RAWVISION90 SUMMER 2016
EDITOR John Maizels DIRECTORS Henry Boxer, Robert Greenberg, Audrey Heckler, Rebecca Hoffberger, Phyllis Kind, Frank Maresca, Richard Rosenthal, Bob Roth ART EDITOR Maggie Jones Maizels SENIOR EDITOR Edward M. Gómez FEATURES EDITOR Nuala Ernest ASSOCIATE EDITOR Nick Petty ACCOUNTS MANAGER Judith Edwards SUBSCRIPTIONS MANAGER Suzy Daniels ADVERTISING MANAGER Michael Gorman FRENCH EDITOR Laurent Danchin CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Michael Bonesteel, Jenifer P. Borum, Roger Cardinal, Ted Degener, Jo Farb Hernandez, Tom Patterson, Colin Rhodes, Charles Russell PUBLISHED by Raw Vision Ltd PO Box 44, Watford WD25 8LN, UK tel +44 (0)1923 853175 email info@rawvision.com website www.rawvision.com USA 119 West 72nd Street, #414, New York, NY 10023 (Standard envelopes only) ISSN 0955-1182
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RAW NEWS Outsider events and exhibitions around the world.
OBITUARIES Josep Pujiula i Vila and Martine Birobent.
STEPHANE BLANQUET The exquisite monstrosity of a French graphic artist.
ALICE PERY Nineteenth-century mediumistic artist of royal descent.
ART MOURA Fetish figures from a Californian artist.
JAIME FERNANDES The unique bestiary of a Portuguese draftsman.
RUTH KOHLER: A VISIONARY LIFE The preservation and collection activities of a pioneer.
JUANITA LEONARD Visionary environment and church in the Deep South.
JESSICA PARK Vibrant, dreamlike cityscapes.
MICHAEL GOLZ Maps and charts of a fantasy nation.
RAW STUDIO A look at Studio Cooca in Japan.
RAW REVIEWS Exhibitions and books.
GALLERY & MUSEUM GUIDE A round-up of notable venues around the world.
COVER IMAGE: Stéphane Blanquet, The Silence of a Guardian Angel is Worth Gold, 2011, 11.8 x 15.7 ins. / 30 x 40 cm
Raw Vision (ISSN 0955-1182) June 2016 is published quarterly (March, June, September, December) by Raw Vision Ltd, PO Box 44, Watford WD25 8LN, UK, and distributed in the USA by Mail Right Inc., 1637 Stelton Road 84, Piscataway, NJ 08854. Periodical Postage Paid at Piscataway, NJ, and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: send address corrections to Raw Vision c/o Mail Right International Inc., 1637 Stelton Road 84, Piscataway, NJ 08854. USA subscription office: 119 72nd Street, #414, New York, NY 10023. (Standard envelopes only). Raw Vision cannot be held responsible for the return of unsolicited material. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Raw Vision.
AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM VISIONARY AWARD
WORLD’S BEST ART MAGAZINE
UTNE INDEPENDENT PRESS AWARD
MEDAILLE DE LA VILLE DE PARIS
R AW N E W S CALLAN PARK GALLERY
MUSEUM DR. GUISLAIN TRANSFORMS
until Jan 8, 2017 To celebrate 90 years of Johann Hauser and its own ten-year anniversary, Museum Gugging presents johann hauser ... i‘m the artist! The exhibition includes an overview of the artist’s impressive lifework with over 200 works. The show is curated by Museum Gugging’s artistic director, Johann Feilacher, who worked closely with Hauser over 13 years.
until Sep 29 For one summer the Dr. Guislain Museum becomes the Dirk De Wachter Museum, examining the way contemporary art represents today’s society and the current time, and reveals the shortcomings and possibilities in its own language. The exhibition Dirk De Wachter Museum is a collaboration between psychiatrists Dirk De Wachter and Erik Thys and the curators at the Museum Dr. Guislain.
MUSEUM GUGGING Am Campus 2, A-3400, Maria Gugging, AUSTRIA www.gugging.at
MUSEUM DR. GUISLAIN Jozef Guislainstraat 43, 9000 Gent, BELGIUM www.museumdrguislain.be
Judith Scott
CALLAN PARK GALLERY Sydney College of the Arts, Callan Park, Kirkbride Way, Lilyfield, NSW 2040, AUSTRALIA www.sydney.edu/sca
HAUSER CELEBRATED AT GUGGING
Johann Hauser
Philip Hammial
Jul 7–30 For Philip Hammial’s 30th exhibition, Mr Odongo Okono & others of his ilk features a range of figurative sculptures made from found objects.
SPIRITS AT THE COURTAULD GALLERY
Jun 30 – Oct 16 Pallant House Gallery will be showing small sculptures by the self-taught artist Friedrich Nagler. Nagler was an obsessive maker who created thousands of works, some of which were probably inspired by his flight from Nazi Germany to England in 1939. The exhibition focuses on a series of small scale sculptural heads which were carved, cast and assembled using a variety of materials including bone, metal, ivory, plastic and even bread.
until Sep 11 Georgiana Houghton: Spirit Drawings presents Victorian semi-abstract drawings, being exhibited in the United Kingdom for the first time since they were shown in the late nineteenth century. Houghton pioneered the use of drawing as part of her process of communicating with the spirit realm.
Georgiana Houghton
Friedrich Nagler RAW VISION 90
REDWING GALLERY until Sep 2016 A changing exhibition of paintings by Chris Neate, John Sheehy, Piers Lockwood and others is on display until September. The not-forprofit social enterprise’s empty-shop project has recently expanded to include two floors of gallery space.
Piers Lockwood
HEADS AT PALLANT HOUSE GALLERY
PALLANT HOUSE GALLERY 9 North Pallant, Chichester PO19 1TJ, UK www.pallant.org.uk 4
AUSTRALIA, AUSTRIA, BELGIUM, BRITAIN
THE COURTAULD GALLERY Somerset House, Strand, London, WC2R 0RN, UK www.courtauld.ac.uk
REDWING GALLERY 36A Market Jew Street, Penzance, Cornwall TR18 2HT, UK redwinggallery.co.uk
R AW N E W S
SWITZERLAND, USA
THE GOOD LUCK GALLERY
LOY BOWLIN’S HOLY JEWEL HOME
MCKISSICK MUSEUM
Jul 9 – Aug 27 The Good Luck Gallery presents Disparate Minds, based on the organisation and website documenting progressive art studios. Daniel Green,William Scott, Joe Zaldivar and Roger Swike will be on display, all of whom incorporate text into their work.
through 2016 The John Michael Kohler Arts Center offers visitors the opportunity to observe, in real time, conservators working on the preservation and conservation of Loy Bowlin’s The Beautiful Holy Jewel Home art environment.
until Aug 6 The McKissick Museum will show Richard Burnside: Who is King? with art and interviews with the artist, collectors, and friends from his hometown of Pendleton, South Carolina.
PEOPLE AT COLLECTION DE L’ART BRUT
OUTSIDER ART IN LOS ANGELES
Jul 3 – Nov 13 Collection De l’art Brut exhibits People, which will show how many of authors of art brut share our fascination with celebrities. Each creator, whose work joined the museum collections between 1976 and 2016, depicts stars from film, music and politics.
until Sep 3 Just Folk shows a collection of outsider and selftaught art at the Fetterman Gallery. Broaden Your Vision: Outsider Art 101 includes works by Bill Traylor, Thornton Dial, William Hawkins, Joseph Yoakum, James Castle and Ronald Lockett.
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MCKISSICK MUSEUM College of Arts and Sciences, University of South Carolina 816 Bull Street, Columbia, SC 29208 www.artsandsciences.sc. edu/mckissickmuseum
MUSEUM OF INTERNATIONAL FOLK ART until Jan 1, 2017 After 30 years, the Morris Miniature Circus returns to the Museum of International Folk Art in Return of the Little Big Top. Built over 40 years by W.J. “Windy” Morris (1904– 1978) of Amarillo, Texas, the Circus is a 100,000 piece 3/8”-scale model. W.J. “Windy” Morris’ Miniature Circus
JOHN MICHAEL KOHLER ARTS CENTER 608 New York Avenue, Sheboygan, WI 53081 www.jmkac.org
William Hawkins
COLLECTION DE L’ART BRUT Av. des Bergières 11, 1004 Lausanne, SWITZERLAND www.artbrut.ch 8
Loy Bowlin
Kunstmuseum Thurgau Kartause Ittingen, 8532 Warth, SWITZERLAND www.kunstmuseum.ch
THE GOOD LUCK GALLERY 945 Chung King Road, Los Angeles Chinatown, CA 90012 thegoodluckgallery.com
Dominique Hérion
Michael Golz
William Scott
until Oct 30 Over the past decade Michael Golz has created a fictional parallel world. His vision of “Athosland” takes shape in several forms: a large-scale map, several hundreds of town- and village views, and abstruse travel stories. Michael Golz. Reise ins Athosland (A Trip to Athosland) at the Thurgau Kunstmuseum offers a deeper view into this fascinating universe between reality and fantasy - exhibited for the first time ever.
Richard Burnside
MICHAEL GOLZ - A TRIP TO ATHOSLAND
FETTERMAN GALLERY 2525 Michigan Ave A1, Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, CA 90404. www.justfolk.com, peterfetterman.com
MUSEUM OF INTERNATIONAL FOLK ART 706 Camino Lejo, on Museum Hill, Santa Fe, NM 87505 www.internationalfolkart. org
R AW N E W S CAVIN-MORRIS GALLERY
FEVER WITHIN: THE ART OF RONALD LOCKETT IN NEW YORK
until Jun 4, 2017 AVAM will present Washington, DC-based, self-taught artist’s exhibition MATT SESOW: Shock and Awe. Over 150 works includ Sesow’s tributes to great humanitarians and fantastical depictions of creatures.
until Aug 19 Cavin-Morris Gallery introduce a series of exhibitions called Summer Spotlights, where each artist will be shown on a specific wall or floor section of the gallery. The series will commence with artists JB Murray, Jon Serl, Gregory Van Maanen and Christine Sefolosha.
until Sep 18 This first retrospective on the artist emphasises the themes Ronald Lockett explored over his decade-long artistic career. Working with found materials, his subjects included racial, economic and political unrest, including the unfulfilled promises of the civil rights movement and environmental degradation. Largely unrecognised in his lifetime, Lockett fits squarely into evolving histories of American art in the late twentieth century.
AMERICAN VISIONARY ART MUSEUM 800 Key Highway, Baltimore, MD 21230 www.avam.org
CAVIN-MORRIS GALLERY 210 11th Avenue, #201, New York, NY 10001 www.cavinmorris.com
AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM 2 Lincoln Square, New York, NY 10023 www.folkartmuseum.org
FOOD AT CREATIVITY EXPLORED
until Oct 30 The High Museum of Art has received a gift of 47 artworks from collector Gordon W. Bailey. The High will celebrate the gift with an exhibition opening this spring titled A Cut Above: Wood Sculpture from the Gordon W. Bailey Collection. Self-taught artists include Thornton Dial, Jr., Roy Ferdinand, Herbert Singleton, OL Samuels and Howard Finster.
until Jul 20 Work by artists with developmental disabilities that explores San Francisco’s famous food culture is being shown in Ripe. The artwork represents the themes of food and its relation to ritual, celebration, desire, storytelling, memory, obsession, power and culture. It features artists Andrew Bixler, Melody Lima, Musette Perkins and Marilyn Wong.
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THE MENIL COLLECTION until Oct 16 As Essential as Dreams presents work by selftaught and visionary artists from the Collection of Stephanie and John Smither. Artists include Thornton Dial, Solange Knopf, Sister Gertrude Morgan and Carlo Zinelli.
Carlo Zinelli
O.L. Samuels
Musette Perkins
BAILEY DONATION AT HIGH MUSEUM
HIGH MUSEUM OF ART 1280 Peachtree St NE, Atlanta, GA 30309 www.high.org 10
Ronald Lockett
INTUIT: THE CENTER FOR INTUITIVE AND OUTSIDER ART 756 N Milwaukee Avenue Chicago, IL 60642 www.art.org
SHOCK AND AWE AT AVAM
Matt Sesow
Thornton Dial
Jul 15 – Jan 2, 2017 To celebrate it’s 25-year anniversary, Intuit will revisit the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s groundbreaking 1982 exhibition Black Folk Art in America 1930– 1980. The exhibition will explore all the areas impacted by the term “Black Folk Art”.
JB Murray
INTUIT
USA
CREATIVITY EXPLORED GALLERY 3245 Sixteenth Street, San Francisco, CA 94103 www.creativityexplored.org
THE MENIL COLLECTION 1533 Sul Ross St, Houston, TX 77006 www.menil.org
MASTER OF EXQUISITE MONSTROSITY The work of French graphic artist Stéphane Blanquet has a gravitational pull on the viewer, in any media that he uses ALLA CHERNETSKA
Le Train (detail), 2009, mixed media installation in “Quintet”, MAC Lyon, France, 820.2 sq. ft / 250 sq. m, photo by Céline Goergen
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he world created by Stéphane Blanquet is a monstrous circus of reality. The people, insects and other characters which cohabit in his books, or occupy an entire wall space in an exhibition, are monsters that swarm in too-cramped pictorial spaces. As Blanquet acknowledges, paper and canvas are far too limiting, so going beyond the frame his worlds and characters conquer entire walls, and entire exhibitions. Blanquet says, “Spaces are always too small for my necessity to spray everything around with my pictures.
If I was given an entire building, I would cover it with graphic semen. I need a city to cover it with pictures; a city is a minimal space for an exhibition”. Blanquet’s monsters closely interact, creating myriad living, organic patterns that pulsate and absorb our gaze. From the narration of tales to the abstraction of murals horror vacui, Blanquet’s universe becomes an ordeal in which we are forced to confront our own shadow side, and it is a pleasurable carnal hallucination. Blanquet published his first drawing when he was
All images © Stéphane Blanquet below: Distorted Forest, Installation Nocturne, 2012, mixed media (six sculptures, two light rail-systems, engines), photo by Fumanart
above: Le Corps sent l’Organe (The Body feels as an Organ), drawing used for the 2009/2010 programme of the Caen Theatre of Comedy, 2009, ink on paper, courtesy of the artist
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ROYAL BLOOD AND SPIRIT VOICES The re-discovery of a Victorian artist who channeled royalty in her blood and the spirit world in her drawings VIVIENNE ROBERTS
left: Untitled, pencil on paper, 1874, 10 x 7 ins. / 25 x 18 cm right: Untitled, (detail) pencil on paper, 1889, 6.5 x 3.25 ins. / 16 x 8 cm
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lice Mary Theodosia Pery (1833–1906) was one of seven children of the Honourable Edmund Sexton Pery (1797–1860) and the Honourable Elizabeth Charlotte Cokayne (1798–1883), and on both sides of the family a direct descendent of King Edward III. Alice was also a Spiritualist and highly talented mediumistic artist who chose to have little contact with her family, their opulent lifestyle and her Catholic upbringing. Instead, she lived alone among working-class villagers and kept her identity a secret. She began creating art in the early 1870s and continued until her death in 1906, all the while using a pseudonym – if she signed her work at all. 20
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Pery was introduced to Spiritualism following a chance encounter in 1871, with a medium who encouraged her to develop her own mediumistic skills. This led to Pery’s conviction that she had the ability to see clairvoyantly, hear clairaudiently and draw automatically. Pery stated that each drawing would begin, by lines, ovals, circles and other curved lines, done quickly and at once all over the paper. I have nothing to do but let my hand go, and the spirit, whoever it is, does the work and lays his foundation. The spirit would then use Pery’s artistic knowledge to fill in all the spaces between the curved lines with a
multitude of faces, hands and figures resulting in an extraordinarily complex artwork similar, albeit on a smaller scale, to the work that Britain’s best known mediumistic artist, Madge Gill 1882–1961, would produce half a century later. These curious drawings were brought to the attention of prominent Spiritualists Georgiana Houghton (1814–1884) and William Stainton Moses (1839–1892), both founding members of the College of Psychic Studies in 1884. Through their friendship and encouragement, Alice’s work became well known in Spiritualist circles, and it is thanks to them that small details of her Spiritualist life and artistic output were recorded. Sadly, after the deaths of Houghton and Moses, Alice and her art fell into obscurity. After her own death in 1906, her art, with no family to protect it, was dispersed – unsigned and anonymous.
Alice’s work remained in obscurity until early 2016, when I was working on an exhibition of spirit art and artefacts at the College of Psychic Studies and searching through the archives. Alice was identified from letters and further research led to the details of her life beyond Spiritualism and her astonishing secret royal heritage. A previously unrecorded drawing was also found and there are undoubtedly many more in existence. Hopefully, Alice and her art will now be appreciated once more and given its rightful place in the annals of mediumistic art. Images courtesy of the College of Psychic Studies, London, where Alice Pery’s artworks can be seen in the upcoming exhibition “Encounters with the Spirit World”, August 14–20, 2016. Vivienne Roberts is a curator currently working on a series of exhibitions for the College of Psychic Studies in London.
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ART MOURA
DEWITT CHENG
Characterful and powerful fetish-like dolls from a Californian artist
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he town of Sebastopol, in Sonoma County (unusually verdant these days, after the return of rains this winter), is a prosperous bedroom community an hour north of San Francisco. Despite having become a commuter town for the city, the area still retains traces of its agricultural origins, the old apple orchards now transformed into vineyards
supplying local wineries. A quick internet search reveals that Sebastopol, possibly named for a battle of the Crimean war, has been home to such diverse notables as Luther Burbank, Jerry Garcia, Johnny Otis, Mario Savio, Charles M. Schulz and Tom Waits. To this list one might someday add – should outsider art achieve mass appeal – the artist Art
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THE BESTIARY ART OF JAIME FERNANDES Little known by most, in life and afterwards, this Portuguese, art brut artist has been highly acclaimed in the outsider art world JOÃO PEDRO FRÓIS
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aime Fernandes came from peasant stock, from a village in the hinterland of Portugal, and he lived a life that was common for small crop farmers whose livelihood depended on whether each year’s harvest was good or bad. The first of three children born to farmers Joaquim Fernandes and Maria de Jesus, he was born on May 8, 1899, in Barco, a small village in the Covilhã district some 300 kilometres north of Lisbon. In 1923, he married Evangelina Delgado, who bore him five children. He died in Lisbon on March 23, 1969. In January 1938, Fernandes was interned in the Miguel Bombarda Psychiatric Hospital, Lisbon, the first psychiatric hospital of its kind in Portugal, which was founded in 1848 and closed down in 2011. Throughout its existence the hospital was housed in precarious conditions, in a building which had withstood the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755. It had once been a friary belonging to the “Mission Congregation”, founded by St Vincent de Paulo, and then, later, a military barracks. According to the hospital records, Fernandes was booked into the Sixth Ward on January 7, 1938, after being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He experienced hallucinations, delirium, incoherent thinking and amnesia. At the end of his first year of internment, and as a result of his ongoing agitated state, he was transferred to another ward – a ward described by author António Lobo Antunes in his 1970s-set novel Knowledge of Hell (transl. Clifford Landers, Dalkey Archive Press, 2008): The eighth men’s ward of Miguel Bombarda Hospital, set away from the rest, near the garage, the workshops and the high dark wall going to Avenida Gomes Freire, near the anaemic greens of the
All works shown are from the collection owned by Gulbenkian Modern Art Centre (CAM) in Lisbon, and appear courtesy of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
right: Untitled, n.d., ballpoint pen on paper, 12.4 x 19.4 ins. / 31.6 x 49.2 cm opposite: Untitled, n.d., ballpoint pen on paper, 17.3 x 5.3 ins. / 43.9 x 13.5 cm
vegetable garden and the neglected bushes, is an odd building in the shape of a bullring, bearing the words Security Ward above an iron door. Inside are enclosed, in cubicles sealed with enormous latches, the patients that the police, the courts, the doctors consider dangerous, poor slow and obtuse creatures with fingers like fat smashed worms, shuffling about under a sky that falls on their heads like some gigantic cube of blue lead, with edges sharpened by the blind,
empty, white eye of the sun. The doors open with large keys, misery is obvious, lamentable, tragic, the orderlies’ offices uncomfortable and melancholy. (p. 195). In 1954, Fernandes was transferred to the Fourth Ward due to a lung ailment. He never returned to his native village. Fernandes’ path in life, the history of his internment
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A VISIONARY LIFE Former director of the Kohler Foundation, Ruth DeYoung Kohler, takes on a new role. RUTH LOPEZ looks at her unique achievements in the realm of self-taught expression
Nek Chand, Bangle Kings and Queens, c.1972, cement, coloured cement, broken crockery and glass bangles, height approximately 40–45 ins / 100–115 cm.
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uth DeYoung Kohler, the visionary director of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, since 1972, has retired to focus on her dream project called The Art Preserve – a new museum and park nearby that will be devoted to environment builders. The art centre, near the shore of Lake Michigan, one hour north of Milwaukee, was established in 1967 by the Kohler Foundation, the charity established by Ruth Kohler’s family from the success of her family’s eponymous plumbing and bath fixtures business. Kohler took the reins of the small museum and expanded it from a concentration on craft to acquiring and presenting the work of self-taught artists. There are now approximately 20,000 artworks in the collection. The foundation, a separate entity from the art centre, has become a leader in the restoration and preservation of visionary environments. Ruth Kohler also helped shape the direction that the family business would take in supporting art by suggesting a residency program at the company foundry. While these organisations have different boards and functions, there is a synergy that has benefitted the art world, and specifically the field of outsider art, immeasurably. During an interview in Kohler’s sunny office earlier this year, she spoke about what drew her to the work of vernacular artists. The administrative wing of the art centre is on the second floor of the old family home where Ruth’s father was born. The art centre expansion in 1982 connected the brick Italianate mansion to the
Ruth DeYoung Kohler with folklorist Fred Fussell at St. EOM’s (Eddie Owens Martin’s) Pasaquan environment, Georgia, October 10, 2014, photo by Jenna Robinson
gallery spaces. Visible from Ruth’s desk near the door was a handwritten sign, a quote by the author E. B. White: “I wake up every morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”Is this her credo? “It is how I would like to feel”, Kohler said. Kohler’s first encounter with a visionary outdoor environment was in the early 1970s when a friend took her to see Fred Smith (1886–1976) in the Northwoods country of Wisconsin. “I fell in love with Fred, he was amazing”, said Ruth, who returned to the site many times. Smith was a logger, farmer and tavern keeper who created more than 220 figures on his land. Smith’s sprawling creation, near the rural community of Phillips, was built between 1948 and 1964, and contains a tableaux of oversized people and animals, made of concrete, bottles, glass, mirror and wire, depicting historic events. Kohler’s roots in the appreciation of roadside attractions go back to the long Sunday drives with her family in a Packard convertible. “He loved to just start driving”, she said of her father, who was also a painter and loved art. He would stop and talk to farmers. Vernacular architecture and treasures like bathtub shrines made them “veer off the road”. Kohler studied art history at Smith College, Massachusetts, and after graduation in 1963 she lived in Spain, and exploring the paleolithic cave art in the mountain region of the north. “Altamira had just closed”, she said, but there were many other sites. “I would arrive in a village and find a kid with a kerosene lantern”, said Kohler. “I saw a lot of wonderful things.” When her father became ill in 1967, she returned home. He died the following year (her mother had died in 1953).
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caption
MS JUANITA’S CHURCH Deep in the southern bayou, a woman has created a visionary environment that speaks to its visitors just as God has spoken to her FRED SCRUTON
THE ART OF JESSICA PARK Dream-like transformations by a visionary artist from New England TONY GENGARELLY
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essica Park’s unique perspective has combined with a remarkable array of artistry to transform the ordinary reality she records so well into a world of visionary excitement. Working from her home in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where she has lived for most of her life, Jessica creates transfigured architectural monuments: skyscrapers, bridges, Victorian mansions, historic landmark buildings, even ordinary houses. The artist often focuses on rooftops, overhanging eves and cornices; the top portions of skyscrapers and bridges to accommodate an upward vantage point, while she substitutes her own visionary elements for existing backgrounds. Known for her rainbow-palette of colors, intricately arranged and harmoniously balanced, Jessica complements the grids of decorative hues that highlight her principle subjects with naturalistic effects that include, most importantly, remarkable skies. These are filled with astronomical phenomena which she researches and includes in a variety of presentations. Her playful imagination generates a cosmic balance where multicoloured images lift off the paper into a separate reality. Jessica often uses an inversion of light and dark – nighttime skies over day-lit buildings/bridges – in the accomplishment of this gesture. Park was born into a household of professional educators and writers. Her mother, Clara Claiborne
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Park, who taught English literature at Williams College, wrote two memoirs about her exceptional daughter – The Siege (1967) and Exiting Nirvana (2001). David Park, her father, was a professor of Physics at Williams College and authored several books, many of which placed the discipline within a more philosophical context. Jessica’s autism – at first a mystery which threatened to overwhelm her family – has become an important part of who she is as an artist and accomplished person. Rather than succumbing to the news that Jessica was on the spectrum, the Parks rallied and successfully brought her back into the world as an important, contributing member of society. Following the recent deaths of her parents, Park’s three older siblings now watch over their artist sister who is living responsibly alone in the family residence. Along with insightful love from her parents, siblings and the community of friends and patrons that surround the Park family, the artistic sensibility,
above: The House in Chapin Court, 1987, acrylic on paper, no measurements, collection of Anita Sokolsky and Stephen Tifft opposite: The Queen Anne Victorian House in Portland, Oregon, 2002, acrylic on paper, 24 x 18 ins. / 61 x 45.7 cm, collection of Marcia Johnston Wood
“WUUM! THAT’S WHAT YOU GET“ Michael Golz has created an entire country, with maps, brochures and tourist information. Welcome to Athosland... CHRISTIANE JECKELMANN
Map of Athosland, detail of Honne Mid-West, 1977–today, mixed media on paper, 42.9 x 94.5 ins. / 109 x 240 cm, courtesy of Galerie ART CRU Berlin
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n Athosland, Michael Golz takes the viewer on a journey through his lifetime’s work. As a cartographer, inventor and storyteller, Golz has built his own fantasy world with its own culture, history and geography. What started in the 1960s as a childlike game of inventing fictional worlds and creatures with his brother Wulf has developed into an infinite artwork. Today, Athosland manifests itself in three main parts: a giant map; hundreds of scenes and drawings of places, towns, and landscapes; and eight folders full of travelogues about the imaginary country.
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The most extravagant element in Golz’s Gesamtkunstwerk (total art work) is a giant map. This large-scale pictorial sculpture defines Athosland cartographically. Golz has been working on this current version of the map since 1977. Over the past four decades, around 160 irregularly-shaped pieces have been created, with an average size of 31.4 x 39.4 ins. / 80 x 100 cm. They can be assembled, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, into a giant map that is 55.8 x 46 feet / 17 x 14 metres in size. Athosland is divided into five main regions. In the
“Michael Golz – Reise ins Athosland” is open to the public until October 30 at Kunstmuseum Thurgau, Switzerland. Artworks are courtesy of Kunstmuseum Thurgau unless otherwise stated.
south is the giant capital, “Athos”. The urban area of this metropolis spreads through the “East Marshlands” on one side and the “Western Region” on the other. In the east is the “Eastern Region”, which merges, in the northeast, into the sparse Folder 1, page 131, day 7,1968–2014, mixed media, 11.7 x 15.7 ins. / 29.8 x 40 cm “Juniper-Desert”, and in the north into the fertile, sap-green “Kindermann name, which lies at the broad “Athos River”. The river Area”. West of Athos-City you can find the rural itself meanders across the country, from north-west to landscapes of the “Western Region”, as well as the south-east. Between “Honne” and the “Kindermann“Land of Castles” and the “Karst Mountains”, which are Area” are the “Ground of the Forest“ and the “Anxiouscharacterised by the many rivers flowing through Mountains“. them and by their yellow-brown mountains. The With his map, Golz transforms his fantasy into a region “Honne” spreads throughout the northwest and tangible reality and gives the viewer the opportunity covers about a fifth of the whole country. At the centre to take a journey deep into the centre of it. of the region of “Honne” is a major city of the same The map is complemented by around 250 separate illustrations of places, towns and villages, which are located on it. These colouredpencil drawings (several accentuated with a marker) show everything from capitals with modern skyscrapers, farms, shopping malls and bars, to tiny, rustic villages with timberframed houses or family-run guest houses. The drawings bring the imaginary country to life; the towns, villages and landscapes on the map are given a visual identity and the inhabitants of Athosland are given I Love Michael Golz, 1998, mixed media, 16.5 x 23.2 ins. / 42 x 59 cm faces.
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All artworks courtesy of Studio COOCA Michiko Matsumoto, Hoppe, 2012, oil marker, ball pen and acrylic on paper, 10.6 x 15.6 ins. / 27 x 39.5 cm
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STUDIO COOCA, JAPAN JOHN FRANCIS CROSS
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tudio COOCA is a state-funded welfare facility in the coastal city of Hiratsuka, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan, and provides adults with disabilities the opportunity to generate income by producing art work of various kinds. There are 90 registered and 60 currently-active artists who are paid to attend and produce work at COOCA. They are also able to sell their creations or earn a share of profits from the sale of goods – bags, pencil cases and so on – that incorporate motifs from their work, though not all members wish to sell their work. Members also take part in picture story shows, marionette plays, live painting and other art performance activities. COOCA artists are encouraged to find and develop their own talents, not necessarily drawing or painting. On the day of my visit to the café gallery, members made and served me coffee and sandwiches, as well as offering services with cardboard-constructed ‘fortune telling machines’, and selling me a handmade lucky charm assemblage which, I was assured by the artist, would bring unexpected financial benefits within two days of purchase. It did. There are two locations: a large, three-floor workshop/studio area and, ten minutes’ walk away, a newer café gallery space that also has workshop areas. In all workshop areas there was a mood of enjoyable concentration, and most 56
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Noriko Kawamura, Light Blue, 2003, colour pencil on kraft paper, 3.9 x 5.8 ins. / 10 x 14.8 cm
artists were proud and happy to explain their work to a visitor. A few were so absorbed in creating that they did not want to be disturbed. There is clear sense that the studio participants are working. Their work is making art. This seems to give them dignity, identity and self-worth, and perhaps this is especially important in contemporary Japan where the value of work is held in high esteem. Guiding staff in the studio do not direct the content of work and limit their advice to materials, especially for new members. The artists’ application and practice has
Keiko Kurita (right) and Yoriko Yamamoto (left) in Studio COOCA’s main workshop, 2016, photo by John Francis Cross
resulted in work of quality and individuality. Much COOCA art is vibrant and cheerful, but although it is true that charming and colourful art and merchandise is more likely to find a buyer, members are not under pressure to conform to cute stereotypes, and some
produce introspective, abstract pieces. One artist, who does not communicate verbally, was totally absorbed in decorating irregularly-shaped pieces of wood in striking fashion with the coloured core of pencils – which he extracted by biting away the wooden cases. A staffer asked me not to touch the stacked pieces of wood, which he called the artist’s “treasures”. Small-scale exhibitions featuring one or two artists are held about twice a month in the café gallery. Large-scale shows with many artists taking part have been held two or three times a year at art spaces in the Kanagawa and Tokyo area, though rental and publicity costs are a serious concern for what is ultimately a taxfunded enterprise. Studio COOCA has been operating under its present name since 2009, though its origins go back 30 years. Director Motoshi Sekine says that in those days welfare officials saw no value in giving workshop facilities to disabled people. Now, Sekine says, social attitudes have slightly improved, but the real transformation happens when an artist sells a piece for the first time. “The artist and their family members then realise a disabled person can earn a living, be an artist, have a dream, and – who knows – even be famous. I hope one of these artists becomes famous, I really do. She or he would be a model of success.”
Gallery COOCA, 14-8 Akashicho, Hiratsuka 254-0042, Japan. www.studiocooca.com Souichiro Shimizu, Takahashi Minami, 2009, oil marker on paper, 11.7 x 8.3 ins. / 29.7 × 21 cm
John Francis Cross is a teacher and writer living in Tokyo and a Trustee of the Nek Chand Foundation.
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Mary T. Smith
EXHIBITIONS
DO YOU NO ME: MARY T. SMITH AND B. THOM STEVENSON Shrine, 191 Henry Street, New York, NY 10002 May 6 – June 12, 2016 Not far from the wooden bungalow of Mary T. Smith (1904–1995) in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, lay a garbage dump. There, Smith, a Mississippi native who had moved into this modest home in the early 1940s, found a surplus of discarded, corrugated tin. She cut it into strips with an axe to create her artworks, including a fence, furniture, storage huts and lawn ornaments decorated with thick, confident brushstrokes, which she set up around her property. Smith, who also painted on found 58
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pieces of wood, was a portrait artist. Her subjects included Jesus Christ, her neighbours, and herself – all of which, comparatively speaking, she depicted with the impulsive energy of JeanMichel Basquiat and the reverence of an Eastern Orthodox icon painter. Her figures seemed to wave to passers-by and to protect the woman who lived inside her home. This is the third exhibition at this recently opened gallery in Manhattan’s Lower East Side district, and corrugated metal serves as the meeting point between the work of the self-taught Smith and that of B. Thom Stevenson, a schooled, young, emerging artist based in nearby Brooklyn. Stevenson’s paintings, which recall grainy, Xeroxcopied punk rock flyers, are made
with clean, shiny rectangles of metal. By contrast, Smith’s tin pieces appear weather-beaten after their many years in the artist’s yard, and jagged from the cuts from her axe. Both artists’ paintings are marked with written words. Smith, who was hearing-impaired, was ostracised in her community on account of this condition; the language that appears in her work seems to be her own creation. One of her pieces (Untitled, c. 1980), which might have hung on her fence, features a face surrounded by words. Though some, like “NO” and “AT”, are recognisable, together they are difficult to understand. They seem to hold some kind of deep meaning, like fragments of an ancient script that has yet to be decoded. Sarah Fensom
EXHIBITIONS
Eugene Von Bruenchenhein
R AW R E V I E W S
EUGENE VON BRUENCHENHEIN: MARIE! MARIE! I LONG FOR YOU Delmes & Zander Berlin, RosaLuxemburg-Str. 37, Berlin, Germany March 11 – 23 April, 2016 “Create and be recognized”, commanded a sign which hung in Eugene Von Bruenchenhein’s basement, a clandestine subterranean space that provided a creative hub for the artist’s broad range of creative pursuits. To quote the title of Joanne Cubb's monograph, Eugene Von Bruenchenhein was somewhat of an “obsessive visionary” with a practice that encompassed chicken-bone sculptures, ceramic masks and visionary paintings that were created in a frenzy under the guidance of a
genie perched upon his shoulder. At Delmes & Zander, the exhibition focuses on Von Bruenchenhein’s photographic works and the reciprocal relationship between artist and muse – his wife, Marie, who he met in 1939 at a visit to Wisconsin State Fair Park. During more than 40 years of marriage, Von Bruenchenhein’s practice narrated his romantic and erotic devotion to Marie. Thousands of photographs feature her in a leading role and numerous love poems are dedicated to her; the exhibition title borrows from his poem Marie! Marie! I long for you thru the dusky, hollow, fading years. The intimate black-and-white portraits on display capture Marie in a variety of costumes and roles, clad in patterned fabrics or lingerie and bejewelled with elaborate pearl
necklaces, often in front of a floral background. Referencing a pin-up aesthetic, with the exotic illusions sometimes broken by the appearance of a domestic chair or the couple’s sofa, Von Bruenchenhein portrays his wife as the ultimate fantasy woman. Alternating between girl-nextdoor, magazine pin-up and exotic femme fatale, Marie greets the viewer with a shy smile, either directly or indirectly, as if a little self-conscious in front of the camera while simultaneously displaying an ease and comfort with the photographer. While looking at these engaging photographs, that portray a marriage rather than an individual, we, as outsiders, can’t help but wonder if we are intruding upon a private domestic bliss. Sheena Malone RAW VISION 90
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Johann Hauser
Linda Naeff
EXHIBITIONS
JOHANN HAUSER… DER KÜNSTLER BIN ICH! (I AM THE ARTIST!!) Museum Gugging, Art Brut Center Gugging, Austria June 6, 2016 - Jan 8, 2017 Johann Hauser (1926-1996) was one of the most distinctive members of the original group of residents of the House of Artists at what is now known as the Art Brut Center Gugging, an institution on the northwestern outskirts of Vienna. That residence for self-taught art-makers evolved out of what had been an earlier Centre for Art and Psychotherapy, which had been set up by the psychiatrist Leo Navratil (1921-2006) in 1981. (Today’s Gugging art complex has its roots in a former psychiatric hospital.) After the psychiatrist and sculptor Johann Feilacher became Navratil’s successor in the mid-1980s, he transformed the clinically oriented artists’ residence, focusing instead on their artistic creativity, not on their mental illnesses. To mark the tenth anniversary of its founding, Museum Gugging is presenting a comprehensive exhibition of Hauser’s drawings and hand-coloured etchings. Featuring more than 200 works, it includes some of the Austrian autodidact’s early depictions of aircraft, along with pictures of animals, palaces, rockets, and his emblematic, erotic-expressionistic images of women. With a sure line, using plain pencil, coloured pencils or wax crayons, Hauser portrayed female figures of ambiguous and haunting beauty, whipping up voluminous 60
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piles of hair and highlighting their mouths, breasts and other body parts in ways that bring to mind the Cubists’ experiments with exaggerated forms. These pictures also recall the figuration-abstraction tug of war that characterised the imagery of certain Abstract Expressionists. Hauser’s palette is plain and powerful; he used mainly primary and secondary colours. In this exhibition’s superbly illustrated catalogue, Feilacher, the show’s curator, fondly recalls his first interactions with Hauser many years ago. He points out that admirers of his work included the French modern artist Jean Dubuffet and the Austrian avantgardist Arnulf Rainer. Museum Gugging’s exhibition is a milestone presentation that both celebrates and vividly documents the raw creative energy that lies at the heart of art brut art-making. Edward M. Gómez
LINDA NAEFF: LES COULEURS HABILLENT LA SOUFFRANCE Musée de Carouge, Carouge, Switzerland April 27 – August 28, 2016 Linda Naeff (1926–2014) was born near Paris to an authoritarian father and an emotionally troubled and suicidal mother. Naeff’s parents were unmarried at the time; her out-ofwedlock birth provoked the ire of her mother’s relatives, which led to considerable family tension. In 1940, the Naeffs settled in
Switzerland, where the young Linda was sexually abused by a male teacher. That traumatic experience wounded her psychologically for a lifetime; although she later married and bore two daughters, Naeff also suffered four miscarriages. Nevertheless, she studied hairdressing, took part in amateur theatre and was active in a volunteer organisation that aided people facing psychological and other hardships. At the age of 61, Naeff began making art. She took some basic classes that introduced her to materials but mostly developed her own art-making techniques, often employing found objects, including clear-plastic candy boxes and mattress-support slats from old beds. As this exhibition, whose title means “Colours Dress Up the Suffering”, makes clear, for Naeff, creating art was a therapeutic activity. In a short film made by Mario del Curto and Bastin Genoux, which is part of the exhibition, Naeff suggests that she regarded her work as potentially serving a therapeutic purpose for its viewers, too. Her impulsive, unbridled creative energy, along with an uninhibited sense of raw emotion, can be felt in many of her works, most of which are untitled. Among them: a picture of a girl who is chained to a chair and gnawed at by rats; her self-portrait as a naked woman who has just miscarried a child; and her ceramic figures, with their big holes for eyes, tilting necks and gaping mouths. In one of her many one-of-a-kind artist’s books, Naeff wrote, “I am a joyous pessimist and a sad optimist.” Edward M. Gómez
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