The Outsider – Fall 2007

A P U B L I C AT I O N O F I N T U I T : T H E C E N T E R F O R I N T U I T I V E A N D O U T S I D E R A R T

The Outsider

Purpose-built How visions propelled the work of A.G. Rizzoli

V O L U M E 1 2 | I S S U E 2 | FA L L 0 7

Ramírez reconsidered Delving deeper into artist’s life proves illuminating

Wrapped in art Collecting works of outsiders inspires this figurative artist

2 THE OUTSIDER

EDITOR Janet Franz ART DIRECTION & D E S I G N Lowercase, Inc. EXECUTIVE COMMIT T E E William Swislow, President

The Outsider

Cheri Eisenberg, Vice President Gary Zickel, Treasurer Susann Craig, Secretary Gary Fine, Communications Chair Daniel S. Berger, M.D., Collections & Acquisitions Chair Ralph Concepcion, Development Chair Jerry Stefl, Education Chair

Contents F E AT U R E S

Jan Petry, Exhibits Chair Russell Bowman, Long Range Planning Chair BOARD MEMBERS Cathryn Albrecht Patrick Blackburn Kevin Cole Karl D’Cunha Robert G. Donnelley Marjorie Freed Nancy Gerrie Ellen Glassmeyer Stuart Grannen

11 A.G. Rizzoli: Master Architect

By Jo Farb Hernández A draftsman by day, the artist spent his nights building a magnificent alternative reality

19 The Myth of Martín Ramírez

By Victor M. Espinosa Sometimes a mystery is only a mystery because no one has probed deep enough

Eugenie Johnson Chris Julsrud Jessica Moss Herb Nechin Judy Newton Bob Roth Judy Saslow

27 ‘It Makes Me Feel Inspired’

Interview by Janet Franz For this painter and mentor of other artists, collecting completes the picture

Lisa Stone Terri Sweig David Syrek Bernard Williams STAFF Cleo Wilson, Executive Director Robert Reinard, Program Director, Collections & Exhibitions Alys Tryon, Membership Coordinator Amanda Curtis, Program Director, Education Heather Holbus, Program Coordinator Felicia Ojo, Gallery Assistant

D E PA R T M E N T S 03

What’s Happening at Intuit

36

Recent Acquisitions & Promised Gifts

38

Book Reviews

42

Tribute

43

Calendar

The Outsider is published two times a year by Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, located at 756 N. Milwaukee Avenue, Chicago, IL 60622. Prior to Fall 1996, Volume 1, Issue 1, The Outsider was published as In’tuit. The annual subscription rate is included with membership and is mailed to all members.

On the Cover: William Hawkins, Acrobats, 1988. Enamel on collage on masonite, 72 x 48 in.

Gift of Frank Maresca. Part of the Intuit exhibition Gifts to the Permanent Collection, which runs through January 5. Photo by William Bengtson.

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What’s Happening At Intuit

P H OTO BY AMANDA CURTIS

PHOTO BY C L E O W I L S O N

Students from the Little Black Pearl Art and Design Center watch as Lonnie Holley applies paint to one of the 68 sculptures he created over two weeks at Intuit.

Amanda Curtis (second from right), who was recently promoted to Program Director, Education, is flanked by new Intuit employees (from left) Robert Reinard, Program Director, Collections and Exhibitions; Alys Tryon, Membership Coordinator; Heather Holbus, Program Coordinator; and Felicia Ojo, Gallery Assistant.

THE INTUIT SHOW WOWS AUDIENCES Attracting an elite clientele of collectors, curators and guests, the Intuit Show of Folk and Outsider Art marked another successful fundraising endeavor. For four days in April, more than 10,000 people visited 42 galleries and dealers of outsider art, non-traditional folk art and ethnographic art from throughout the U.S., Haiti and the Netherlands.

By the evening of the first opening, he had accumulated an impressive array of salvage and discarded materials.

Eight educational presentations were a highlight of the weekend. They included a series of slide lectures, dubbed “Outsider Art 101,” every day at noon.

Our thanks go to the galleries and dealers, presenters, and the corps of volunteers who made this event so successful. We couldn’t have done it without you. We look forward to next year!

FROM T R A S H TO T R E A S U R E In May, Alabama self-taught artist Lonnie Holley arrived in Chicago for a two-week stint as Intuit’s first artist-in-residence.

The plan was to open on May 11 with an empty gallery and then open a second time to unveil his completed sculpture.

But Lonnie is an unstoppable force.

Over the next two weeks, 200 Chicago Public Schools students, public television and radio crews, and scores of others visited Intuit to interact with the artist and to watch his creations take shape. On May 25, nearly 300 people came to marvel at the 68 pieces that Holley had created. We are grateful to the John R. Houlsby Foundation for a grant that allowed us to rent buses to bring participants from Little Black Pearl Art and Design Center and students from Wells Community Academy High School, a participant in Intuit’s 2006–07 Teacher Fellowship Program.

Thanks to a very generous gift from the Polk Bros. Foundation, this fall we will see a twofold increase in the number of schools served and teachers participating in the fellowship program. The program will serve 20 Chicago Public Schools teachers and their students from 10 schools.

C H - C H -CHANGES Intuit bids a fond farewell to Farris Wahbeh, program director, collections and exhibitions, and bon voyage to Bryan

Preston, program coordinator, as both men head off to pursue their dreams.

Farris is attending the University of Maryland for a second master’s degree, this one in Archive, Records and Information Management, while Bryan treks off for a year-long backpacking trip through Europe and Africa.

We are pleased to welcome Robert Reinard, who steps into Farris’ position, and Heather Holbus, who is our new program coordinator.

THE BENEFIT Development chair Ralph Concepcion and gala chairs John and Dorianne Venator have an amazing, fun-filled evening planned for Intuit’s annual benefit gala.

Titled “In the Realms of the Unreal,” the gala will take place at 6:30 pm Saturday October 20 at Architectural Artifacts.

There will be lots of surprises, including entertainment provided by the Vivian Girls. Tables of 10 are $1,500, $3,000 and $5,000. Individual tickets can be purchased for $150. Call 312-243-9088 or e-mail heather@art.org for tickets or more information. n – C L E O W I L S O N , E X E C U T I VE DIRECTOR

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Achilles G. Rizzoli: Master Architect A draftsman by day, the artist spent his nights building a magnificent alternative reality B Y J O FA R B H E R N Á N D E Z

The story of A.G. Rizzoli, whose complex, enigmatic work was introduced to the public in 1997, is both striking and compelling. A lifelong bachelor who lived with his beloved mother, he was traumatized in his teens by his father’s disappearance. Introverted and sexually repressed, his personal circumstances were characterized by pain and powerlessness, stimulating a need to reorder and balance his life. Quietly and loyally laboring on mundane drafting work during the day, he spent his nights and weekends on a monumental yet secret task: the delineation of a new world, for which he served as “High Prince” and “Master Architect.” 1 Undertaken at the command of spiritual guides, these drawings and writings have been hailed by scholars as the “find of the century.”

The exhibition A.G. Rizzoli: Architect of Magnificent Visions runs from September 14–January 5 at Intuit.

All drawings and photos courtesy of The Ames Gallery, Berkeley, CA. All images © The Ames Gallery.

Detail: The Shaft of Ascension, 1939. Ink on rag paper, 21 1/16 x 13 in.

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Achilles Rizzoli was born in 1896, the fourth of five children of Innocente and Erminia (Emma) Rizzoli, who had immigrated to Marin County, California, from culturally Italian areas in southern Switzerland.2 In 1912, he moved to Oakland to study at the Polytechnic College of Engineering, soon to be joined by his mother and siblings. Three years later, following assorted family and economic struggles, his father disappeared, never to return. In 1933, having lived for short periods with various relatives in several San Francisco neighborhoods, Achilles and his mother settled by themselves in a modest four-room cottage on Alabama Street, where he was to live for the rest of his life. Achilles, or A. G., as he later preferred to be known, made few friends and never married; he shared the single bedroom in the house with his mother, and his writings reveal that he remained a virgin.

stiff and boring, each manuscript was rejected in turn by the various publishers to whom it was submitted; in his files he kept all 280 rejection notices as well as each methodically typed-out text. Next, under the pseudonym Peter Metermaid, Rizzoli self-published his novel The Colonnade (aka Colonnaded Plaza). He neither marketed nor distributed it, however, and the three thousand copies remained wrapped and stored in his home.

Frustrated by the lack of positive response to his literary works but still inspired by utopian fantasies, in 1935 Rizzoli shifted to producing large pen-and-ink renderings of architectural designs. Utopian images are found throughout the history of visionary architecture, but Rizzoli’s elaborate buildings were unusual in that most were symbolic representations (“transfigurations,” in his words) of people he knew, intended to glorify a heavenly world of his own creation.

the common pinafore dresses worn by the young girls in his neighborhood), including buildings and monuments in the Y.T.T.E. and portraits of those involved in it. A was his Amplification of these four categories of drawings in the Achilles Tectonic Exhibit Portfolio, in which he recorded and interpreted his work to date.

The first drawing in the Symbolization series was Mother Symbolically Represented/ The Kathredal, a combination birthday card, full-scale drawing honoring and symbolizing the strength, beauty and spiritualism of his mother, and premiere structure in the Y.T.T.E. world exposition.

Many of the Symbolization buildings are described on the drawings themselves as “heavenly homes” or “heavenly inheritances,” meant to symbolize an actual metamorphosis of the person following death, as well as an architectural personification of their essential attributes.

While at the Polytechnic College from 1912 to 1915, Rizzoli took classes such as mechanics, geometry, electrical engineering and magnetism. At this early stage, his interest in architecture was already evident: he even used his English assignments to explore subjects such as construction, drafting and inventions.

During these years, the San Francisco Bay Area was steeped in images of a utopia shaped by architectural visions. The 1906 earthquake and fire had sparked energetic efforts to revitalize San Francisco, and its victorious rebirth was symbolized by the grandiose optimism of the 1915 PanamaPacific International Exposition. Given his youthful interests, it is no wonder that Rizzoli would decide to pursue a career inspired by the heroic efforts of architects not only to rebuild the city, but to define its cultural future.

Rizzoli worked at a variety of low-paying jobs during those early years. At the same time, he undertook a series of ambitious creative endeavors: his first, dating from 1927 to 1935, was a series of novellas and short stories featuring the utopian efforts of a group of idealistic architects. Verbose,

12 THE OUTSIDER

Group View Adjoining 1668 Alabama St., 1934.

He later referred to his works from the period 1935–44 by the acronym SYMPA, each letter designating a separate category of drawings. S stood for the Symbolization drawings, some two dozen large renderings of classic-style buildings, each of which symbolized a family member, acquaintance or event. Y referred to the Y.T.T.E. series (pronounced it-tee), an acronym for “Yield To Total Elation,” a half-dozen plot plans delineating a symbolic world exposition. M represented Miscellaneous lists, signs and poems. P were the PIA drawings, short for Piafore (itself an invented word referring to

The meticulously crafted drawings for this rapidly developing imaginary world combined Beaux-Arts architectural idioms3 with an eclectic borrowing of Roman, Renaissance, Baroque, Art Deco and Art Nouveau styles. Spectacular lighting displays reminiscent of a Hollywood premiere (but probably more specifically referential to the lighting for the Panama-Pacific Exposition), as well as more populist elements of commercial advertising and a hyperbole worthy of P.T. Barnum, complemented the central structures. This fusion of styles,4 many of

The Spirit of Cooperation/Academically The Essosee, 1935. Ink on rag paper, 17 9/16 x 23 5/8 in.

The Ornament, 1938. Ink on rag paper, 17 7/8 x 8 7/8 in.

Margaret E. Griffin Symbolically Sketched/Palazzo Pianissimo, 1938–1939.

Ink on rag paper, 24 x 35 3/4 in.

Bridal Bar, 1939. Ink on rag paper, 8 x 10 in.

Mrs. Geo. Powleson Symbolically Portrayed/The Mother Tower of Jewels, 1935.

Ink on rag paper, 37 x 25 1/8 in.

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Mr. and Mrs. Harold Healy Symbolically Sketched/First Prize, First Anniversary, 1936.

Ink on rag paper, 35 1/2 x 24 5/8 in.

The Man, 1943. Ink on rag paper, 9 x 6 1/8 in.

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Irwin Peter Sicotte, Jr. Symbolically Delineated/The “Sayanpeau,� 1936.

Ink on rag paper, 35 3/8 x 23 1/2 in.

Alfredo Capobianco and Family Symbolically Sketched/Palazzo del Capobianco, 1937.

Ink on rag paper, 24 9/16 x 38 5/16 in.

which Rizzoli had probably seen only in books, was a juxtaposition not many could have successfully presented without parody.

Such satire would have been unthinkable to him, however, given his self-assigned title of “earthly architectural assistant and transcriber” to God. His drawing technique followed the elaborate Beaux-Arts system, which was predicated upon numerous draft concept and detail sketches; however, although Rizzoli was a prodigious accumulator, with books, lists, newspapers, letters and other documents found among his effects, no extant sketches were found that might have shed additional light on the development of the Symbolization drawings. Close examination of these drawings reveals very little trace of preliminary graphite outlines; his penned lines are sure and steady, and his detailing is tight and compulsive. His notes, frequently recorded on the drawings themselves, indicated that a single rendering would often require several months of devoted labor. Though a small man, Rizzoli made some drawings that were almost as large as he was: the largest approach 5 by 3 feet.

Rizzoli always desired a public audience to appreciate his creative efforts, so beginning in 1935 he set aside the first

Sunday in August as an open house to display the evolving SYMPA drawings. He arranged a “gallery” in the front room of his house for the “Achilles Tectonic Exhibit” (the A.T.E.); his 1940 Portfolio documented a floor plan and elevations of the walls indicating how he had installed the drawings. To advertise, he put up handlettered signs around the neighborhood, but few people ever attended.

The year 1936 was pivotal for Rizzoli, both personally and professionally.

Local events such as the dedication of the San Francisco Bay Bridge and the groundbreaking for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition must have stimulated his own utopian visions. This was also the year that he joined Otto A. Deichmann’s small architectural firm as a draftsman, working in a windowless room for $1.50 an hour, a steady if not satisfying position5 he was to hold until his retirement almost 40 years later.

Then, in late summer, 21 years after the disappearance of Rizzoli’s father, the family was startled by the news of the discovery of Innocente’s deteriorated bodily remains in a deeply wooded section of Marin County, the result of an apparent suicide. Later that same year, Rizzoli’s mother was hospitalized, and died January 8, 1937, at age 63. Her passing, following so closely the trauma of identifying his father’s body, struck him hard.

Rizzoli did not change their house after her death, and it slowly began deteriorating around him. He seemed oblivious to all this, however, as he became increasingly involved in the design of buildings for the exquisite heavenly domain that would follow this earthly “saddening well of tears.”

The drawings were enhanced with pictorial and emblematic insignia such as those found in legal or ceremonial documents; he must have felt they lent authority and validity to his labors, and he used them liberally. They contrasted with the unusual mix of emotional, witty and

quasi-erotic commentary that encircled the central building images. The insignia and commentary—unconventional in architectural renderings—signify that although at casual glance these drawings appear to be bona fide renderings of buildings that could have been built, they were actually symbols that through metaphor, allegory and pun simultaneously beckon and exclude us from his private world.

Despite the seriousness of his goal, Rizzoli’s sense of humor is revealed through the names of his imaginary “collaborators” (for example, Victor Betterlaugh and John McFrozen), public sculpture (such as The Sungkenart, “commemorating the lost art of remaining virgin lifelong”), buildings (the “P.P.P.” and the “A.S.S.” were the bathrooms), and the ancillary titles, acronyms, puns and comments lettered around the border in illuminated characters.

As he continued to design and render new buildings, he concurrently developed a plot plan to situate the increasing number of structures constituting his utopian exposition, the Y.T.T.E. Modeled after the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition, the Y.T.T.E. plot plan is also reminiscent of the floor plan of a cathedral. From 1935 to 1944 Rizzoli produced a half-dozen full revisions of the plot plan; even later, from 1958 to 1977, when he was consumed with other works, he returned again and again to the Y.T.T.E., retracing and copying the plot plan, indicating revisions, redesigns and additions. Yet he was ambivalent about his labors, writing that “from the beginning the Y.T.T.E. contemplation was a source of agony, of invisible things made visible by heavenly hosts projected upon the visible azure”; in contrast, elsewhere he commented about how fulfilling it was to do God’s work. He compared himself to Saint Veronica of Umbria (1660–1727), who lived with almost continuous visions and revelations, yet was considered “practical and level-head(ed)”; he suggested that her “predicament” was similar to his, and paralleled the challenges he faced.

Rizzoli’s mother, 1934.

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With each incarnation, the number of structures included in the Y.T.T.E. exposition increased; by 1939, 80 separate building units were included, as well as 20 “Major Statuary Compositions.” In contrast to the full-scale Symbolization “portraits” of specific family and friends, the Y.T.T.E. images monumentalized such abstractions as Labor, Life, Poetry, Happiness, Culture and Peace.

Rizzoli at work

Rizzoli experienced increasing numbers of visions from 1945 on; fully formed images of elaborate “heavenly inheritances,” they came to him at any and all times, day and night. In a final attempt to share his spiritual experiences with others, Rizzoli began a new project on February 9, 1958, which he would work on for the rest of his life. This was the A.C.E., or AMTE’s Celestial Extravag(r)anza, a compilation of over 325 24-by-36-inch graphite on vellum sheets originally intended to poetically reproduce his “sunbursts” of visions linking poetry and architecture, but which he came to believe were the basis for the third, and final, testament of the Bible. AMTE (or Miss AMTE, as he formally referred to her) was introduced to his readers in the first poem of the A.C.E., his

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personification of Architecture Made To Entertain, a virginal consort of Christ who was Rizzoli’s mentor, guide and “principal collaborator.” She partnered him through the A.C.E.’s 2,600 pages6 of poetry, prose and graphic imagery as he attempted to reproduce the words and visions of saints, historic heroes, departed family members and even Christ himself through means “acceptable to spiritual authorities.” More than his other works, the A.C.E. pages specifically document the increasing visionary experiences that inspired and yet agitated him.

Work on the A.C.E. continued until February 23, 1977. With his last piece (titled “Rest in Peace...Awhile”) uncompleted, Rizzoli suffered a stroke that left him permanently unable to speak or move. After it became clear that he would never be able to return to Alabama Street, his niece and her family cleared out the house, discovering for the first time the treasure trove of his drawings and writings. The proceeds from the sale of the house were used to support Rizzoli in a convalescent home during the last four years of his life. He died on November 18, 1981 at age 85, and is buried next to his mother in a cemetery near San Francisco.

Through his drawings and writings, A.G. Rizzoli bypassed his quotidian reality as the low-paid blue-collar son of poor immigrants, becoming a self-appointed collaborator with God and protégé of the saints. His personal isolation and internal torments conditioned the development of his work until it became a muchpreferred alternative reality, yet he was able to maintain both objectivity and a sense of humor about the two identities that he inhabited.

Adapted from “Divine Design Delights: The Life and Works of A.G. Rizzoli” in Jo Farb Hernández, John Beasley and Roger Cardinal’s A.G. Rizzoli: Architect of Magnificent Visions. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1997). Hernández, curator of the Rizzoli exhibit, is director and curator of the Natalie and James Thompson Art Gallery at San Jose State University. She is also director of the national organization SPACES—Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments, and is currently engaged in researching and writing a book on Spanish art environments.

E N D N OT E S 1

All quotations from Rizzoli are taken directly from

his various writings and drawings.

2

My warmest thanks to Bonnie Grossman, director

of the Ames Gallery, Berkeley, California, who conducted much of the early research on Rizzoli, and who graciously shared her findings with me through numerous interviews between 1990 and 1996.

3

The first formal model for architectural training in

the U.S., it was so known because of its inception and principal advocacy at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Kevin Michael Day astutely noted Rizzoli’s innovative

4

juxtapositions of distinct iconographic elements.

“Rizzoli’s drawings present an ingenious interface between the high art of the Beaux-Arts rendering, and the popular mode of the commercial advertisement.

Unlike the more democratic perspectives proposed by current social theories of art, the hierarchical division between the high and the popular was the accepted convention in the 1930s. This fact makes Rizzoli’s art all the more unique from our present understanding.”

Day, “Allegorical Architecture: Interpreting the Visions of A.G. Rizzoli”(Master’s thesis, University of California at Berkeley, 1995), 26.

Deichmann’s designs were rather unimaginative, and

5

differed markedly from the drawings Rizzoli did on his own time.

6

It may be assumed that Rizzoli had no preconception

that the A.C.E. would become as massive as it did; periodically he writes of finishing, although he

Masterfully expressing both his vulnerability and the power deriving from his role as Master Architect, Rizzoli’s private labors have become renowned public achievements that both challenge and appeal to our aesthetic and cultural norms. n

continued until his health prohibited further work almost 20 years after A.C.E.’s inception.

Other Artists Shared Rizzoli’s Affection for Fantastical Architecture B Y W I L L I A M S W I S LOW

Willem van Genk, Kyoto, ca. 1970. Gouache, ballpoint pen, marker, ink and collage on paper, 35 1/2 x 66 1/2 in. Photo by Claude Bornand. Courtesy of Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne.

Achilles G. Rizzoli executed one of the most fully realized bodies of work ever devoted to imaginary architecture, but his passion was by no means unique. A number of outsider artists have shown devotion to fantastical buildings, from the New Jerusalems of Howard Finster and Sister Gertrude Morgan to the skyscrapers of Aghassi George Aghassian, train stations of Willem van Genk, streetscapes of Wesley Willis and fantasy spaces of Alexander Maldonado.

Maldonado’s structures echo Rizzoli’s in their grandness and thematic conception. However, Maldonado’s futuristic architecture tends to look outward, whether taking politics, the media or outer space as its subject.

Rizzoli’s constructions project inner life and mostly look backward in their visual style.

The buildings of Van Genk and Willis are not entirely imaginary, but if real places are recognizable, both artists transform them. Van Genk’s train stations and other monumental urban locations are overwhelmingly complex, dynamic and not a little mysterious. Willis compulsively repeated the same views of Chicago’s downtown, but his cityscapes are abstract and drained of life in favor of the highway activity that he typically placed in the foreground.

Howard Finster, Pearl Granet-City of Mosola, 1986. Enamel on wood, 33 1/2 x 29 1/2 in. Courtesy of Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York.

Alexander Maldonado, Public Television, 1975. Oil on canvas, 18 x 24 in. Courtesy of The Ames Gallery, Berkeley, CA.

If Rizzoli’s goal was to envision people as fantastic buildings, for both Finster and Morgan the point of their architecture was to represent heaven. While Morgan’s Everlasting Gospel Mission is recognizable in her renderings of the building that served as her base, the New Jerusalem that she so frequently painted is far more schematic. Heaven’s grandeur is shown in size and scale, with detail usually minimal.

Finster took literally Jesus’ reference to the many mansions in his father’s house. The buildings that dot his paintings of the afterlife are typically multi-tiered with setbacks and quite elaborate in their decorative detail.

The art deco skyscrapers they sometimes resemble can make Finster’s vision of heaven look like an idealized central business district from 1929 or thereabouts. Finster gave his architectural vision tangible form in the World’s Folk Art Church that he built in his Paradise Garden environment, a squat version of his celestial wedding-cake towers.

If Finster’s most fully realized architecture looks like high deco and Rizzoli’s beaux arts and gothic, Aghassian drew buildings echoing the clean lines of the mid-Century International style. His art seems to be free of the thematic content that characterizes many of these artists. Aghassian appeared to delight in architecture for its own sake, with no agenda but the joy of design, making this artist the most Modernist of them all. n William Swislow, president of Intuit’s board of directors, writes regularly for The Outsider.

Sister Gertrude Morgan, New Jerusalem, ca. 1956–1974. Acrylic and/or tempera, ballpoint ink and pencil on cardboard, 12 x 19 in. Courtesy of the American Folk Art Museum.

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The Myth of Martín Ramírez Sometimes a mystery is only a mystery because no one has probed deep enough

BY VICTO R M . E S P I N O S A

Martín Ramírez is an “artist of the first rank... who, in an uneducated way, sums up many of this century’s great art issues: collage, abstraction, (and) the primacy of drawing.

Roberta Smith, 1985 1

Ramírez’s art was, like all great art, typically site-specific, that is, firmly rooted in real experiences and memories that he reshaped and distilled according to his needs and talents. The more we know about this artist, the clearer it becomes that we are just beginning to fathom his extraordinary achievement.

Roberta Smith, 2007 2

All works are part of the exhibition Martín Ramírez, which runs October 6–January 13 at the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Detail: Untitled (Tunnel with Cars and Buses), ca. 1948 –1963. Crayon and pencil on pieced paper, 51 x 24 in. Collection of Todd and Paige Johnson.

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Untitled (Madonna), ca. 1948–1963. Crayon and pencil on pieced paper, 75 x 35 in. Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA.

In 1995, 10 years after Martín Ramírez’s first large-scale survey in Philadelphia, British author Roger Cardinal wrote that he was tempted to “situate (Ramirez’s) work as the perfect paradigm of Outsider Art.”3 According to Cardinal, three elements in the artist’s available biography at that time drove him to that conclusion: Ramírez’s “physical incarceration,” his “social degradation” over 30 years of his life and his classification as a “mute psychotic.”

For many years, those three elements defined Ramírez, the creator, as the “ideal type” of artist who produced his work completely insulated from the art world—that is, without any formal credentials, without access to conventional art materials, without influence from other artists and without any recognition as an artist by critics, galleries or museums during his lifetime.

The California psychiatric system’s diagnosis of Ramírez as a mute psychotic stigmatized anything his hands produced and created the conditions to define his work as a mysterious art without tradition, a sort of cryptic brand of noncommunicative artistic expression.

As Cardinal acknowledged in the same piece, some of those assumptions might lose their relevance once we have a deeper knowledge or better understanding of the “narrative or symbolic fabric” of Ramírez’s work and his “sociocultural profile.” Yet for more than 50 years, since the first public exhibit of Ramírez’s art in 1951, only a few advocates and critics tried to look further into his life story or his cultural background.

During Ramírez’s lifetime, when there was still an opportunity to ask him about his life and the passions that inspired him, artist and professor of psychology Tarmo Pasto was, unfortunately, more concerned with using Ramírez’s drawings to develop and demonstrate his own theories about art expression and psychology.

In 1954, Pasto wrote that with Ramírez, “conversation as an exchange of ideas” was impossible. Because Pasto was convinced that normal verbal communication with a schizophrenic was useless, he didn’t use a Spanish-language interpreter to ask Ramírez about his life or the meaning of his work. Like those who say that art can speak for itself and be appreciated aesthetically without any knowledge of the author’s life or intentions, Pasto believed that the work of art alone could provide enough clues to understand the artist’s mental condition.

When Ramírez’s drawings were introduced into the Chicago and New York art markets in the 1970s, the idea of the artist as a mute, schizophrenic Mexican who produced his art in complete isolation made him very attractive to collectors looking for exotic examples of “pure” creativity. Thus it seems few dealers, collectors or even art critics were interested in inquiring more about his life. In 1976, art critic Peter Schjeldahl, for example, wrote that the “facts” about Ramírez’s life provided by dealers at that time were so contradictory that “at one point in trying to get the story straight” he “began to doubt that Ramírez ever existed.”4 As sociologist Gary Alan Fine has shown, some advocates of outsider art are not concerned with whether the biography of an outsider artist is accurate, because the “mystery is part of the appeal” of the art. In spite of the customary insistence that it is the quality of the piece that matters, not the biography of the artist, writes Fine, it is evident that “collectors buy stories that they share with visitors when they display their art.” This explains why biography has been a “central selling point” in the outsider art market.5 The emphasis on the biographies of outsider artists has led some art critics to contend that “the narrow focus on artists’ lives makes discussion of quality almost impossible.”6

The tension between emphasis on biography and emphasis on the artwork is not found only in the field of outsider art. But, as Fine points out, the “explicitness and bitterness of this debate in the world of self-taught art suggests that this artistic domain differs from others in which the consensus is that the art has priority, even if knowledge of the artist always is important. If biography matters throughout the art world, in most domains it is taken as informing the art, rather than justifying it.” 8 Ramírez’s case highlights a paradox in the outsider art field: the exploitation of biographical narratives on one hand and the lack of systematic research about the life of many artists on the other.

So the mystery that for many years has surrounded Ramírez’s life and art is not a simple absence of information—it also is a mystery constructed and promoted by dealers as an attractive and seductive component of his art. This explains, in part, why the myth of Ramírez as the mute schizophrenic who produced his entire work in complete silence and isolation was mostly unquestioned by those who in fact promoted him as a “perfect paradigm of Outsider Art.” I think that Fine was right when he said that for many years nobody really wanted to know who Ramirez was because it was less important than who he needed to be.9 Some curators contributed to the perpetuation of the Ramírez mystery, perhaps unintentionally, through exhibition labels and catalogues that repeated the myth about his life or by producing new theories about his art without providing any supporting evidence. Other curators and art critics paid more attention to the formal elements of his work than to his life. Although this reaction against the exploitation of Ramírez’s life story arose from good intentions, it encouraged neglect of biographical research.

Cardinal, for example, spoke about the need to “draw attention to the positive effect of the ‘work’ rather than the often negative aspects of the life of the ‘person’ behind the work.” 7 THE OUTSIDER 21

Untitled (Stag), ca. 1948–1963. Pencil on pieced paper, 24 1/4 x 18 1/2 in. Collection of Selig and Angela Sacks.

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Untitled (Vertical Landscape), ca. 1948–1963. Crayon and pencil on pieced paper, 46 x 28 1/2 inches. American Folk Art Museum.

For a review of The American Folk Art Museum’s book Martín Ramírez, see page 39.

Together, the many speculations published in catalogues, books and art magazines about Ramírez’s life and the uninformed attempts to understand his drawings facilitated the diffusion of the myth that his art was an unconscious manifestation beyond articulation and reinforced the idea that his life and art constituted an unsolvable mystery.

The biography we present in the catalogue of Martín Ramírez, the traveling exhibition curated by Brooke Davis Anderson (running October 6–January 13 at the Milwaukee Art Museum), provides new knowledge about the life of this artist and some clues about the experiences that may have inspired his work. The new information challenges some assumptions about Ramírez’s supposed “paradigmatic outsiderness.”

The information we have now shows that, from the perspective of a dominant culture, Martín Ramírez was in fact an outsider or excluded individual in three ways: as an immigrant in a strange and racist land, unable to speak English; as a forced recluse in a U.S. mental institution; and as a visually gifted individual with no formal artistic training, without any autonomy to have direct contact with the art world, and without any control over the exhibition, circulation or preservation of his own artistic production.

However, the new biography also proves what art dealer and author Randall Morris and others have insisted for years: Ramírez is above all an artist from Mexico whose work is rooted in his local culture and personal experiences as a transnational migrant.

Many aspects of Ramírez’s life will be forever unknown. Yet we now have enough knowledge to understand that the sources of his art could be found in the vernacular visual culture of his homeland.

24 THE OUTSIDER

We know that his drawings are inspired by memories, his spirituality and folk religiosity. His works visually narrate his journey, migration and family separation.

They reveal a traumatic experience of despair and confusion during times of economic crisis and war, and his forced seclusion and artistic creation under extreme conditions. His drawings also betray an urgent need to communicate and gain recognition.

Ramírez was a marginal individual who became an artist because circumstances forced him to choose visual language as the only means to communicate his experience and personal tragedy. He was then an artist driven by a desperate impulse to keep his memories and identity alive. In that sense, his life and art are an inspiring example of perseverance, survival and powerful artistic production made under extreme circumstances of exclusion and oppression.

Still, I believe that the new biographical information should not reinforce the essentialist idea of the outsider “born artist,” but should instead illuminate the circumstances under which the art is produced and the artist is constructed.

Maybe the question should not be about the differences between “insiders” and “outsiders,” but about why some of the most spectacular art has been produced under very difficult conditions. Why do some individuals create more intense and original art in extreme circumstances?

Why do some artists fruitfully exploit situations of war, oppression, censorship, migration or cultural displacement?

Ramírez’s case also illustrates many questions about the use of biography as an indicator of authenticity or as an element for art interpretation: What will be the consequences of a realization that Ramírez’s art is an act of narrative communication, not an unconscious manifestation of madness that is beyond the possibility of articulation? Will Ramírez be expelled from the Pantheon of Art Brut Artists because we now know that he

was aware of the attention his drawings received from some of the artists who visited him and knew that his work was exhibited in California? Is it really just a “matter of time before artists such as Ramírez come to be appreciated on equal terms with their mainstream counterparts,” as some reviews on Martin Ramírez’s exhibition have proclaimed?i n Victor M. Espinosa is a native of Mexico who is pursuing a PhD in sociology at Northwestern University. Espinosa is working on a biography of Martin Ramírez and a project under the direction of Gary Alan Fine on the reception of Ramírez’s art and the intersection of sociology of art, migration and diasporic art.

E N D N OT E S

Roberta Smith, letter to Tom Armstrong, former

1

director of the Whitney Museum (July 28, 1985).

2

Roberta Smith, “Outside In,” New York Times

(January 26, 2007).

3

Roger Cardinal, “Between Order and Adventure,”

Visions From the Left Coast: California Self-Taught Artists (Santa Barbara: Contemporary Arts Forum, 1995): 11.

4

Peter Schjeldahl, “Martin Ramirez at Phyllis Kind,”

Art in America, 64, May–June, 1976: 114.

5

Gary Alan Fine, “Crafting authenticity: The validation

of identity in self-taught art,” Theory and Society, 32 (2003): 153–180.

6

Tessa De Carlo, “Outsider Biographies vs. Outsider

Art,” Raw Vision No. 41 (2002): 27.

7

Laurent Danchin, “An intercontinental perspective:

An interview with Roger Cardinal.” Laurent Danchin and Martíne Lusardy, Outsider and folk art: the Chicago collections (Paris: Halle Saint Pierre, 1998): 22.

8

See Fine, Crafting authenticity, p.171.

9

Gary Allan Fine, Everyday Genius: Self-Taught Art and

the Culture of Authenticity (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 125. i

See, for example, Constance Wyndham, “Return of the

innocents,” Financial Times (February 05, 2007).

Untitled (Courtyard), ca. 1953. Pencil and colored pencil on pieced paper, 40 1/2 x 36 in. Anthony Petullo Collection of Self-Taught & Outsider Art.

‘It Makes Me Feel Inspired’ For this painter and mentor of other artists, collecting completes the picture INTERVIE W B Y JA N E T F R A N Z

Mark Jackson is an enthusiastic collector of outsider art who owns works by Lee Godie, William Dawson, S.L. Jones, Jesse Howard, Bessie Harvey, Steve Ashby and Chicago barber Nicholas Greeley. His tightly packed apartment is also filled with memory paintings and vernacular photography from India, spindle tables, miniature houses, carved canes and pieces by artists he works with as studio director of Project Onward, a City of Chicago open-studio program for visual artists with developmental, cognitive and mental disabilities.

PHOTOS BY C H E R I E I S E N B E R G

Mark Jackson in the studio he has carved out of his Chicago apartment for his own painting and drawing. On shelves in the background are a group of vernacular photos from Yemen and sculptures from an eclectic mix of artists.

THE OUTSIDER 27

A figurative artist himself, Jackson holds a degree in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The Outsider recently spoke with Jackson about collecting and art.

Do you think of yourself as a collector?

And if so, when would you say you officially became one?

I think of myself as an artist first, and collector also. I probably started seriously when I was in art school (in the 1970s).

I had a teacher, Ray Yoshida, who encouraged me to collect source material that was meaningful to me and to my ideas about my work. I started going back to where I came from—I grew up in downstate Illinois near the Ohio River. It was a very old place, sparsely populated with a lot of pioneer aspects to it. There was a lot of folk life. And that was something that I started exploring at that time.

One collection I started was of photographs; things made by hand—where you would actually see the human touch—were another. I was doing a kind of painting back then where texture and mark making were very important to me. And some of the pictures I would look for would have to do with the way things had aged and decayed, the way something becomes transformed through time. Tintypes, for instance. The scratches and the marks on top of an image would add another interpretation or a different psychological point of view.

Why do you like surrounding yourself with artwork?

It’s like a story. The way that I arrange things in the house, pieces have relationships to each other. When I look at the walls it’s like reading a book in a way. It makes me feel inspired.

Has your taste in art evolved over the years?

Yes. It’s become more refined and focused.

I’ve had a number of collections—like quilts. I looked at hundreds of quilts, but the more imaginative and free-form

28 THE OUTSIDER

African-American quilts became more important to me. But some things get played out, so as a painter, quilt making went by the wayside. They’re interesting, but I don’t have to have those. Same with photographs. After a while, it becomes hard to know what you have if you have hundreds and hundreds of things. Now, sculpture, landscapes and figurative kinds of things are probably what I would gravitate to more than anything.

You have work by some of the artists in Project Onward. How do you see these fitting in with the other work you collect?

Our artists at Project Onward are chosen because of their talent. They all are really good artists and I’m in a position to watch them create and to grow and I’m struck by what talent they have. My collection is strong on figurative kinds of artwork.

There’s a lot of portraiture. And some of the Project Onward artists specialize in that kind of thing. They’ve been working for a number of years, they’re committed to what they’re doing and they’re well developed. You can’t tell where they come from—it’s like everything else here.

You’ve gotten to know many of the artists whose work you own. What does that add to the experience of collecting?

With a lot of the artists who have become friends, it adds a whole other dimension.

Knowing the history or the struggle behind how something comes about or the context of where it comes from is important to me.

I think everything that I’ve collected I’ve tried to find out as much as I can about where it comes from, who might have made it.

Is there still good stuff out there?

Yes. There are constantly new artists emerging. There are many people out there we don’t know about, who we will know about someday. I think there are going to be many great artists who come out of programs like Project Onward.

There are a number of similar programs now all around the world. Henry Darger, for instance. He lived a very isolated life here in Chicago, and his work could have

easily disappeared. Programs like ours are incubators for artists with special needs.

They can come there, create and feel good about what they’re doing. They can have an art career that would have been impossible several generations ago.

Unfortunately, in Chicago, Maxwell Street isn’t here anymore, so it’s harder to find things in the city. You just have to keep your eyes open and look. And there are a number of dealers out there working all the time, looking for the next thing. You can make a collection just by developing a relationship with a dealer you like and trust.

What about ebay?

I think the Internet has a lot of possibilities.

And sometimes things are quite good.

But it’s really hard to buy art that way.

I think you need to see it and to hold it.

And the whole sense of discovery is deeper when you’re going out on your own and finding something.

If you were reduced to living in one room and could have only a fraction of what you have, which artists would be on the list?

I think about that quite a bit. If a disaster were to strike and I had to run out of the house, what would I grab? I also think about not having anything and starting again. It’s an interesting concept. I’m not sure, because everything works together for me. I’d have to give that a lot more thought.

Note: After thinking about it for a couple of weeks, Jackson sent this reply via e-mail: I would grab my Bessie Harvey Delilah sculpture first. She’s the last thing I see before I turn off the lights to go to bed at night. She’s there, kind of guarding over me as I sleep. She’s been in the same spot for about the last seven years, so I probably owe it to her for all of her hard work. What else?

There are probably about 20 more pieces that I would want to take, too. My two favorite Lee Godies, the S.L. Jones, two Nicholas Greeleys, the Raymond Heyduck country western singers, the Flax submarine . . . n

An S.L. Jones carving shares space with an anonymous carved head that once topped a fence post in New England. The painting in the background is by Chicago barber Nicholas Greeley.

In the bedroom are a Delilah sculpture by Bessie Harvey, a Ghanaian hair sign that Jackson found at a Paris flea market, a miniature house from Tennessee, a Jesse Howard sign and a painting of Reelfoot Lake by an itinerant Tennessee artist.

THE OUTSIDER 29

INTUIT WANTS YOU FOR DARGER’S ARMY Intuit is completing the Henry Darger Room Collection, an installation of original objects, architectural features, furniture, and works of art from the room where Darger lived at 851 West Webster St. in Chicago. This permanent installation is intended to honor Darger’s extraordinary artistic legacy and illuminate aspects of the environment within which Darger wrote and created his remarkable body of visual works.

Join Darger’s Army and help us complete the room.

Enlistees will assist with the following activities: $250 $300–$500 $500+ $1000+

$2500+

Framing of original paper artifacts Conservation and preservation of artifacts Creation of interpretive materials Creation of facsimiles of Darger’s scrapbooks and source materials Creation of an illustrated educational brochure about the Room

Enlistees of $500+ will receive a copy of the book Henry Darger’s Room 851 Webster.

Enlistees of $2500+ will be offered a private reception for ten and curator’s tour of the Henry Darger Room Collection.

All enlistees will be proudly acknowledged in the room.

The Darger Room Collection will open on January 18, 2008.

Nearest Recruiting Station: Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, info@art.org, or www.art.org.

The Henry Darger Room Collection was generously donated to Intuit

by Kiyoko Lerner in 2000.

The Henry Darger Room Collection project is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.

Photo: Detail from Flanengoe Girl Scout Thirty-third Degree Rangers

by Henry Darger. © Kiyoko Lerner.

32 THE OUTSIDER

THE OUTSIDER 33

THE ANTON HAARDT GALLERY Mose T. From A to Z: The Folk Art of Mose Tolliver is GOING TO PRESS

Friday, Saturday, 12–5pm and by appointment Magazine Street Gallery at 2858 Magazine New Orleans, LA 70130 (504) 891-9080 Come visit the new Annex in Montgomery, Alabama Gallery Annex at 1023 Woodley Road Montgomery, AL 36016 (334) 261-3323

34 THE OUTSIDER

A M E R I CA N P R I M I T I V E G A L L E RY 594 BROADWAY # 205 NEW YORK, NY 10012 (212) 966 –1530 american.primitive@verizon.net Aarne Anton visit our new website www.americanprimitive.com

Early painted wood horse child’s pulltoy

29 x 29 x 5 in.

c. 1890s

SHELTON GALLERY CONTEMPORARY FOLK & OUTSIDER ART Bruce & Kathy Shelton 5133 Harding Road, B-10, PMB# 392, Nashville, TN 37205 Tel: 615-477-6221 e-mail: sheltongal@ aol.com www.sheltongallery.com

SANDSTONE CARVINGS BY TIM LEWIS (b. Kentucky 1952-) FOR SALE Inquiries invited from private collectors, museums & institutions

Jimmy Hedges

Rising Fawn Folk Art Gallery 3745 Scenic Highway Rising Fawn, GA 30738 706-398-2640 Please visit our NEW website: www.RisingFawnFolkArt.com

Adam & Eve (2003), 22.25” h x 20” w x 5.5” d

Moses (1997), 27” h x 12” w x 11” d, Illustrated in Tim Lewis chapter in Outsider Art of the South by Kathy Moses (Schiffer Publishing Ltd)

Plans Underway for Catalogued Traveling Museum Show TIME MADE REAL: The Carvings of Tim Lewis - Opening premier at Customs House Museum & Cultural Center, Clarksville, Tennessee, July 10 through October 2008 - Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio, November 14, 2008 through February 22, 2009 - Mennello Museum of American Art / Orlando, Florida, April 15 through June 30, 2009

- July 15 through September 10, 2008 Open - Kentucky Folk Art Center, Morehead State University, Morehead, Kentucky, October 1 through December 30, 2009 - January through March, 2010 Open

THE OUTSIDER 35

Recent Acquisitions & Promised Gifts

Eugene Andolsek, Untitled (Drawing), ca. 1993–2003. Colored ink on graph paper, 14 x 18 in. Gift of Eugene Andolsek and Aarne Anton.

Recent gifts to Intuit have enriched the permanent collection with a few individual gems, some very special bodies of work, documentation of an extraordinary art environment and even works made on-site at Intuit—a new category.

We thank Aarne Anton, director of New York City’s American Primitive Gallery, and two of his gallery artists for their co-donations of works to Intuit: an electrifying geometrical drawing by Eugene Andolsek (b. 1921) and a signature carved stone portrait by Ted Ludwiczak (b. 1926). We appreciate the support of dealers in the field and the generosity of living artists, whom we hope to honor and promote over the years.

Intuit’s first artist in residence, Lonnie Holley (b. 1950), worked for two weeks at Intuit in May, animating the gallery entirely with his spirited mixed-media sculptures, constructed on-site and dense with meaning and metaphor. Holley has generously offered to donate two individual sculptures from this project to Intuit. We’re deeply indebted to Holley for bringing his

36 THE OUTSIDER

Betty Zakoian, Turks Attack Me, n.d. Oil on canvas, 17 1⁄4 x 21 1⁄2 in.

Gift of the Zakoian Family.

boundless artistic energy to Intuit, and for allowing us to retain evidence of this wonderful project. We’re still living with and loving the installation (as we go to press), and have not yet made our selection.

The legendary environment of Clarence Schmidt (1897–1978) on Ohayo Mountain, near Woodstock, N.Y., was one of the truly extraordinary examples of American environmental art. Schmidt’s site was, unfortunately, ephemeral, and we now experience its magic through documentation. Photographer David E. Johnson generously donated 93 gelatin silver prints of Schmidt’s Mark II and Silver Forest (two manifestations of the site) to the Robert A. Roth Study Center. In 1970 and ’71 Johnson spent several weeks with Schmidt at his Ohayo Mountain property, where Schmidt allowed Johnson to photograph the site and record his singing.

Intuit sends an enthusiastic thank you to the Zakoian family for the donation of the estate of Badaskhan (Betty) Zakoian (1908/10–1978). Thanks also to the Thomas McCormick Gallery for facilitating the donation, which consists of more than 60 paintings, drawings and sketches

in oil, tempera, ink and graphite. Born Badaskhan Ermoyan in what used to be Armenia (now eastern Turkey), Zakoian developed her artistic talents in her adopted home of Chicago, where she also acquired the nickname Betty. In her body of autobiographical work she depicts simple figures in a highly expressive and personal manner. Through her work she reveals a complex life history—an arduous journey that took her from Armenia through Turkey, Greece, Egypt, France and finally to Chicago, where she settled and raised her family.

Zakoian was brought into the world during a time of war and upheaval, born in either 1908 or 1910 (family lore and her birth certificate disagree). Her parents were killed in 1915 during the Turkish massacre of Armenians. When the German Red Cross came to the aid of the refugees, Zakoian and her siblings were put on an evacuation train. Left behind during a rest stop and separated from her remaining family, the 7-year-old Zakoian, alone and with no money, followed the railroad tracks out of Armenia into Greece.

Ted Ludwiczak, Untitled (Head Sculpture), 1989.

Carved found stone, 19 1⁄2 x 13 x 9 in.

Gift of Ted Ludwiczak and Aarne Anton.

Betty Zakoian, Lost Journey, n.d. Tempera on paper, 21 1⁄2 x 26 1⁄2 in.

Gift of the Zakoian Family.

Her earliest dated painting, Turks Attack Me (1957), speaks to this early experience.

With lyrical lines and brilliant colors that contrast with the severity of the subject, she depicts herself wrapped in a pink babushka, standing between two uniformed Turks who are wearing fezzes and carrying imposing swords. A glowing orange angel floats above her head—perhaps a guardian she felt responsible for saving her life.

Zakoian returned to this subject in several other works, including Night Journey (1957), which shows figures wandering along the railroad tracks under a night sky.

showed her some rudimentary techniques.

Betty Zakoian is lovingly remembered by her children Peter, Elizabeth and Susan.

Zakoian spent her remaining childhood in an orphanage in Greece and later found work in Alexandria, Egypt as a domestic. At the age of 21, she moved to Lyons, France to join her half-brother. A marriage for her was soon arranged with Mgrditch (Mike) Zakoian, an Armenian refugee with whom she would have four children and eventually settle in Chicago. In the late 1950s, with her children grown, Zakoian found herself with free time and took up drawing. Her artistic endeavors were supported at home.

Her daughter Suzie, who studied at the Art Institute, bought her paints, and her late son Paul, a sculptor and photographer,

We thank Janis Kanter and Thomas McCormick for the generous gift of a treasure trove of works by Thomas King Baker (1911–1972). T.K. Baker was a true original. Despite a shred of art school training and a lifetime of fine arts experiences, he made his work only for his wife and friends, and to distract himself from the tedium of his desk job as an insurance adjuster at the Business Men’s Assurance Company in Kansas City, Mo. Baker worked in a variety of media, making oil paintings and drawings, but the majority of his work falls into the category of ephemera—a private outpouring of humorous, satiric work in the form of scrapbooks, calendars, day books, faux correspondence, homemade magazines, parodies of the fashion world and the like. His works engaging ephemera—the stuff from his desktop—are a direct link between art making and daily existence.

From a 2007 perspective, his works strike a nostalgic chord, recalling the office paraphernalia from pre-computer and preInternet days that became obsolete in so short a time, and now has achieved a kind of rarefied patina.

In all of his works Baker had a facility for focusing on subtleties: the chance encounters, off-balance moments and off-color innuendoes, which he isolated and elevated into endearing reflections of life—still life, agitated life, business life, social life and private life. Intuit is in the process of cataloging this gift, and we look forward to reporting on T.K. Baker’s work more fully in the future.

In closing, we express our sincere appreciation for Farris Wahbeh, Program Director for Collections & Exhibitions, who joined Intuit in the fall of 2005.

Farris approached the organization and preservation of the permanent collection and archival materials with dedication and intelligence, and contributed to the management of the collection enormously.

He recently left Intuit to pursue a degree in Archive, Records and Information Management at the University of Maryland.

We wish him the very best. n – LISA STONE AND JESSICA MOSS P H OTO S B Y W I L L I A M B E N GT S O N

THE OUTSIDER 37

Book Reviews THE C O LO R F U L A P O CA LY P S E : JOUR N E Y S I N O U T S I D E R A R T

By Greg Bottoms, University of Chicago Press, 200 pages, 2007. ISBN 978-0-226-06685-1 (hardcover)

As an outsider to outsider art, Greg Bottoms is in a great position to ask uncomfortable questions that might otherwise run afoul of the field’s shibboleths and loyalties. Unfortunately, the questions he asks in this book are often as uninformed as they are discomfiting.

Bottoms clearly wants to engage with artists as people, not performers or freaks. Yet he ends up reducing them to some of the very clichés that he seems to want to debunk. Early on, for example, he associates Howard Finster with the myth of outsider-art craziness. He writes of outsider art (and in the context, Finster): “It is more often fuelled by passion, troubled psychology, extreme ideology, faith, despair and the desperate need to be heard and seen that comes with cultural marginalization and mental unease.”

38 THE OUTSIDER

That’s a mild variation of the more explicit claim of lunacy that Bottoms makes elsewhere in his text. That Finster was eccentric is undoubted. No one creates an environment as grandiose as Paradise Garden without being well outside the norm for avocation. Anyone who had even passing encounters with the man knew he worked and spoke compulsively, obsessed with getting his message out. But does that make him schizophrenic, or anything like it? Bottoms seems to assume that the visionary quality of someone’s art makes a prima facie case for the diagnosis, with evidence of personal idiosyncrasy the closing argument.

Bottoms dishes out equally hostile treatment to those who attempted to connect with Finster and his art.

“Filmmakers and journalists, art students and hippies and intellectuals, buyers and browsers and gawkers, used to come around and ogle the old man, America’s most famous outsider artist, like a sideshow attraction or a comic performer,” he writes.

To imply that Finster was exploited is strange indeed. The assumption that country bumpkins are inevitably victims when they encounter city slickers should have been put to rest with the Beverly Hillbillies. One can argue quite plausibly that Finster knew what he was about, and played his audience brilliantly.

The effort to connect across any kind of cultural divide seems offensive to Bottoms, whether it happens on the artists’ home turf or in the museums and galleries where those dreadful hippies, art students and gawkers congregate when in town.

At one point he refers to the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore as like “a warehouse of good old marginalization.”

“You, an art consumer, are invited to witness the raw expression of the marginalized and the disenfranchised, have a nice pricey meal, then go wait in the beltway traffic like everybody else in the D.C. area,” Bottoms writes.

So what exactly are you supposed to do after going to a museum? There seems to be a fundamental misanthropy here that finds ordinary human activities worthy of loathing while erecting a false dichotomy between art makers and viewers. One presumes that Finster, William Thomas Thompson and Norbert Kox sometimes have meals, sit in traffic or even go to a museum, too. They’re hardly fixed on the other side of that dichotomy unless you assume that they’re basically just nuts and that as nuts they should be shut off from the wider culture.

AVAM and the modern-day Mr. Drysdales and Miss Hathaways that Bottoms found there are at least halfway willing to take Finster and the other religious visionaries on their own artistic terms. Yes, art collectors tend to take the expression more to heart than the message being expressed. But why is valuing religious intensity as a driver of artistic vision any more hypocritical than using it for evidence of insanity? The fact that the art world’s acceptance is qualified doesn’t mean the artists aren’t accomplishing exactly what they set out to do. For many evangelicals, the mandate specifically is to preach the gospel message. If the recipients ignore it, it’s certainly their problem, not the preacher’s.

But Bottoms isn’t really any more interested in that message than is the audience he berates. His real theme seems to be himself. At every opportunity he turns his account back to his family and his personal circumstances. Early on, for example, we learn that Bottoms’ grandmother was institutionalized twice for depression and alcoholism, “but, remarkably, seemed happy and at peace late in her life.” What that has to do with Myrtice West, the subject at the time, or the book’s readers remains a mystery. But we know it’s top of mind for Bottoms, not only because he wrote an earlier book on his brother’s schizophrenia, but also because of the repeated references in this work to his family history.

When Bottoms takes himself out of the picture and allows the artists and the people who know them to speak for themselves, there are some flashes of light. He includes a poignant quote from William Thomas Thompson’s wife about the toll taken by his devotion to his art and his message.

Similarly, some of the quotes from Norbert Kox are as compelling as his art (even if Kox and Thompson have disputed Bottoms’ accounts of their encounters).

Given the persistent narcissism of this book, it’s hard not to suspect that the real source of Bottoms’ discomfort has to do with some internal saga of his own rather than anything to do with the art.

For whatever reason, he apparently would prefer that the outside world leave these artists alone to fester in what he seems to view as their mental or cultural cul-de-sacs. It’s a nasty thought, but then in the end this book is a nasty piece of work toward all concerned.

– WILLIAM SWISLOW

M A R T Í N RAMÍREZ

By Brooke Davis Anderson with essays by Victor M. and Kristin E. Espinosa, Robert Storr, Daniel Baumann and Victor Zamudio-Taylor; Marquand Books, Seattle, in association with American Folk Art Museum, New York; 192 pages with color and black & white reproductions; 2007. ISBN 978-0-9778028-1-4 (hardcover: alk. paper)

The most extraordinary news reported in the American Folk Art Museum’s new book, Martín Ramírez, is Victor M. and Kristin E. Espinosa’s revelations about the Mexican-American artist’s life.

Heretofore, practically nothing was known about Ramírez’s life prior to his being institutionalized in 1931. But now, knowing a good deal more about his life, we can see that his artwork is almost completely autobiographical.

As with many other of the Folk Art Museum’s publications, Martín Ramírez was produced in conjunction with an exhibition that opened in New York and travels to the Milwaukee Art Museum on Oct. 6 (and runs through Jan. 13, 2008). Art historical and sociological essays make up roughly one-third of this substantial “catalogue,” published in association with Marquand Books. These are followed by more than 100 pages of beautifully reproduced full-color plates.

The reproductions are divided into four sections: “Horse & Rider”; “Trains & Tunnels”; “Madonnas & Other Figures”; and “Landscapes.”

According to the Espinosas — both sociologists who have done a thorough investigation of Ramírez’s family in Jalisco, Mexico — the deer and other animals he depicted most likely mirror the livestock he kept on his farm in Mexico. The railroads in his landscapes appear to have been inspired by the railroads he traveled and worked on in Mexico and the U.S. The artist’s horse riders are probably based on both his own extensive experiences as a horseman, as well as the Cristero revolutionaries who rebelled against the Mexican government during his years in Jalisco. Similarly, his horsewoman riders are possibly derived from imagined images of Ramírez’s estranged wife, whom he mistakenly believed to have joined Mexico’s federal forces.

By revealing the drama of Ramírez’s tragic misunderstanding of the situation with his family back in Mexico and his subsequent refusal to return there, the Espinosas have supplied us with a crucial understanding of the artist’s life and perhaps a key element that motivated his artistic development.

Like “The Great Aronburg Mystery” incident in Henry Darger’s lifework, Ramírez’s loss and abandonment of his wife and children must have played an equally profound role.

Art historian Daniel Baumann’s essay offers a mini-history of outsider art and an assessment of its treatment at the hands of contemporary art history. He compares Ramírez’s work to that of other formidable outsiders, such as Adolf Wolfli.

Baumann’s most valuable insight is his comparison of Ramírez’s compositions to music — specifically the rhythms and

THE OUTSIDER 39

Book Reviews (continued)

choruses of popular Mexican ballads that were routinely sung by everyday people to themselves, long before listening to things like CDs and MP3s made such practice obsolete.

“Looking at Ramírez’s oeuvre from a removed point of view,” Baumann writes, “it can be compared to a continuous ballad that, over the years, repeats its verses again and again, while continuously altering them.”

The train image, he continues, is a predominant motif in these popular folk ballads. The train took immigrants to America; it deported them back to Mexico; and it was the predominant physical agent that separated husbands and wives, parents and children.

An essay by art historian Robert Storr tends to lay on the academese a bit thick.

At the risk of taking one of his sentences out of context, here’s an example from the second paragraph of his essay: “Liminal states experienced by habitually febrile sensibilities are intolerable to the collective body, though they occur with alarming ubiquity in individual bodies.”

It’s heartening that some quarters of academia have deigned to embrace outsider art, but writing like this does little to elucidate it — or any other form of art for that matter.

Like Baumann, Storr attempts to sum up outsider art’s place in academic art history. He acknowledges that the literature on outsider art has evolved from Freudian interpretations to cultural ones, but worries that the pendulum swing away from too much biography may go too far in the other direction of too much art analysis, thus opening the doorway to that

40 THE OUTSIDER

dreaded monstrosity of higher learning: formalism. He ends his essay with a poetic and descriptively lurid extended metaphor in which the artist’s works are likened to the flesh, bones, muscles and sinews of the human body. Indeed, Ramírez’s work certainly seems to have come alive quite literally for Storr.

SACRED AND PROFANE: VOICE AND VISION IN SOUTHERN SELF-TAUGHT ART Edited by Carol Crown and Charles Russell, University Press of Mississippi, 308 pages, 2007. ISBN 978-1-57806916-3 (hardcover)

Other essays by Folk Art Museum curator Brooke Davis Anderson and Mexican American/Latin American art expert Victor Zamudio-Taylor cover, respectively, the history of literature devoted to Ramírez and the artist’s cultural identity.

Martín Ramírez, the book as well as the exhibition, signals Ramírez’s arrival as one of the world’s foremost names in outsider art — joining the likes of Wolfli and Darger (who have both enjoyed major attention by the Folk Art Museum) and Bill Traylor. This publication does the artist full justice and demonstrates definitively why he deserves that honor.

– MICHAEL BONESTEEL

This book is definitely not bound for the coffee table, with its undersized images and serious, occasionally turgid, prose. But that’s not the point. Instead the volume’s admirable goal is to achieve a sober arthistorical understanding of the self-taught art of the South “in the context of the makers’ experience.” If it displays more rigor than most books on the subject, however, its authors are not immune to the wishful thinking and biographical bias that mar so much of the popular writing they aim to transcend.

The book gains momentum in fits and starts. Some essays will be more comfortable to scholars than to a general audience. Editor Carol Crown’s own heavily footnoted effort, mercifully unclogged with in-line citations, makes nuanced, useful distinctions across the theologies of artists like Howard Finster and Myrtice West. Despite their shared visionary evangelicalism, they speak in different theological languages if you understand what they are saying.

Benny Andrews contributes one of the least academic of the chapters, a memoir of his father, George Andrews. He makes the important point that, like many self-taught artists, the elder Andrews sustained “a dual life of doing art in the home and being like the other men in the community outside the home.” These artists may be exceptional, but they’re not all hard-core eccentrics.

Jessica Dallow’s essay on Clementine Hunter has rich detail about Hunter’s artistic development, though Cheryl Rivers’ efforts to place Hunter’s art into a broader context end up relying heavily on speculation and mostly superficial similarities that represent merely possible influences, not proven ones.

That failing is par for the course when writing about artists whose lives are often poorly documented. More distressing is the degree to which many writers seem to feel that the validation of these creators’ work as art is something to be fretted over rather than celebrated. This is most apparent in the two essays on Bill Traylor that conclude the book. In them, Susan Crawley and Jenifer Borum deliver the most spirited and provocative of the book’s scholarly efforts, but also the most troubling.

Crawley’s essay starts auspiciously, with a justifiable slam at the loose intellectual standards so typical of writing on selftaught and outsider art. And she rightly points out Traylor’s distinct status as one of the few canonized self-taught artists who is “neither mystical nor religious.”

(She might be too polite to include “nor institutionalized.”)

But Crawley seems excessively afraid of “privileging” artistic status, especially modernism. Like Borum in the next essay, and like many other serious writers on the subject, she undervalues artistic merit in favor of blackness, in this case via emphasis on a “blues aesthetic” that she works hard to recognize in Traylor’s art.

Crawley points to the quality of Traylor’s thematic repetition and variation as well as to his fluidity of line and to elements of performance in accounts of his working style. “The sense of motion, change, and impermanence seems to have been as significant to Traylor as it was to the bluesmen of the Delta,” she writes. But is that enough to build a case? Crawley offers little tangible evidence other than citing more of those merely apparent affinities.

Ironically, the rejection of “formalist” art-centric appreciation seems to lead right back to that supremacy of biography.

Yes, the authors of this volume use biography to demonstrate rootedness in African-American history rather than to show weirdness or charm. But their conclusions often seem no more grounded in reality than the sloppy accounts they deplore in the efforts of journalists, curators and buffs.

Borum’s rhetoric is harsher than Crawley’s as she attempts to protect self-taught artists from the art world’s elitism and exploitation. She seems even more offended than Crawley at the admission of a Traylor (or a Henri Rousseau, for that matter) into the modernist art canon. Even while condemning the notion of outsider art and the “otherness” it implies, she seems to posit a category of insiders from whose predations these others need protection, at least of the intellectual sort.

on “untainted creativity” represents for her a primitivist perspective, and worse.

“The legacy of this show remains the infantilization of African American selftaught artists,” she writes.

One might think that the main legacy of this show, through both its initial run and its widely circulated catalogue, was to introduce Traylor and many other artists to the largest audience work like theirs had yet found. If your perspective is strictly ideological this may look marginalizing.

But for the artists and the audience it was patently mainstreaming.

The “recontextualization” favored in these essays, by contrast, confines artists within the sociology of race and class, its ideologically cleansed agendas no less alien to the origins of the art than the formalist concerns of connoisseurs and curators. Does Traylor really matter more as simply another case study in African cultural persistence, or does he come into his own as a sui generis aesthetic prodigy?

Traylor’s art is exceptional in the literal sense, possessing a personal creative quality that no amount of cultural or social context can fully explain. Ultimately, it’s hard to see how valuing what makes brilliant art brilliant diminishes the artist.

This book gives occasional glimpses into how enlightening it can be when authors who aspire to scholarly discipline take on the creation of outsider art. One looks forward to the day when that discipline no longer tends toward the wholesale devaluation of aesthetic activity. n – WILLIAM SWISLOW

Borum’s venom peaks when she takes up the influential 1982 Black Folk Art in America exhibit at the Corcoran Museum in Washington, D.C., whose emphasis THE OUTSIDER 41

Tribute Rosen dealt with the inevitable question of “what to call it,” but to his credit he did not remain focused on resolving that issue. Rather, he focused on the fact that whatever we call it, it is ephemeral and vulnerable.

Rosen’s admiration for the Watts Towers, and his awareness of their vulnerability, galvanized his resolve to establish SPACES in 1978. It must have been a difficult decision to take a serious detour from his own creative practice, but he set out to organize, save and preserve folk art environments.

“There is something out there....”

Seymour Rosen began the first newsletter of SPACES (Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments) with that observation. There IS something out there.

In fact, there are many things out there that exist due to Rosen’s dogged determination to see to it that environmental works from beyond the mainstream are saved and preserved as essential aspects of our art and culture.

Originally a Chicagoan, Rosen (1935–2006) truly found himself in Los Angeles. There, through his camera lens, he developed a consciousness for the visual and cultural richness of the city, and found a world of exciting creative expressions that were largely overlooked by the mainstream. He documented the things people do and the stuff they create to celebrate themselves, individually or collectively, as neighborhoods, cultures, countercultures or in other loose alliances. His book, In Celebration of Ourselves (1979), is a classic in the photodocumentation of popular or spontaneous forms of artistic self-expression.

42 THE OUTSIDER

SPACES began in a near vacuum, in that the effort to preserve such art and cultural environments was in its infancy. At the time, a campaign to save the Watts Towers was the only relatively well-known example.

The Kansas Grassroots Art Association had been founded four years earlier, with a mission similar to that of SPACES. Kohler Foundation, Inc. (Kohler, Wis.) had completed a major restoration of Fred Smith’s Wisconsin Concrete Park, also in 1978, but had no idea that the preservation of art environments would become central to its mission. Art environments were being discovered, explored and documented, but preservation efforts had barely begun.

Saving and preserving are daunting enough tasks if you’re trying to convince city officials or developers of the value of rescuing an art deco train station or a crumbling Frank Lloyd Wright textileblock house. It’s quite another thing to stay the demolition of a homemade mountain covered in paint, shouting “GOD IS LOVE” to the surrounding desert, or a fragile collection of houses constructed of bottles, made for fun and love by an elderly woman who scoured the dump on a daily basis, or any number of combinations of architecture, sculpture and/or landscape that we call art environments.

Rosen’s efforts to save environments

didn’t mimic the improvised nature of the sites. He knew it was essential that environments be documented at the highest level, that contemporary preservation and conservation theories be engaged, that preservation strategies and methodologies parallel those of the preservation mainstream, and, most important, that the most significant sites be designated as landmarks. Inspired and supported by SPACES’ efforts, a number of organizations that preserve art environments now exist around the country, scholarship and awareness have increased, and more than 15 (and possibly more) art environments are on the National Register of Historic Places.

Rosen continued his first SPACES essay, writing: “Most environments represent a lifetime of work by people who are now in old age. They are the result of individual vision rather than formal training. They are art as an expression of personal joy.”

His lifetime of work to save, preserve and champion art environments did not always bring him personal joy, to say the least, and we are deeply indebted to his pioneering work in the field.

Jo Farb Hernández, longtime advocate for the documentation and preservation of art environments, and well-known writer and curator in the field, is the new director of SPACES. – LISA STONE

Lisa Stone is involved in the documentation and preservation of art environments, and is a new member of the board of trustees of SPACES.

Calendar S U BLIME SPACES & VISIONARY WORLDS: B UILT ENVIRONMENTS OF VERNACULAR ARTISTS This exhibition series showcases the work of 22 vernacular environment builders from the Kohler Arts Center’s permanent collection. In the hands of these littleknown artists, patches of wasteland become transcendent kingdoms. Empty lots and sheds are gateways to healing and the heavens. Homes and yards are simultaneously museum and masterpiece. Artists featured include Levi Fisher Ames, Emery Blagdon, Nek Chand, Dr. Charles Smith, Albert Zahn, Fred Smith and Tom Every. Runs through January at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; www.jmkac.org.

Tom Every, The Forevertron, North Freedom, WI. Photo by Ron Byers.

Sponsored By Intuit Events at Intuit unless otherwise noted A.G. R I Z Z O L I : A R C H I T E CT OF M AG N I F I C E N T V I S I O N S Opening reception 5–8 pm Friday September 14; Gallery talk/coffee hour 11 am Saturday September 15; Runs through January 5 The exhibit will feature iconic works in Rizzoli’s oeuvre that have not been on display together since 1998. Curated by Jo Farb Hernández, a leading scholar on Rizzoli’s work.

ARC H I T E CT O F M AG N I F I C E N T VISIO N S C U R ATO R ’ S TA L K Thursday September 13 5:30 pm Chicago Architecture Foundation 224 S. Michigan Avenue Chicago, IL In collaboration with the Chicago Architecture Foundation, Intuit will host Jo Farb Hernández, noted scholar and curator of the A.G. Rizzoli exhibition, who will discuss the life and work of Rizzoli.

R E C E N T AND ANNIVERSARY GIFTS TO T H E PERMANENT COLLECTION Runs through January 5 The collection demonstrates the complexity and dynamism of the artists who exemplify the fields of outsider art, self-taught art and art brut. Artists represented in this exhibition include Martín Ramírez, Ted Ludwiczak, Eugene Andolsek, Alexander Maldonado, Old White Woman, Louis Monza, Eddie Arning, Howard Finster and Betty Zakoian.

I N T U I T IVE MUSIC SERIES: T H E M IGHTY VITAMINS Saturday October 6 Gallery talk/performance 1–4 pm The Mighty Vitamins, who build their own wind and stringed instruments, will conduct an educational workshop and musical performance of their unique improvisational music.

I N T H E REALMS OF THE UNREAL Intuit’s Annual Benefit Gala Saturday October 20 Cocktails 6:30 pm, Dinner 7:30 pm Architectural Artifacts 4325 N. Ravenswood Avenue Chicago, IL

LECTURE ON THE LIFE AND ART OF MARTÍN RAMÍREZ Thursday October 25 6 pm Victor M. Espinosa, prominent scholar and essayist on the life and art of Ramírez, will lecture on how Ramírez’s ancestral origins, American experience and the Mexican region of Jalisco, coupled with the rise of American modernism, inspired Ramírez’s art.

MARTÍN RAMÍREZ STUDY TRIP Saturday October 27 Bus departs Intuit 9 am Cost: $50 (Lunch not included) Called “one of the best shows of the season” by The New York Times, the Martín Ramírez exhibition , coming to the Milwaukee Art Museum, is one show you don’t want to miss. Join Intuit as we travel there via luxury coach with scholar Victor M. Espinosa. You’ll enjoy a continental breakfast while Espinosa talks about this important figure among American selftaught artists. On the return, you’ll visit the Anthony Petullo Collection of Self-Taught and Outsider Art for a reception before returning to Intuit.

Shake your rump to music by the “Vivian Girls” and find out what other surprises await you at Intuit’s gala benefit. Tables of 10: $1,500, $3,000 or $5,000. Individual tickets are $150 and up.

THE OUTSIDER 43

Calendar (continued)

DISLO CAT I O N / T H I S LO CAT I O N : EXPLO R I N G T H E IM M I G R A N T EXPE R I E N C E I N O U T S I D E R A R T Thursday November 15 Panel discussion 6 pm Scholars Randall Morris, Victor M. Espinosa and others will examine the role of “other” and attempts to bring a disordered world into harmony as exemplified in the work of immigrant outsider artists.

ART ENVIRONMENT PRESENTATION WITH L I S A S TO N E Thursday November 29 Gallery talk 6 pm In celebration of the exhibition Sublime Spaces & Visionary Worlds: Built Environments of Vernacular Artists (June 2007–January 2008) at the Kohler Arts Center, Lisa Stone, curator of the Roger Brown Study Collection of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and co-author of Sacred Spaces & Other Places, will present a lecture on selected environments by inspired artist/builders.

SUB L I M E S PAC E S S T U DY T R I P Saturday December 1 John Michael Kohler Arts Center Bus departs Intuit 9am Cost: $100 If you missed the International Conference in September, you still have a chance to see the exhibition. Meet at Intuit before boarding the bus for the Kohler Arts Center. There you will see an incredible reinstallation by 22 artists who transformed their homes, yards or other spaces into multifaceted works of art.

You’ll depart Intuit for the three-hour trip to Sheboygan aboard a luxury coach. A continental breakfast will be served on board, lunch on-site and hors d’oeuvres on the return trip.

Central U.S.

Eastern U.S.

TA K I N G THE ROAD LESS T R AV E LED: CONVERSATIONS O N T H E VISUAL VERNACULAR September 27–30 John Michael Kohler Arts Center Sheboygan, WI www.jmkac.org

A SELECTION FROM THE BARON AND ELLIN GORDON CO LLECTION Runs through October 21 Old Dominion University Norfolk, VA www.odu.edu/al/art/gallery

In conjunction with the Sublime Spaces exhibit, this international conference will focus on the art of vernacular environment builders-artists who have transformed their homes, yards and lives into multifaceted works of art.

2 0 T H A NNIVERSARY C O N F E RENCE OF THE FOLK A R T S OCIETY OF AMERICA October 4–7 Louisville, KY www.folkart.org

GOING WEST! QUILTS AND COMMUNITY October 5–January 21 Smithsonian American Art Museum Renwick Gallery Washington, DC www.americanart.si.edu

Features of the conference include a symposium, a benefit folk art auction, presentation of the awards of distinction, tours of public and private art collections, and social events.

ALL FAITHS BEAUTIFUL October–August 31, 2008 Exhibition Preview Party 7 p.m. October 5 American Visionary Art Museum Baltimore, MD www.avam.org

M A R T Í N RAMÍREZ October 6–January 13 Milwaukee Art Museum Milwaukee, WI www.mam.org

The show includes more than 500 highly personal works of art on the subject of belief with a special emphasis on the work of artists who honor the beauty in faiths other than their own.

Major retrospective of the self-taught artist Martín Ramírez. This exhibition presents close to 100 of his works on paper. Ramírez (1895 –1963) is considered one of the Big Three of 20th Century outsider artists.

M A R Y WHITFIELD RETROSPECTIVE Gala reception October 6 Runs mid-September to mid-October Black World History Museum St. Louis, MO 314-241-7057 This exhibit features the work of the Alabama-born self-taught artist.

44 THE OUTSIDER

Pioneering folk art collectors Ellin and Baron Gordon of Williamsburg, Virginia have donated a significant portion of their collection of 20th and 21st Century American folk art to Old Dominion University.

International VODOU RITUALS AND ARTS IN HAITI Opens in December Musée d’Ethnographie de Genève Geneva, Switzerland www.ville-ge.ch/meg Three hundred pieces from Haitian art collector Marianne Lehmann’s collection will be on display.

Keep current at www.art.org

Intuit is open to the public Tuesday–Saturday 11 am – 5 pm Thursday 11 am – 7:30 pm Admission is free

January 18–April 12, 2008

An exhibition of Vintage American mug shots from the collection of Mark Michaelson.

Of American Mug Shots

Least Wanted: A Century

UP C O M IN G :

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