Recent works have responded to global concerns such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Throughout the yard and often incorporated into the specific sculptures, political and religious messages painted on boards affirm the site’s pedagogic and healing functions. Minter proclaims that he has built his environment “to show how we lived and how we live now,” to tell “part of the story that’s never been told,” and to reconnect people with “the motherland and culture that has been taken away.”

African Village in America as an extensive environment serves as a public testimonial to collective history and an act of cross-cultural understanding. For Minter, art is an instrument through which we see, hence understand, how other people see the world we share, however painful or inspiring that vision may be. While exceptionally expansive in size and conception, Minter’s environment can also be seen as a manifestation of the broad cultural tradition of southern, African American yard shows—altered landscapes that reveal a complex interaction of personal, aesthetic, and spiritual expression with the cultural, historical conditions out of which they emerge.

CHARLES RUSSELL
Rutgers University at Newark

William Arnett and Paul Arnett, eds., Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art, vol. 2 (2001); Joe Minter, To You through Me: The Beginning of a Link of a Journey of 400 Years (2005); Carol Crown, ed., Coming Home: Self-Taught Artists, the Bible, and the American South (2004).

 

Mr. Feuille

(fl. ca. 1834–1841)

The portrait painter Feuille, whose first name is unknown, is said to have been frequently conflated with his brother, Jean-François Feuille, a copperplate engraver who was active in New Orleans at the same time. Scholars have speculated that the Feuille brothers emigrated to the United States from France, although there is no solid evidence to support this contention. The name Feuille first appears in the records of the National Academy of Design in New York, where one of the two men was an associate member in 1832. The first record of Feuille in New Orleans is an advertisement taken out in the Bee on 5 March 1835. The last notice appears in the Courier on 4 April 1841. Although his name does not appear in directories, Feuille apparently lived with his brother at various addresses on Chartres Street near Canal Street in what is today the French Quarter. It is also possible that J. F. Feuille and the artist identified as “Mr. Feuille” are one and the same person.

The handful of portraits and miniatures signed by or attributed to Feuille are marked by the tendency, characteristic of plain or folk portraiture, to reduce volume to a series of flattened planes. There is a decided emphasis on the precise delineation of detail and pattern. The representation of fabric suggests a stiff, almost metallic appearance that readily marks the artist’s work. Figures are set against a dark background in most portraits. Where suggested, linear perspective is skewed, and there is little evidence of atmospheric perspective. Nevertheless, Feuille’s portraits are individualized likenesses of specific individuals executed with a high degree of competency and charm. Perhaps the best known of Feuille’s portraits is the likeness of Nicolas Augustin Metoyer, the patriarch of the prominent Creole of color community near Nachitoches, La.

RICHARD A. LEWIS
Louisiana State Museum, New Orleans

John Burton Harter and Mary Louise Tucker, The Louisiana Portrait Gallery: The Louisiana State Museum, vol. 1, To 1870 (1979); Historic New Orleans Collection, Encyclopedia of New Orleans Artists, 1718–1918 (1987); Louisiana State Museum, 250 Years of Life in New Orleans: The Rosemonde E. and Emile Kuntz Collection and the Felix H. Kuntz Collection (1968); Martin Wiesendanger and Margaret Wiesendanger, 19th-Century Louisiana Painters and Paintings from the Collection of W. E. Groves (1971).

 

Mohamed, Ethel Wright

(1906–1992)

At the age of 60, Ethel Wright Mohamed of Belzoni, Miss., began to create pictures in embroidery, and by age 75 she had created more than 125 extraordinary memory pictures. The Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage invited Mohamed to participate in its 1974 Folklife Festival, which featured artists from Mississippi, and exhibited her work in its 1976 bicentennial festival. Mohamed’s work was displayed at both the 1982 and 1984 World’s Fairs.

Ethel Wright was born in 1906 and grew up near Eupora, Miss. Working at a local bakery at age 16, she met 32-year-old Hassan Mohamed, owner of the local dry goods store. The two married in 1924 and after a few years moved to Belzoni, where they opened the H. Mohamed general merchandise store and reared eight children.

After her husband died in 1965, Ethel Mohamed continued to run the family store but was lonely: “I was a successful businesswoman. I had brought up eight wonderful children. I had been married to a marvelous man for 41 years. Now here I was coming home at night to this big empty house. I needed a hobby.” First Mohamed tried painting, but one of her grandchildren was embarrassed about his grandmother’s art. “People will think you’re weird,” he said. Young Ethel Wright had been encouraged by her mother to draw and to embroider, to take scraps of cloth and make her own “coloring books.” So Mohamed decided to take up embroidery instead. “That way I could fold up the work and put it away quickly when people came by.” She kept her stitchery hidden in a closet.

Ethel Wright Mohamed, The Blue Bird of Happiness, ca. 1979, silk and cotton, 25″ × 25″ (sight) (Collection of Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson)

Her secret art brought her great happiness; she said of her “hobby,” “I began to stitch pictures, a family album of sorts, of my family’s history. Of graduations, of family stories, of pets and trees and flowers in our yard. I felt a great joy when I was stitching, as if this was what I was meant to do. The needle sang to me.” When Mohamed was persuaded to show her pictures to a local artist, she found a waiting audience for her work.

Mohamed created miniature worlds in her pictures of family and community events: births, holidays, scenes at home, and at the store. Twelve pictures tell sequentially the story of the Mohamed family farm. Some pictures are imaginative re-creations of local events; in one scene, an ancestor leaves home to fight for the Confederacy. A Sacred Harp singing group is the subject of another. The Beautiful Horse illustrates a favorite story that Hassan Mohamed brought from his native Lebanon.

The joy and the intimacy of Mohamed’s memories show in the animation, the brilliant colors, and the fanciful detail of each child, animal, plant, tree. In many of the works, the trees and plants are truly animated—each leaf with a smiling face. As Mohamed stitched, all parts of the needlework came to life to her, each tiny part of the picture with its own story. Mohamed never took out a stitch. If a face turned out ugly, she would tell it, “That’s too bad; you were just born that way.” She never sold her pictures, considering each a member of the family.

In 1991 the Mississippi Arts Commission presented Ethel Mohamed with the Governor’s Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in the Arts. Mohamed’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Ethel Wright Mohamed Stitchery Museum, and the Sarah Ellen Gillespie Museum of Art at William Carey University.

CHRISTINE WILSON
Mississippi Department of Archives and History

William Ferris, Local Color: A Sense of Place in Folk Art (1982); William Ferris and Judy Peiser, Four Women Artists, video, Center for Southern Folklore (1978); Ethel Wright Mohamed, My Life in Pictures, ed. Charlotte Capers and Olivia P. Collins (1976); Emily Wagster, Clarion-Ledger (7 February 1992); Christine Wilson, ed., Ethel Wright Mohamed, Mississippi Department of Archives and History (1984).

 

Morgan, Sister Gertrude

(1900–1980)

Between 1956 and 1974, Sister Gertrude Morgan executed approximately 800 drawings, paintings, and sculptures. A self-appointed missionary, Morgan utilized her artwork as tools of her ministry in New Orleans, her adopted city. Morgan also used her talents as a musician, poet, and writer to spread the Gospel and to beseech her audience to live a good Christian life or suffer the consequences. Two major themes dominate her work: self-portraits and biblical subjects, with an emphasis on the apocalyptic warnings of the New Testament book of Revelation.

Gertrude was born to Frances and Edward Williams in Lafayette, Ala., on 7 April 1900. She grew up in various communities in Alabama and Georgia and as a young adult worked as a domestic and nursemaid. In the late 1910s and early 1920s she became affiliated with James Berry Miller’s Rose Hill Memorial Baptist Church in Columbus, Ga., where she sensed that God had called her to dedicate her life to him and had sanctified her to a life of faith. She married Will Morgan on 12 February 1928, but the union did not last, and in 1929 she relocated to New Orleans. There Morgan met Mother Margaret Parker and Sister Cora Williams and, with them, began a new life, first as a cofounder of an uncertified orphanage/daycare center, then as a sometimes-homeless prophetess and street preacher, and, finally, as the sole proprietor of the Everlasting Gospel Mission, which she established in her small house in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward.

Sister Gertrude Morgan, Sister Morgan Did Some Great Work, 1970, gouache and ballpoint pen on cardboard, 12″ × 11½″ (Collection of Robert A. Roth)

Around 1956 or 1957 Morgan received a second revelation from the Lord: she was to be the bride of Christ. From this point, she discarded the black robes she had worn while preaching and put on white garments, in keeping with her new relationship with Christ and God the Father. Abandoning her colleagues at the orphanage and striking out on her own, Morgan began to make art that preached the Gospel and especially the book of Revelation. Around 1960, while preaching and singing in the French Quarter, Morgan came to the attention of art dealer Larry Borenstein. He invited her to show her work and perform her music at his gallery. Through Borenstein’s efforts, Sister Morgan became nationally known through two exhibitions at New York’s Museum of American Folk Art, through God’s Greatest Hits, an illustrated book by poet Rod McKuen, and through a recording of her singing entitled Let’s Make a Record.

Early in 1974 Morgan suddenly stopped making art but continued to write poetry. She died at her mission on 8 July 1980 and was interred in an unmarked grave in the potter’s field in Metairie, La., outside New Orleans.

Morgan’s brightly colored designs employ a conceptual mode of representation, showing what the artist knows to be rather than what is actually seen. Figures and architectural forms are highly simplified yet infused with an intense expressive energy. Her works can be found in major institutions across the United States, including the American Folk Art Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the High Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

WILLIAM A. FAGALY
New Orleans Museum of Art

William A. Fagaly, Tools of Her Ministry: The Art of Sister Gertrude Morgan (2003); Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, Made with Passion: The Hemphill Folk Art Collection (1990); Herbert W. Hemphill Jr. and Julia Weissman, Twentieth-Century American Folk Art and Artists (1974); Elsa Longhauser and Harald Szeemann, eds., Self-Taught Artists of the 20th Century: An American Anthology (1998); Chuck Rosenak and Jan Rosenak, Museum of American Folk Art Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century American Folk Art (1990).

 

Moses, Anna Mary Robertson (Grandma Moses)

(1860–1961)

Anna Mary Robertson Moses, known as Grandma Moses, is perhaps the most famous self-taught artist of the 20th century. The charismatic artist attained celebrity and achieved unprecedented media attention during her lifetime, and her art still maintains wide appeal. Her art embodies values Americans revere: courage, energy, respect for past, devotion to family and community, and a reverence for nature. Moses lived in rural Virginia for 18 years. Her paintings in later life contain memories of her southern experience.

Anna Mary Robertson was born 7 September 1860 in Greenwich, N.Y., to Mary Shanahan and Russell King Robertson, a farmer. She demonstrated an early interest in art, delighting her father, who also was interested in art. From the age of 12, she spent 15 years as a “hired girl” in area farms. In 1887 she married a “hired man,” Thomas Salmon Moses, and the young couple moved to Staunton, Va., to seek a better life. Anna and Thomas worked as tenant farmers for a number of years before they had saved enough money to buy their own farm. Anna sold butter and homemade potato chips to neighboring farmers in order to bolster the family income. By 1905 when the couple decided to move back to New York State, Moses had given birth to 10 children, five of whom did not reach adulthood. Upon their return, the family settled in Eagle Bridge, N.Y., where Thomas Moses died in 1927.

In 1918 at the age of 58, Moses painted her first large picture. During the 1920s she painted landscapes on panels and occasional small pictures for family and friends. In 1932, at her daughter Anna’s request, Moses embroidered a “worsted yarn” picture for her granddaughter, Zoan. She enjoyed the experience and made many more when she moved to Bennington to tend to her daughter during a long illness. When she developed arthritis, yarn pictures became too difficult to execute. Encouraged by her sister Celestia, she gradually switched from yarn back to paint. As she grew older and her farm chores and family responsibilities lessened, she devoted her full attention to art. Her memory painting, The First Auto, painted in 1939 at the age of 79, was inspired by one of her visits with Thomas and four children to a fair in Gypsyhill Park, near Staunton, where she had seen her first automobile. Apple Butter Making (1947) is another among the relatively small number of memory pictures related to years spent in Virginia with Thomas.

An exhibition of Moses’s paintings in a woman’s exchange competition organized by Thomas Drug Store in Hoosick Falls in 1938 caught the interest and attention of New York collector Louis J. Caldor. He purchased all of Moses’s paintings, met the artist, purchased more, and sought to obtain exhibitions and representation for her in New York City. In 1939 Sydney Janis selected three paintings for a modest exhibition in the Member’s Room of the Museum of Modern Art. Otto Kallir, director of the newly formed Galerie St. Etienne, New York, gave Moses her first one-person exhibition, What a Farm Wife Painted (1940). Three paintings sold; the exhibition garnered several reviews, including one in the New York Herald on 8 October 1940 that named the artist “Grandma Moses,” as she had long been called in her own community.

With an intuitive compositional ability and talent as a colorist, Moses painted an idyllic world through the changing seasons, recording the holidays, especially Thanksgiving and Christmas. She borrowed images from Currier and Ives and other popular sources—greeting cards, magazine and newspaper illustrations, and leaflets, often tracing motifs for anecdotal details for landscapes and interior narratives. She frequently painted more than one rendition of a subject, but always varied details or changed the mood so that her pictures never appear as mimeographed copies. Her mature landscape painting style combined detailed foregrounds with stunning panoramic backgrounds. In her later years, looser brushwork resulted in an expressionistic painterly style. Moses sets many of her subjects in a shallow picture plane; her pictures combine simultaneous perspectives, flattened, abstract forms, and deep illusionistic vistas. Her paintings nostalgically recall earlier times, and her universal messages are imbued with both serenity and spirited optimism.

Moses painted more than 1,500 pictures from 1935 until 1961, the year she died. Hundreds of national and international exhibitions followed, along with a significant body of scholarly articles and books. Virtually every book or catalog that surveys 20th-century self-taught artists includes an entry on Grandma Moses.

Moses was awarded honorary doctorates from Russell Sage College, Troy, N.Y. (1949), and Moore College of Art, Philadelphia, Pa. (1951). The artist met President Harry Truman in 1949, when she traveled to Washington to receive the Woman’s National Press Club Award. Moses took part in an insightful televised conversation with Edward R. Murrow’s See It Now in 1955 and appeared on the covers of Time (28 December 1953) and Life (19 September 1960). Moses was a celebrity and a national icon who painted against stylistic trends. During an era of Cold War, her optimistic messages delighted a vast number of people, and many works were reproduced on calendars and greeting cards.

On 13 December 1961 Moses died. Her legacy continues to draw interest from new and committed audiences as well as debate within the art community. Recent reappraisals have analyzed the artist’s process and recognized her significance in the history of American art. Moses’s paintings are in the collection of many museums and public and private collections. In 1969, eight years after her death, the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative six-cent stamp in her honor, a detail of the painting July Fourth.

LEE KOGAN
American Folk Art Museum

Sidney Janis, They Taught Themselves: American Primitive Painters of the 20th Century (1942); Jane Kallir, Grandma Moses (1973), Grandma Moses: The Artist behind the Myth (1948), Grandma Moses in the 21st Century (2001); Lee Kogan, Grandma Moses: Grandmother to the Nation (2007); Karal Ann Marling, Designs of the Heart: The Homemade Art of Grandma Moses (2006).

 

Mulligan, Mark Anthony

(b. 1963)

A true Louisville original, Mark Anthony Mulligan is an important Kentucky artist. Despite mental and physical disabilities, and no formal art instruction, Mulligan has created a mostly joyous vision of Louisville’s urban environment that transcends his personal circumstances.

Mulligan, who is African American, was born into a working-class family and neighborhood in Louisville’s west end. In the 1970s, several petroleum refineries operated in an area called Rubbertown near his home. This unlikely place was Mulligan’s first inspiration. Rubbertown’s large fuel storage tanks with giant trademarked logos became a lifelong obsession that the artist celebrated in numerous pictures and songs.

To Mulligan, who considers himself a “sign and logo artist,” these corporate petroleum signs are full of spiritual meaning—manifested in acronyms. For example, Gulf becomes “God’s Unique Love Forever,” Chevron morphs into “Charity Ever On,” and, his personal favorite, Ashland, stands for “Ask Him Love and Never Doubt.” That Mulligan is able to find spiritual meaning in the most commercial of ventures is one of the highlights of his remarkable art. In Mulligan’s worldview, everything in the urban environment is redeemed by being an obvious extension of the Creator’s plan. Mulligan has a talent for choosing aspects of contemporary life that most artists would find unappealing as subject matter, and yet are omnipresent parts of our culture. For example, Mulligan has celebrated the fast-food industry through his still-life drawings, paintings, and songs about their products.

Mark Anthony Mulligan is at heart a draftsman. Mulligan’s use of line is his most expressive quality. He usually fills the page completely, and he has an intuitive sense of how to take advantage of the formal elements of art. Introduced to acrylic painting by a Louisville gallery at his request, Mulligan’s use of color is pure and usually straight out of the tube or marker. In a typical Mulligan cityscape, the composition is divided into a patchwork of tall buildings, roads, and highways. Signage is everywhere in the form of real streets and businesses integrated with imaginary places named for friends and pop culture references. Mulligan uses simple perspective and implies depth by reducing the scale of objects as the eye moves from foreground to background. The artist also uses a bird’s-eye vantage point. You sense he is floating over the world he creates. Mulligan completes a piece by signing his name, giving the work a title, dating it, and recording how long it took him to finish his composition.

Mulligan’s works are fantastic imaginary maps filled with hundreds of named and intersecting roadways. He has produced seek-and-find and connect-the-dot images that underscore the difficulty of finding easy meaning in life. For fans of mail art, Mulligan has created hundreds of letters with profusely illustrated envelopes. He has also experimented with multiples made on commercial photocopy machines.

Despite being widely exhibited and collected, Mulligan retired from art in 2000. Today, he occasionally produces art, which he prefers to sell or barter on the streets. Years of instability and homelessness have taken their toll. In 2005, the Kentucky Folk Art Center in Morehead, Ky., honored Mulligan with a traveling retrospective exhibition entitled You Must Withstand the Wind: Transformation of the Urban Landscape. Mulligan’s work is in the collections of the Kentucky Folk Art Center and the New Orleans Museum of Art. In 2003, the Kenyan filmmaker Andrew Thuita directed Looking for Mark, an 80-minute documentary about Mulligan.

ALBERTUS GORMAN
Louisville, Kentucky

Kentucky Folk Art Center, Morehead, African-American Folk Art in Kentucky (1998); Gail Andrews Trechsel, ed., Pictured in My Mind: Contemporary American Self-Taught Art from the Collection of Dr. Kurt Gitter and Alice Rae Yelen (1995); Kentucky Folk Art Center, You Must Withstand the Wind: Transformation of the Urban Landscape (2005).

 

Murray, John Bunion (J. B.)

(1908–1988)

John Bunion (J. B.) Murray, a former tenant farmer from Glascock County, Ga., gained notice in exhibitions of folk and so-called outsider art in the early 1980s. Unlike most artists introduced in these contexts, he painted abstractly, marking two-dimensional surfaces and found objects with a chantlike asemic script that he called “the language of the Holy Spirit direct from God.” Murray cited the origins of his “spiritual work” in a 1978 visionary experience. “When I started I prayed and I prayed and the Lord sent a vision from the sun. Everything I see is from the sun. He came to me slowly, over a period of time, came in a vision and a likeness. It was then I began to write these letters.” Murray’s first works were inscribed on rolls of adding machine tape and blank stationery. They were sealed in envelopes that he distributed for free at his church and on street corners in the towns of Mitchell and Sparta near his home. “Different writing represents different languages and folks,” he explained, “It’s like He uses different verses and prayers and psalms—the same.”

A year after Murray’s initial visionary experience, William Rawlings, his physician, introduced him to watercolor, polychrome inks, and fine art boards and papers. Murray immediately expanded the size and complexity of his work and produced his first autonomous paintings. Among the fields of script he now added ghostly human figures that he described as “people that are dry tongued; they don’t know God.” He marked found objects such as stovetops, television cabinets, and picture tubes—all objects associated with fire and light—with fluid strokes of blue, yellow, and red enamel. He filled sketchbook pages with vertical syncopated strokes of watercolor and, in larger works, applied dense fields of color in columns. He made geometric compositions with meandering lines and script fields and, when asked about his work, gave lengthy verbal meditations on God and nature.

As a result of the advocacy of Rawlings and the ceramic sculptor Andy Nasisse, Murray’s work began to appear in regional exhibitions of self-taught artists. Almost immediately he was invited to exhibit in folk art venues and museums throughout the United States and soon entered important collections in New York, Europe, and Japan. Murray’s work is included in the collections of many museums, including abcd, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

JUDITH MCWILLIE
University of Georgia

Grey Gundaker, Signs of Diaspora / Diaspora of Signs: Literacies, Creolization, and Vernacular Practice in African America (1998); Judith McWillie, in Cultural Perspectives on the American South, vol. 5, Religion, ed. Charles Reagan Wilson (1991); Judith McWillie and Grey Gundaker, No Space Hidden: The Spirit of African American Yard Work (2005); Mary Padgelek, In the Hand of the Holy Spirit: The Visionary Art of J. B. Murray (2000).

 

National Heritage Fellowships

The National Endowment for the Arts, established in 1965 by an act of Congress, created the National Heritage Fellowships to recognize and preserve the United States’ rich and diverse cultural heritage. These fellowships are the highest honor this country bestows upon master folk and traditional artists. The National Endowment for the Arts’ Folk Art Program, which awarded its first Fellowship awards in 1982, follows a folkloristic definition of folk art; honorees are more likely to be practitioners of local craft traditions than artists whose art making is distinguished by idiosyncrasy or aesthetic value.

The number of awardees per year has varied between 11 and 17. As of 2007 more than 325 artists and groups have been recognized for their roles in practicing, conserving, reviving, innovating, and teaching their art forms. One of the fellowships awarded each year is named for Bess Lomax Hawes, the National Endowment for the Arts director of the Folk Arts Program who initiated the National Heritage Fellowship program. This particular honor is given specifically to recognize those who foster and promote folk and traditional arts in the public arena. Recipients of the National Heritage Fellowships have included musicians, dancers, storytellers, boat builders, quilters, basket makers, and many others.

RHONDA L. REYMOND
College of Creative Arts West Virginia University

Robert Atkinson, Journal of American Folklore (Fall–Winter 1993); Steve Siporin, American Folk Masters: The National Heritage Fellows (1992).

 

National Society of the Colonial Dames of America

The National Society of the Colonial Dames of America (NSCDA), a voluntary organization for women, was established in 1891 to foster a national appreciation for America’s early history and culture through patriotic service, educational projects, and historic preservation. An unincorporated association of 44 corporate societies with more than 15,000 members, the society maintains its headquarters at Dumbarton House in Washington, D.C. Membership is limited to women whose ancestors lived in the colonies before the American Revolution.

With more than 70 affiliated properties nationwide ranging in date from 1680 to 1930, the NSCDA owns or manages 42; others receive financial assistance, volunteer services, donations of furnishings, or archaeology funding. In the South, the Dames are involved with approximately 25 properties in 14 states, documenting America’s development from its pioneer settlements to westward migration. The Dames’ interest in museums in the South extends to structures and their furnishings dating from the 18th and 19th centuries, including the Ximenez-Fatio House (1798) in St. Augustine, Fla., Liberty Hall (1796) in Frankfort, Ky., Greek-Revival Craik-Patton House (1834) in Charleston, W.Va., and the Neill-Cochran House (1855) in Austin, Tex. Within these sites, the nscda maintains collections of American pictorial and decorative arts. Among these are a double portrait of Frankfort, Ky., residents Mason Preston Brown and his brother Orlando by the itinerant artist Trevor Thomas Fowler (1800–1881) from about 1849; a graphite drawing by an unidentified artist depicting Fort DeRussy, La., during the Civil War; and a dirt dish, an earthenware plate sealed with a clear lead glaze, made in Randolph County, N.C., from about 1750 to 1800. Following up on its landmark publication American Samplers (Ethel Stanwood Bolton and Eve Johnston Coe, 1921), the society currently is conducting a survey of samplers and pictorial embroideries, building upon more than 2,500 descriptions previously recorded. Again, this survey is an invaluable resource for scholars of southern art, which has often been ignored.

Other NSCDA endeavors include maintaining genealogical records, conducting oral histories, installing plaques and historic markers of local and national interest, and sponsoring an inventory of American paintings and sculpture. This inventory is an important repository for scholars, aiding genealogical, historical, population, and art-historical research. Beginning in 2003, the Tennessee NSCDA chapter began a project documenting Tennessee portraits, in public and private collections including significant portraits in collections out of state. The project has documented more than 2,400 portraits and maintains a website (www.tnportraits.org) that serves as a repository that welcomes new additions and as a resource for future research. Because many southern works, such as portraits, remain in family hands, the NSCDA inventories help scholars locate specific works. Furthermore, as the identities of many southern portraitists remain unknown, the inventories, with images of portraits apparently made by the same hand, serve as an impetus for new research on southern art.

CHARLOTTE EMANS MOORE
Wilmington, North Carolina

Clarinda Huntington Pendleton Lamar, A History of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America, from 1891 to 1933 (1934); “National Society of the Colonial Dames of America,” special edition, The Magazine Antiques (July 2007); National Society of the Colonial Dames of America, The National Society of the Colonial Dames of America: Its Beginnings, Its Purpose, and a Record of Its Work, 1891–1913 (1913); Summary of the Histories of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America and of the Corporate Societies, 1891–1962 (1962); William Seale and Erik Kvalsvik, Domestic Views: Historic Properties Owned or Supported by the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America (1992).

 

New Market, Virginia, Painted Boxes

A unique group of more than 30 paint-decorated miniature boxes and miniature blanket chests has been found and documented in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, in the area surrounding the town of New Market in Shenandoah County. The miniature boxes come in two basic sizes. The larger ones have heights ranging from 6⅞ to 7⅝ inches, widths from 9¾ to 10⅜ inches, and depths from 5½ to 6 inches. The smaller ones range from 5⅜ inches high, 6¾ to 8¾ inches wide, and 4¼ to 5 inches deep. In this group, 95 percent of the wood used is yellow pine; the remaining 5 percent is made from poplar. Corners are constructed with either dovetailed joints (60 percent) or nailed together (40 percent). The bottoms of all examples are nailed to the sides, and the tops are attached with leather hinges. The boxes’ feet are turned and fitted into holes drilled into the bottoms of the boxes. The turnings used for the feet vary from box to box, and even sometimes on the same box.

The miniature blanket chests, all made from yellow pine, range from heights of 13½ to 19½ inches, widths of 15 to 28 inches, and depths of 10¼ to 16 inches. These chests have dovetailed corners, bottoms nailed to the sides, and tops affixed with commercial butt hinges. The feet are turned and fitted into holes drilled into the bottom boards of the boxes.

The makers of these miniature boxes and chests applied decorations in paints of two or three colors over a base coat. These decorations usually combine freehand painting and stenciling patterns that include eagles, doves, stylized leaves, stars, snowflakes, and leaves on a stem. Several of the constructions have only freehand decoration. Except for one example, the makers treated all legs with black paint. Most of the “Newmarket” boxes have been found in Shenandoah County, which in the 19th century had the Shenandoah Valley’s largest German population. The handing down of boxes and chests in Virginia-German families and their location are evidence of German cultural connection. An inscription under the lid of one box that reads “Maid by Mr. Stiawalt in Shennadoh Co., 1835 bought by Isaac Bull” is further evidence of Germanic origin. At that time there were only two male members of the Stirewalt (or Stiawalt) family living in New Market or anywhere in Shenandoah County. They were brothers who were Lutheran ministers both married to members of the Henkel family. Both lived in New Market, Va., and in North Carolina, traveling back and forth to serve congregations in both places. Information about Jacob Stirewalt, suggests that he was the maker of this Newmarket box.

Jacob Stirewalt, born in Rowan County, N.C., in 1805, was the younger brother of John Stirewalt. In 1833 he married Henrietta Henkel of New Market, Va.; he and his wife had six children. In 1837 he became a licensed deacon in the Lutheran Church, and in 1838 he was ordained as a minister. He owned a farm one mile south of New Market, and family tradition says that he always farmed, even during the time that he was a minister. His son, Jerome Paul, described his father as “an industrious and practical man.” An inventor, he was skilled in working wood, leather, and metal. Jacob also taught at the New Market Academy from 1837 to 1838 and became principal of the New Market Female Seminary in 1854.

The variety of Jacob Stirewalt’s activities may indicate how he might have marketed his miniatures. He might have made and decorated the boxes in New Market and offered them for sale at his brother-in-law Solomon’s store; he might have made and peddled them during his travels to churches he served; or because oral traditions in families from the New Market region associate the miniature chests and boxes with girls who attended school in New Market, he might have made, decorated, and sold them to students at the academies.

Regardless of who made and decorated these boxes, they represent an important regional distinctive folk art tradition that stands apart from the body of painted furniture associated with the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

RODDY MOORE

SALLY MOORE
Blue Ridge Institute and Museum Ferrum College (Virginia)