Raw Vision 98 by Raw Vision

RAWVISION98 SUMMER 2018

EDITOR John Maizels DIRECTORS Henry Boxer, Robert Greenberg, Audrey Heckler, Rebecca Hoffberger, Phyllis Kind, Frank Maresca, Marilyn Oshman, Richard Rosenthal, Bob Roth ART EDITOR Maggie Jones Maizels SENIOR EDITOR Edward M. Gómez FEATURES EDITOR Nuala Ernest ASSOCIATE EDITOR Natasha Jaeger DESIGN Terrayne Brown ACCOUNTS MANAGER Judith Edwards SUBSCRIPTIONS MANAGER Suzy Daniels CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Michael Bonesteel, Jenifer P. Borum, Roger Cardinal, Ted Degener, Jo Farb Hernandez, Tom Patterson, Colin Rhodes, Charles Russell, Daniel Wojcik PUBLISHED by Raw Vision Ltd Letchmore Heath WD25 8LN, UK tel +44 (0)1923 853175 email info@rawvision.com website www.rawvision.com

ISSN 0955-1182

4 14 16 18 26 34 40 46 52 58 64 72

RAW NEWS Outsider events and exhibitions around the world

OBITUARIES METROPOLITAN MUSEUM Souls Grown Deep donation

SISI Introducing the vibrant work of Julia Sisi

EDMUND MONSIEL Microscopic detailed drawings of classic art brut artist

KEMEL LEEFORD RANKINE Jamaican roadside environment

JANA PALECKOVA Czech artist’s work on found photographs

JOSEPHINE TOTA Surreal visions of self-taught New Yorker

ODINGA Powerful carvings of Odinga Tyehimba

EVELYN POSTIC Complex organic works by French artist

RAW REVIEWS Exhibitions and events

GALLERY & MUSEUM GUIDE Notable venues around the world

COVER IMAGE: Julia Sisi, One Water, 2018, ink and acrylic on stretched canvas, 33 ft x 44 ins. / 88 x 116 cm.

Raw Vision (ISSN 0955-1182) June 2018 is published quarterly (March, June, September, December) by Raw Vision Ltd, PO Box 44, Watford WD25 8LN, UK, and distributed in the USA by UKP Worldwide, 3390 Rand Road, South Plainfield, NJ 07080. Periodicals postage paid at South Plainfield, NJ. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Raw Vision c/o 3390 Rand Road, South Plainfield, NJ 07080, and additional mailing offices.

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

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FRANCE

GALERIE POLYSÉMIE

TRIBUTE TO PAUL AMAR

Jun 16 – Oct 28

Jul 26 – Aug 25

Jul 13 – Nov 3

Galerie Polysémie’s summer exhibition offers visitors a rich collection of works by its best art brut and outsider artists. From August 30 through September 22, Expanding Universe investigates the expansion of the universe of the human spirit – whether it can be known or whether it remains immeasurable. GALERIE POLYSÉMIE 12 Rue de la Cathédrale, 13002 Marseille, FRANCE. www.polysemie.com

Paul Amar used painted shells with nail varnish, glitter and mica to create lavish sculptures. Musée des Arts Buissonniers pays tribute to the self-taught artist who passed away in November 2017, exhibiting special and unfinished pieces, and also the tools and instruments he used to produce his work. MUSÉE DES ARTS BUISSONNIERS Rue de l'Église, 12370 Saint-Sever-du-Moustier, FRANCE www.artsbuissonniers.com

CHRISTIAN BERST

JULIA SISI

Jun 15 – Sep 2

Jun 7 – Jul 13

Sep 6 – Oct 11

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For the second time, christian berst in Paris is devoting a solo exhibition to Jean Perdrizet. With over 20 drawings dated between the late 1960s and early 1970s, the gallery presents the complexity of the poet-inventor’s work. CHRISTIAN BERST, 3-5, Passage des Gravilliers 75003, Paris, FRANCE www.christianberst.com

Julia Sisi

Ignacio Carles-Tolrá

Jean Perdrizet

MUSEE DE LA CREATION FRANCHE

The World According to Carles-Tolrá presents Ignacio Carles-Tolrá as both artist and collector. His correspondence with Dubuffet is also included in the exhibition and accompanying catalogue. MUSEE DE LA CREATION FRANCHE 58, avenue du Maréchal de Lattre-de-Tassigny 33130 Bègles, FRANCE. musee-creationfranche.com 6

Paul Amar

L’envol is the final exhibition at La maison rouge, which will close its doors on October 28, 2018. Barbara Safarova, Aline Vidal and Bruno Decharme have co-curated this exhibition which explores mankind's dream of flying. Some 200 works include installations, films, documents, paintings, drawings and sculptures. LA MAISON ROUGE 10 bd de la bastille - 75012 Paris, FRANCE www.lamaisonrouge.org

Imam Sucahyo

Charles Dellschau

Henry Darger

LA MAISON ROUGE

Hypnagogies is Julia Sisi’s first solo exhibition in Paris. GALERIE D'UN LIVRE L'AUTRE 2 rue Borda 75003 Paris, FRANCE www.singuliers.ovh

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GERMANY, ITALY, PORTUGAL, SWITZERLAND

EUWARD SHOW

TREGER/SAINT SILVESTRE COLLECTION

until Aug 26

Jul 2 – Sep 9

until Oct 14

Restlessness and Architecture features 150 paintings and works on paper created by artists marginalised in institutions, illustrating the interaction between man and construction. PRINZHORN COLLECTION Universitätsklinikum Heidelberg, Voßstraße 2, 69115 Heidelberg, GERMANY www.sammlung-prinzhorn.de

Histories de violence explores the theme of destructiveness in the human race: where does it originate from and how does art use these destructive impulses? The artworks chosen by curator Gustavo Giacosa from the Treger/Saint Silvestre Collection include art brut, singular art and contemporary art. More than 50 artists are presented, including Henry Darger, Friedrich Schröeder-Sonnenster and Franco Belucci. NÚCLEO DE ARTE DA OLIVA, Rua da Fundição, 240, São João da Madeira, PORTUGAL 3700-119. tsscollection.org

BACKSTAGE AT MUSEUM IM LAGERHAUS

until Sep 28

Aug 28 – Oct 28

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Emily Salz

Franca Settembrini

MARONCELLI 12

Jun 15 – Jul 14

Haci Sami Yaman

GALERIE ART CRU

Galerie ART CRU Berlin is showing works by Haci Sami Yaman and Beatrice Guder from the Open Atelier St. Hedwig in Naturale Systeme. GALERIE ART CRU BERLIN Oranienburger Str. 27, 10117 Berlin, GERMANY. www.art-cru.de

This year’s euward7 award show at the Buchheim Museum presents works by 17 outsiders including Michael Golz (Germany), Ota Prouza (Czech Republic) and Clemens Wild (Austria). BUCHHEIM MUSEUM Am Hirschgarten 1, 82347 Bernried am Starnberger See, GERMANY. www.euward.de www.buchheimmuseum.de

Henry Darger

Karl Junker

Michael Golz

PRINZHORN COLLECTION

THE F FACTOR: Femininity, frailty, force presents the work of five female artists: Marie-Claire Guyot, Cristina Martella, Nabila, Franca Settembrini, Annamaria Tosini. MARONCELLI 12, 20154, Milan, ITALY www.maroncelli12.it

Backstage offers the chance to take a look behind the scenes at the museum, featuring highlights and new discoveries from the last 30 years, including Emily Salz’s magical tapestries, Brida Lazzarino’s fascinating perspectives, and Philippe Saxer’s impressive drawings. MUSEUM IM LAGERHAUS, Davidstrasse 44, 9000 St. Gallen, SWITZERLAND. www.museumimlagerhaus.ch

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USA

HOWARD JOHNSON

BURNING MAN AT THE SMITHSONIAN until Sep 16 and Jan 21

SOULS GROWN DEEP AT THE MET until Sep 23

Cutting-edge artwork created at Burning Man, the annual Black Rock City gathering, is exhibited in Washington for the first time. No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man takes over the Renwick Gallery building, exploring the maker culture, ethos, principles and creative spirit of Burning Man. Artworks on the first floor will be on view through September 16 and artworks on the second floor through January 21. THE RENWICK GALLERY OF THE SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM, 1661 Pennsylvania Avenue at 17th Street N.W., Washington, DC 20006. americanart.si.edu

Howard Johnson: Phantastrophies showcases drawings informed by Johnson’s deep interest in phenomena at the furthest reaches of human comprehension and the search for extraterrestrials. FITCHBURG ART MUSEUM 185 Elm St, Fitchburg, MA 01420 fitchburgmuseum.org

Nellie Mae Rowe

Howard Jonhson

Duane Flatmo, photo: Libby Weiler

until Sep 30

History Refused To Die: Highlights from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation Gift presents 30 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and quilts by self-taught contemporary African American artists from the American South to celebrate the 2014 gift to The Metropolitan Museum of Art of works of art from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. Artists include Thornton Dial, Nellie Mae Rowe, Lonnie Holley and Ronald Lockett. THE MET FIFTH AVENUE, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028. www.metmuseum.org

WILLIAM HAWKINS AT MINGEI INTERNATIONAL MUSEUM

Aug 18 – Sep 21

Jun 9 – Aug 26

Amy Evans

William Hawkins

AMY EVANS AT KOELSCH GALLERY

Koelsch Gallery presents an exhibit to commemorate Hurricane Harvey's first year anniversary. Amy Evans' paintings are filled with memories of independently owned shops, restaurants and other small businesses that provided years of service to Houstonians. The gallery will also have works by self-taught artists Al Taplet and Helena Obriki on display. KOELSCH GALLERY, 801 Richmond Ave, Houston, TX 77006. koelschgallery.com 12

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Mingei International Museum presents WILLIAM L. HAWKINS – An Imaginative Geography, organised by Figge Art Museum, Davenport, IA, in collaboration with Susan Mitchell Crawley. Drawn from important public and private collections across the US and Europe, the travelling exhibition presents over 60 of Hawkins's exuberant paintings, drawings and sculptures. It can be seen next at Figge Art Museum September 22 through December 30, 2018 and at The Columbus Museum, Columbus, GA, January 29 through April 28, 2019. MINGEI INTERNATIONAL MUSEUM Plaza de Panama, Balboa Park, 1439 El Prado, San Diego, CA 92101. mingei.org

IN TO THE C AN ON In New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art welcomes African-American self-taught artists’ works into its collection EDWARD M. GÓMEZ

Purvis Young, Locked Up Their Minds, 1972, paint and wood on wood, 84 x 84 ins. / 213 x 213 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art

n late 2014, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, one of the largest, most encyclopaedic institutions of its kind in the world, received a gift of 57 works made by contemporary, self-taught African-American artists from the William S. Arnett Collection of the Atlanta-based Souls Grown Deep Foundation (SGDF). That sizable donation included drawings, paintings and mixed-media works by Thornton Dial, Joe Minter, Nellie Mae Rowe, Lonnie Holley, Joe Light, Ronald Lockett, John B. Murray, Mary Proctor, Mose Tolliver and others, as well as 20 quilts produced by female artists in the Gee’s Bend, Alabama, area. Now, in “History Refused to Die: Highlights from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation Gift” (on view through September 23), the museum is presenting 30 pieces from the 2014 donation, representing some, but not all, of the artists whose works are part of it. On view are assemblages by Dial, Minter and Holley, and ten quilts, among other items. Meanwhile, through July 29, Shrine, a gallery in

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downtown Manhattan, is presenting “Annex”, an exhibition of works by several artists from the museum-gift group who are not featured in the Met’s show, along with others whose art is included in the broader holdings of the SGDF. Among them are Light, Tolliver, Hawkins Bolden, Bessie Harvey and Mary T. Smith. As a young man interested in art and cultural history, William (“Bill”) S. Arnett, the SGDF’s founder, began collecting antiquities and what used to be called “tribal” or “ethnographic” art before embarking on a decades-long journey of research and discovery that would become his life’s work. Arnett, who grew up in Georgia, travelled around the rural Deep South, focusing on indigenous forms of artistic expression produced by self-taught creators of African descent. Much of what he found exemplified or was derived from so-called yard art. Such mixed-media assemblages, made with wood scraps, old automobile tyres, farm-equipment parts, wire, or

Ronald Lockett, The Enemy Amongst Us, 1995, mixed media, 50 x 53 x 3 ins. / 127 x 135 x 8 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Thornton Dial, History Refused to Die, 2004, mixed media, 102 x 87 x 23 ins. / 259 x 221 x 58 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Mary T. Smith, Untitled (three figures), 1987, paint on plywood, 23.5 x 12.5 ins. / 60 x 31 cm, Shrine, New York

house paint, were used to decorate their makers’ homes and gardens. Arnett traced their mysterious, talismanic character to object-constructing traditions practised by the slavery-era ancestors of the African-American artmakers whose creations he documented. In 2000, Arnett and his collaborators published Souls Grown Deep: African-American Vernacular Art of the South (Atlanta, GA: Tinwood Books), a big, two-volume survey of the art forms they had examined over many years. In 2010, Arnett established the SGDF to serve as an archive and educational/promotional outlet for the art he had collected. Over the decades, Arnett acquired works by many of the artists he met. It was from the collection he amassed that the 2014 gift to the Met was culled. In the art world, the Met’s integration of the SGDF artists’ works into its collection, which has prompted it to revise and expand the way in which it recounts the history of art’s evolution in the twentieth century, has been seen as a validation by the establishment of the accomplishments of art-makers who were long overlooked, marginalised, or simply unknown – but whose contributions to the artistic expression of their time were as powerful as anything produced by schooled, mainstream artists working in dialogue with art history and the latest critical trends. Marla Prather, a former curator in the Met’s department of modern and contemporary art, originated the current

exhibition. It was organised by Randall Griffey, a curator in that department, and Amelia Peck, a curator of American decorative arts. “That placement, near large abstract paintings by Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still, was intentional and it sends a strong, art-historical message”, Griffey said, pointing to Dial’s wall-mounted Victory in Iraq (2004), a mixed-media tableau featuring painted, found materials – a mannequin’s head, rusty metal cans, stuffed animals, bits of steel and more – surrounding metal rods set in a “V” shape. Dial’s work holds its own alongside wellknown examples of “heroic” American abstract expressionism of the post-World War II era. In addition to their formal impact, works like those of Dial and Minter are informed by and unabashedly allude, subtly and eloquently, to the violence and evil of slavery and racism, which are indelible, painful aspects of America’s history. Viewers may be struck by how the artists featured here managed to squeeze so much expressive power out of humble materials, from fabric scraps to old shovels. Still, for all their technical inventiveness, it is a simmering evocation of history characterising many of the works on view, never mind the ways in which they unwittingly parallel or presage assorted modernist or postmodernist art-making gestures, that makes an encounter with them so rewardingly unexpected – and memorable. Edward M. Gómez is Raw Vision’s New York-based Senior Editor.

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SISI

The lucid dreams and nomadic journeys of Julia Sisi VÍCTOR M. ESPINOSA

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opposite: Inner Animal, 2016, ink and acrylic on canvas, 19.7 x 27.5 ins. / 50 x 69.9 cm below: Circle of Life, 2015, ink and acrylic on canvas, 31.4 x 31.4 ins. / 80 x 80 cm

ulia Sisi’s (b. 1957) fantastical drawings can resemble coloured illustration books or street art. Her visual vocabulary and repertoire rely on her intuitive development of aesthetic strategies used in illustration and graphic design, with a personal iconography. Graphic design elements and illustration techniques are present in the work of some of the most admired self-taught artists: Edward M. Gómez has, for example, defined Adolf Wölfli as a “visionary graphic designer” and a powerful “visual communicator”. (1) Aesthetic decisions and visual

resources similar to Wölfli’s are also evident in Sisi’s work: rich patterning, vibrant colours, powerful lines, and tensions between improvisation and highly structured compositions. Images associated with water and fluidity are also present in the work of both artists. Gómez has described a sense of flowing water in Wölfli’s work, (2) and some of the energy and inspiration in Sisi’s drawings comes from oceans and rivers, too. Sisi’s most recent drawings, her “Hypnagogia Visions and Visitations” series, were inspired by her lucid dreams, and by the river that

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Inner Map, 2017, ink and acrylic on canvas, 39.4 x 39.4 ins. / 100 x 100 cm

runs alongside her property in the Indre region of central France, like some of Wölfli’s designs were inspired by “scenarios of dreams”. (3) Sisi’s use of black backgrounds came after a dream in which she was drawing with a red light, as if the lines were filaments. “If you close your eyes”, she said, “the background is black, so when you sleep the background is black.” (4) After that dream, she started to work on a black surface, reproducing the sensation of drawing with light, using Posca felt pens to create the fluid filaments of light. The symbolic elements in her new series is also inspired by recent and long-past memories. Such highly symbolic content characterises her “Whispering Faces” (2015–16) and “Liquid Mirror” (2016) series. Sisi works with acrylic paint for large areas and to paint thick lines, then uses markers to populate the flat areas with symbols, characters, cabalistic numbers and words that to her are magic. A motif of stairs recurs, connecting different levels in the “Whispering Faces” and “Liquid

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Mirror” series, and there are circular or spiral shapes that, like mandalas, are full of dualities, cardinal points, “arithmetereological” numbers, and characters that represent either metaphysically or symbolically an intimate personal microcosm. For Sisi, her faces are selfportraits as well as portraits of imaginary people. She insists that all of her drawings in the “Whispering Faces” and “Liquid Mirror” series narrate personal stories: “Those faces are talking to us, or more precisely, are using visual languages to whisper to us about my life or the life stories of other people.” Understanding all of the semiotics of the symbols, signals and signs in her work would require knowing about her struggles with identity, her constant search for freedom, her experience as a migrant and the nomadic spirit that informs all her artwork. Julia Sisi was born in Argentina of European and Indigenous South American heritage. Her mother left Asturias, Spain, in 1941, after the Civil War, and her father was from the Guaraní people of north Argentina. Sisi was

In Transit, 2017, ink and acrylic on paper, 11.8 x 15.8 ins. / 30 x 40 cm

born in 1957, two years after her sister – the first Julia Sisi – passed away aged only three months. Sisi found out about her sister in a traumatic way: when she was 6 years old, she was asked to bring her birth certificate in to school. The next day, her mother accidentally gave Sisi her sister’s death certificate instead. Shock resounded around the school, and her parents locked away everything that

related to the first Julia. That small wooden box is one of the many objects with autobiographical meanings that populate Sisi’s whispering and liquid mirror faces. Two years later, when she was eight, Sisi visited her sister’s grave. It was a strange experience to see a grave marked with her own name. Since then she felt that she “was born to replace her elder dead sister” – something that was

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THE EYES OF EDMUND MONSIEL The intensely detailed work of a classic art brut creator KATARAZYNA BÓL

dmund Monsiel was born on November 2, 1897, in Wożuczyn, eastern Poland. His father, Mikołaj, was born in Oszczów around 1865–66, and he worked as a carpenter on local estates in Wożuczyn. There, he settled and married Karolina of Dutkowscy, who was born on January 27, 1869. Together, they had nine children, but

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biographical records about Monsiel only mention two siblings, Aniela and Kazimierz. Mikołaj died in 1933 and was buried in Łaszczów. Tracing the family origins were not helped by there being three ways to spell the surname: “Monssiol” is engraved on Mikołaj’s gravestone; “Monsiol” was used by Mikołaj to sign Edmund’s birth

certificate; and an error by the person preparing that birth certificate led to the name being recorded as “Monsiel”. Monsiel family legend points to a French background. Following the French defeat against Russia in 1812, it has been said that a sick or wounded soldier from Napoleon’s army settled in Wożuczyn, in what is now the Lublin province. However, it is more probable that the family roots lie in a French craftsman who was brought to one of the local Polish courts. This is supported by the Monsiels’ reputation for being excellent carpenters – including Mikołaj. Monsiel accompanied his father to the local courts

and churches in which he worked on repairs and renovations, learning the craft on the way. Young Monsiel was constantly exposed to local art, and one can see his observations of religious and secular art in photographs that he made. Monsiel was educated up to a fourth grade level by a friend of Mikołaj, Władysław Chmielewski – a religious man and a patriot, who played the church organ. Monsiel then lived in Chełm before 1920 and attended the local teaching seminar for three years. In the early 1920s, he settled in Łaszczów, where he lived with his parents.

Untitled 1948, graphite on paper, 3.7 x 8.1 ins. / 9.5 x 20.7 cm, Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne

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Untitled, 1948, media, 8.25 x 5.3 ins. / 21 x 14.5 cm, collection abcd / Bruno Decharme, Paris

Monsiel and his parents lived at 3 Maja Street, where later there were three houses: one, with two living rooms and a shop, occupied by Edmund, and the remaining two occupied by his sister, Aniela, and her husband, Józef Wyrostkiewicz, who were raising Monsiel’s niece Jadwiga (whose father, Kazimierz, lived in Wożuczyn). The shop was founded in 1923, selling stationery and other items, and Monsiel worked there until 1942 when it was supposedly commandeered by the occupying Nazis. 28

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However, Monsiel’s biographer, J. Olędzki, disputes this. It is possible that, like many businesses in World War II, it failed because of a shortage of goods. A crucial event took place around Christmas, 1942. Nazis interrupted a church mass to select a group of people for execution – punishment and revenge for an armed assault on a station of German military police. Monsiel, his brother-in-law (Józef ) and neice (Jadwiga) were in the church, and Józef was selected and murdered in a nearby

Untitled, n.d., graphite on paper, 6.3 x 4 ins. / 16.1 x 10.2 cm, Collection de lâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Art Brut, Lausanne

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SIGNS OF PROGRESS The roadside art of Kemel Leeford Rankine VEERLE POUPEYE

Kemel Leeford Rankine’s sign-painting workshop and shop on Bamboo Avenue, St Elizabeth, photo: Robin Farquharson, c. 2017

amaica has a well-earned reputation for its selftaught, popular artists, with major names such as John Dunkley, Mallica “Kapo” Reynolds, and Everald Brown. These artists have been championed by influential figures in the artistic community, such as the late David Boxer, who was Chief Curator at the National Gallery of Jamaica and in 1979 coined the term “Intuitive” to describe such artists. I have argued elsewhere that the resulting Intuitives’ canon, while it provided recognition to artists of undeniable importance, was too purist in what were externally imposed definitions and also disregarded the enormous cultural changes that have occurred in the last decades. (1) There must have been many self-taught artists who never made it into the collections, exhibitions and publications that shaped this field, because their work did not meet the prevailing definitions of “art” or “Intuitive art”. There is a sense now that the golden age of the Intuitives is over in Jamaica, with no major new names appearing for many years. The case of the painter Kemel Rankine, who has been active since the 1990s, is interesting in this regard. Rankine was first brought to my attention about three years ago by Robin Farquharson, a Jamaican photographer who lives in Negril, and, more

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recently, by Jacqueline Bishop, a New York City-based Jamaican writer and artist who has taken Rankine’s work to the 2017 Santa Fe Folk Art Market and the 2018 Outsider Art Fair in New York City. (2) His ascent to fame has been rapid, but we must ask why it took so long for that to happen. The reason appears to be that Rankine is first and foremost a sign painter. Many of Jamaica’s well-known self-taught artists have been involved in sign-painting at some point in their lives, but that is usually regarded as peripheral to their “real” artistic work and not given the same status. I was initially drawn to Rankine’s figurative paintings, particularly his River Mummas. The River Mumma is a sacred and feared mermaid from Jamaican folklore, and she is the mother of freshwater fish. Images of her are a closer match to what is typically expected from self-taught artists in Jamaica, but it is his text-based and graphic signs that really captured my interest, as these are central to his aesthetic and personal philosophy, and to understanding his figurative work. Kemel Leeford Rankine, as his full name goes, was born in 1944 in the district of Maybole, in the largely rural parish of St Elizabeth in the southwest of Jamaica. He

Part of Rankine’s sign display, including some signs depicting National Heroes of Jamaica: Paul Bogle, Samuel Sharpe and Marcus Garvey, photo: Robin Farquharson

started sign-painting in 1990, after an injury to his leg which made it difficult for him to do more physically demanding work. He now operates a roadside stall at the western end of Bamboo Avenue, a landmark road and tourist attraction in St Elizabeth which is shaded by giant bamboo, with a beautiful, cathedral-like effect. Rankine’s stall is located at a “jerk pit” – where Jamaica’s famous jerked chicken is prepared and sold – and he occupies a small workshop to the side of the restaurant. In front of his workshop, he displays an array of painted signs and figurative paintings, suspended from a helter-skelter system of poles and wires to form a colourful, patchwork screen in front of his work area – a literal forest of signs. He works in enamel on reclaimed metal, which mainly comes from large appliances such as old refrigerators, and his work represents a fertile tradition of “upcycling” discarded materials in Jamaica’s popular culture. He attracts tourists and other casual buyers, but he has developed relationships with several regular patrons who bring him metal to work on and occasionally give him small commissions or make suggestions, to which he is receptive. It was one such patron who encouraged him to

start painting River Mummas, which are now a staple of his production. Despite the competition from digital printing and mass-produced, imported signs, hand-painted signs continue to have currency in Jamaica, as they are often cheaper and more easily customised, and sign-painting survives as a source of informal self-employment. There is hardly a bar in the island that does not have a handpainted sign that says: ”Notice – It Is My Intention to Apply for a Spirit Licence to Sell Rum, Gin, Brandy and Other Distilled Spirits at the Next Court Session” (it is, in fact, a legal requirement for bars to post such a sign in the absence of a spirit licence). Rankine produces such signs along with other standardised notices and graphic signs that are produced in response to market demand, actual and perceived (I am not convinced, for instance, that his traffic signs would have any practical use). There are however some eccentric-but-telling departures from the standards that normally govern such signs, such as the curiously self-referential sign that reads “A Reminder: Signs for Sale”. Instead of using the commonplace “Notice” that appears as a header on many text-based signs in Jamaica, Rankine insists on heading his

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A view of a variety of signs (note the black-and-white “spirit licence” sign), photo: Marc Rammeleare, c. 2017

notices with “A Reminder”, which, he explained to me, is a gentler, politer alternative to the more authoritarian tone that is the norm in such signage. There is a philosophical side to Jamaica’s popular signpainting traditions that goes beyond the utilitarian: many street vendors’ carts and informal shops feature admonitions such as “who God bless, no man curse”, and other statements and biblical verses that invoke divine protection, assert personal values and aspirations, and

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share popular wisdoms. Rankine produces narrative signs that resonate with that tradition: some of his signs provide summary history lessons, including the story of the Gutenberg Bible and of the introduction of electricity to his home parish of St Elizabeth (which he proudly calls St Best, instead of St Bess), along with various pieces of well-meant advice and invitations to prayer. Another self-referential sign reads “Signs of Progress” and is mounted at the top of Rankine’s display, as a sort of

Mermaids are a recurring theme in Rankine’s paintings, photo: Robin Farquharson, c. 2017

“master header” over the assembly of signs. When I last visited, it also appeared in another version elsewhere in his display, in this case accompanied by the following text, with his signature underneath: “The artist do this type of work to highlight the good news of God’s work in the lives of men and woman today” – a clear statement of intent regarding Rankine’s self-appointed educational role in society. Together, Rankine’s signs map out his moral universe and advocate an orderly, progressive and kind

world, in which law and order, benevolent commerce and the basic tenets of Christianity prevail without being aggressively imposed, and in which there is pride of place and history – as a corrective alternative, no doubt, to the anarchic and violent tendencies in contemporary Jamaica. The idea that art provides a necessary service, whether it is to the spirit world or to the human community, is a common thread in the work of many self-taught artists. Rankine brings this to the forefront of his work and

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RAISING THE DEAD Czech artist Jana Paleckova reworks vintage portraits, delving into the afterlives of images GRACE-YVETTE GEMMELL

Untitled (oval framed image), 2015, 18.5 x 22.5 ins. / 50 x 57 cm

ana Paleckova abhors a vacuum. After scouring thrift stores, flea markets, estate sales and antiques shops, on the hunt for orphaned vintage photographic portraits, the 36-year-old self-taught Czech artist found herself left with a nagging itch that she has been scratching ever since. Begging explanation, Paleckova instantly sensed that something was missing from these forgotten portraits, whose histories had long fallen into obsolescence. Stasis, in some ways, is restless, just as silence can speak multitudes. Unable to shake the tantalisingly suggestive, yet ultimately entirely concealed nature of the once-cherished, now long-forgotten stories behind these hauntingly poignant, discarded artefacts, Paleckova felt a compulsion to take matters into her own

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hands by teasing out entirely new visual narratives where photographic documentation left off (or perhaps fell short). The result is a large body of work that raises questions as to the slippery nature of documentation and preservation, the suggestive potency of deeply personal images when taken entirely out of context, the equally illuminating and deceptive quality of elaborate selfpresentation, and the ways in which photographic images take on a life of their own long after capturing a specific, solitary moment in time. Not content to let the dead bury the dead, Paleckova began subtly manipulating these discarded portraits, gingerly lacing them with tenuous but significant modifications achieved by painting directly onto their

above left: Untitled (Man with Two Sets of Eyes), 2016, 6.38 x 4.25 ins. / 16.2 x 10.8 cm above: Untitled (Four Men with Rain Clouds), 2017, 11 x 6 ins. / 27.9 x 15.2 cm left: Untitled (Humping Flies), 2017, 6.75 x 10 ins. / 17.1 x 25.4 cm All images are oil on vintage photograph, courtesy of and photographed by Fred Giampietro Gallery, CT

black-and-white and sepia surfaces in muted gradations of eye-catching oil pigments. Working spontaneously, while quickly responding to the portraits on a gut instinct, Paleckova’s oil-paint interventions in many ways bring to mind the automatic processes favoured by practitioners of Surrealism. Paleckova’s work equally recalls the core practices cultivated by direct carvers, with their emphasis on “liberating” meaning from source materials and their insistence upon “the truth of materials”, or the idea that properties inherent to the raw materials an artist uses should remain physically apparent and largely intact in the creation of finished artworks. Working through a rhetoric of amplification, however, Paleckova’s addenda possess at best an uneasy

relationship to their source material. The objects and figures originally captured in the portraits remain at odds, or only in strained and precarious concert, with the visual addenda that encroach them. At times the subjects appear confused by the intrusion of the new content, while at others it is difficult to imagine the addenda as having never been present in the portraits to begin with. Paleckova’s works present hybrid images that operate in a round of competing proofs, each inflating and exceeding, confounding and complementing the other. Rather than clarifying or even over-determining the interpretation of the original images, Paleckova’s oil-paint additions – which are more hypertext than subtext – are of such an enigmatic and fragmentary nature, at odds with the

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Untitled (Shadow Puppet), 2017, 15 x 10 ins. / 38.1 x 25.4 cm

apparent content present, that they instead serve to further muddle and fracture, no matter the potency of the anecdotal teases. This, however, seems to be the point. Jacques Rancière qualifies what he considers to be “the pensiveness of the image” as “the latent presence of one regime of expression in another.” (1) Treating the neglected photographs as both found objects and artefacts, Paleckova’s oil-paint interventions are “pensive”

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in that they preserve the integrity of the original images captured in the portraits, while playfully and perversely distorting and supplementing them with highly fanciful visual addenda that one might suspect would send their original subjects rolling in their own graves. Robert Penn Warren once had it that “all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their

Untitled (Shadows), 2018, 13 x 10 ins. / 3 3 x 25.4 cm

Untitled (Oval Wedding Portrait), 2016, 14 x 11.5 ins. / 35.6 x 29.2 cm

Untitled (Group of Men), 2018, 12 x 15 ins. / 30.5 x 38.1 cm

eyes implore us.” (2) Paleckova’s erratically amended portraits – with visual annotations at turns relevant, irrelevant and consistently irreverent – merrily muddle the relationship between the original subject(s) and the competing addenda, while complicating the moment, or moments, of the photograph. At once given a new lease on life and exploited to new ends so as to completely obscure their original circumstances, the images that

serve as source materials for Paleckova’s cheeky interventions are sustained in a kind of counterfeit impasse that arrests movement, while yet setting them in motion. Belatedly interrupting and complicating the moment(s) in which the images were captured, Paleckova moves the image – and portraiture in particular – beyond a form of embalmed documentation, understanding it instead as operating independent of the original subjects

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Untitled, 1985, egg tempera and gold leaf on panel, 10.6 x 32.9 ins. / 26.9 x 83.6 cm, Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester

THE SURREAL VISIONS OF JOSEPHINE TOTA Colourful symbolism and a singular take on the American experience JESSICA MARTEN

Untitled, 1984, egg tempera on panel, 7.2 x 28.8 ins. / 18.3 x 73.2 cm, courtesy: Rosamond Tota

osephine Tota (1910–1996) was a seamstress and amateur artist who lived a conventional life among the Italian immigrant community in Rochester, New York. In her seventies, she spent countless hours painting in the privacy of her home, where she imbued over 90 small jewel-like paintings with the richness of her strange imagination. Despite the appeal of her bright, prismatic palette, unsettling narratives hopscotch around shifting spaces. Tota’s visions capture and condense anxieties accumulated over a lifetime. It is this powerful body of work – dozens of untamed paintings in egg tempera and gilding on board, completed at the end of her life – that

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the exhibition “The Surreal Visions of Josephine Tota” explores and advocates for inclusion into the canon of selftaught, visionary art. Tota depicted her small-scale, encoded domestic dramas with an intrepid and intellectually playful approach to image making. Her images sprang from a deep well of memories and dreams. Themes of metamorphosis, family bonds, physical pain, human frailty, the natural world, loss and tragedy dominate her obsessive and otherworldly depictions. Their compact size encourages intimate viewing: the smallest is about 5 by 1.5 inches; the largest is 10 by 32 inches. These works were

made for an audience of one: Tota. Her unsettling, female-led narratives are rife with women subjugated by the circumstances of life or empowered with mystical and unknowable forces. Her most common motifs include anxious women, human/plant hybrids, the third eye, masks, tears of blood, clothing, and needles and threads. Eyes, a powerful source of Tota’s magic, were a source of profound anxiety for her as well. Due to her visual nature and the threat she experienced from cataract surgery during the height of her productive period, her omnipresent eyes – glaring, seeking, weeping blood – are laden with psychological weight. Images like these, not words, were the language in which Tota communicated. No papers or letters exist, and our knowledge of her life comes primarily from the personal accounts of family members. The reward for the

persistent and curious viewer of Tota’s paintings is an engagement with work that unfolds over time in labyrinthine tangles of both art-historical and personal references. Born in Corato, Italy, in 1910, Tota felt a deep and abiding connection with the spirituality and mystery of the natural world. As a deeply sensitive and unusually bright and outspoken child, Tota often felt alienated from her family. Her feelings of isolation and marginalisation were reinforced by the circumstances of her life, including early experiences of childhood poverty and the trauma of immigrating to the United States at the age of ten. Similar to many immigrant women who have struggled with the displacement and duality of living between their home and adopted cultures, Tota often described feeling “torn” or fractured; in her paintings destabilised, unravelling identities take shape as women with multiple heads that grow from a single body. Tota faced and survived many challenges throughout her life, and art provided her solace. When her husband passed away and she retired from work as a seamstress in

Untitled, 1983, egg tempera on panel, 8 x 7 ins. / 20.3 x 17.8 cm, courtesy: Rosamond Tota

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Untitled, 1988, egg tempera and gold leaf on panel, 10.5 x 13.75 ins. / 26.7 x 34.9 cm, courtesy: Rosamond Tota

her sixties, she began to take amateur painting and ceramics classes at the Memorial Art Gallery’s community art school. After painting in a representational style like that of her instructors, Tota was inspired to try egg tempera after visiting the medieval and early Italian Renaissance galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. An artist friend taught her the obsessive, meticulous technique, one that complemented her creative temperament. She quickly turned from traditional landscapes and still lifes to intensely insular images teeming with figures, plants, enigmatic action, and ambiguous settings. In both subject and style, these paintings had no precedent in her previous work. Tota converted the second bedroom of her apartment into a studio and quit her painting class. Diligently and autonomously, the artist went to work each day in her studio, painting for hours in her housecoat. A photo of Tota

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in her studio shows a tidy collection of repurposed jellyjars full of dried pigment, a variety of brushes, small vessels for mixing colours, and reproductions of art on the wall. Perhaps more than many self-taught artists, Tota was particularly attentive to the art of the past and of her own time. Her personal iconography and style grew out of decades of consuming and creating art within the art world infrastructure, however peripheral she may have been. Her eclectic tastes encompassed a love for the work of Paul Gauguin, Wassily Kandinsky, Georgia O’Keeffe, Frank Stella, and the Surrealists Frida Kahlo and Salvador Dalí, to name only a few. Like the Surrealists she admired, Tota’s visual language is rooted in hybridisation, metamorphosis and multiplicity. Earlier in the twentieth century, Tota’s artistic ancestors used similar techniques in their exploration of the human psyche and of realms beyond the visible world. In particular,

Untitled, 1983, egg tempera and gold leaf on panel, 6.6 x 16 ins. / 16.8 x 40.6 cm. Images on this page courtesy of the University of Rochester

Untitled, 1982, egg tempera and gold leaf on panel, 9.6 x 11.2 ins. / 24.4 x 28.4 cm

Untitled, 1983, egg tempera on panel, 7 x 10.5 ins. / 17.8 x 26.7 cm

Untitled, 1987, egg tempera and gold leaf on panel, 16.3 x 9.75 ins. / 41.4 x 24.8 cm

Surrealism offered female artists – including Kahlo, Dorothea Tanning, Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington – a new language with which to explore, in personal and often transgressive images, the realities of their lives. Fifty years later, the permissive spirit of the surrealist idiom proved well suited to Tota’s expressive needs. In addition to her surrealist sensibility, Tota’s creative impulses are characteristic of many unconventional,

visionary, or self-taught artists. Although she was interested in the act of art making and little else, Tota was reluctant to show her paintings outside of her home and she frequently boxed and stored her paintings upon their completion. When she was deeply engaged with consuming or producing art, Tota described falling into transcendent states in which her physical and emotional pain and losses lifted. When the art-making process was

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CAPTURING HISTORY, HOLDING SPIRITS The compelling and complex art of Odinga Tyehimba GLENN HINSON

Odinga Tyehimba with Papa Ghede, the guardian of the crossroads, here carved in wood and webbed with rope wrapped in red cloth and yarn, signifying a baptism in blood. As with all of Tyehimba’s carvings, the title simplifies a far more complex set of identities than the piece represents All photos by Roger Manley.

dinga Tyehimba didn’t intend to carve pieces that would become homes for spirits. And though he certainly had African spirituality in mind when he created his striking figures, he didn’t expect spirits to actually inhabit his carvings. Yet the spirits clearly thought otherwise. Tyehimba, a self-taught sculptor, had sensed this in the troubling dreams that plagued him while he was creating his pieces. But it wasn’t until friends visiting his home in Durham, North Carolina, kept reporting that they felt a distinct and often overpowering presence when they approached his carvings that he began to wonder what was happening. At one point, a friend with a particularly spiritual bent reported that the spirits in the pieces had things to say. Channelling their messages, the friend began 52

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recounting details from Tyehimba’s past that he had never revealed. “It’s not like I could argue”, Tyehimba recalls. “I mean, how can I argue against someone who had information that there’s no way they could know?” Soon, other friends began to have the same experience. At first Tyehimba resisted their explanations. It was too strange, too unreal. But they kept saying the same thing – asserting that the carvings were “alive” and he had “somehow created a doorway [such] that these beings in this other dimension, a subtler realm, can have some degree of agency in this world.” “It was intimidating at first”, Tyehimba remembers. “But, in a way, it made sense, given all the things that I was experiencing in my dreams. Eventually, I just accepted that that’s where it was.”

For Brother Rosales, a piece prompted by a dream, and created to provide spiritual protection for a Palo priest who was the subject of magical attacks. The ritual blades – like the spikes, the chains, and the pot holding the piece – are iron, invoking the power of the orisha Ogún

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The Spirit of Patrice Lumumba, here represented as a martyred Pan-Africanist saint, with dense symbolic layering that draws on meanings from across the African Diaspora. The seven locks of (Tyehimba’s) hair atop his head, for example, invoke the seven orishas (Yoruban deities)

Tyehimba’s journey since this moment of acceptance has led him much further into the spiritual realm, on a path partly guided by believers in the African Caribbean faith of Palo Mayombe. Local practitioners of this Cubaand Kongo-based belief system have increasingly become Tyehimba’s principal clients, contending that his pieces can act as portals to another dimension. 54

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While now recognising this potential in his carvings, Tyehimba nonetheless views himself as an artist who carves pieces that speak to black history and spirituality, and to his experiences as a veteran, father, spiritual seeker and black man living in the South. While honoured by the spirits’ presence, he recognises that his creations carry many messages that are his alone.

Shango, the Yoruba orisha of thunder, wears hammered metal plates on his face, upper body, and feet, signifying his armoured preparation for spiritual warfare. His limbed arms represent lightning, while the negative spaces in his wings invoke his double-headed axes

These messages – pointed, nuanced, multidimensional – have characterised Tyehimba’s work since he began carving more than two decades ago, at the age of 19. Mississippi-born Tyehimba was then in the Marines, and was increasingly aware of the racism that surrounded him both there and in the outside world. He traces the beginnings of this awareness to his final year in high

school, when hip hop opened up a world of black history that he realised had pointedly not been part of his education. Always insistently inquisitive (his kin in Mississippi used to call him “an old soul”), Tyehimba set out to learn all he could about black nationalism, colonialism and the systemic structures of racism. What drew him to carving at the time was seeing a set of carved staffs in a RAW VISION 98

EVELYNE POSTIC Eternal metamorphosis of the being ALLA CHERNETSKA

Circonvolutions (Convolutions), 2017, ink on Nepal paper, 16.25 x 11.3 ins. / 41 x 29 cm All images courtesy of Evelyne Postic

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La Vierge Serpent (The Serpent Virgin), 2014, ink on craft paper, 11.6 x 8.25 ins. / 30 x 21 cm

velyne Postic’s artistic life began after she reached 30 years old, but the intensity with which she has created art for the last three decades stems from her childhood. Born Evelyne Mazaloubaud in Lyon, France, in 1951, she grew up in neglect and was abandoned by her parents during their divorce. Postic escaped with paper and coloured pencils into her grandparents’ kitchen, where from a window she watched coloured water flow from a nearby dyehouse into the drains. In her youth, her passion was dancing. She applied to the dance school at the Lyon Opera House, but was turned down. This was a disaster for her, and it was followed by another: at the age of five, Postic fell ill with a major pulmonary infection, and underwent a torturous treatment that was practiced in those days. Subsequently, lungs were to feature heavily, in multiple forms, in her drawings, as important “characters”. As a teenager Postic wanted to study at the École des Beaux-Arts, but her mother opposed it. Life went on, and

at 18 years old she married and started a family, putting artistic exploration to the side until she went through a new upheaval in her life. In 1989, at the age of 30, Postic divorced her husband and moved to Grenoble with her three children, where she began to make her first drawings and canvases. This practice allowed her to escape the realities of everyday life. Her first works, painted on different media, were quite graphic. Surrounded by black contour, they resembled stainedglass windows. The large eyes and prominent mouths, painted in profile, demonstrated her interest in Africa, and its people and culture. From the beginning, Postic’s hybrid forms combined human, plant and animal in perpetual transformation. Just as Postic faced challenges in life, her characters adapted to their environment to survive. Postic has always been passionate about science, especially biology and the metamorphosis of living beings into the process of evolution of species. Just as nature creates a multitude of forms, Postic creates her various

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Scolopendrium (Scolopendrium), 2010, ink on tracing paper, 19.6 x 19.6 ins. / 50 x 50 cm

forms inspired by her dreams and pain. She also devotes herself to sculpture that she will develop all her life by experimenting with the variety of materials like papier mâché, carved black wood, polystyrene, paper, glue, iron, concrete and seashells. Since 1990, her work has been exhibited by Galerie des 4 Coins, Rouanne, France, by L’Oiel de Boeuf Gallery, Paris, and in the 1994 exhibition “Les Jardiniers de la Mémoire” (The Gardeners of Memory) at the Musée de la Création Franche in Bégles where her work also entered their collection. Her work is held at the collections of the Musée l’Art en Marche in Lapalisse and Cérès Franco in Lagrasse. In 1998, Postic was invited to participate in a collective exhibition in New York. The American mega-city that hosts diasporas from all over the world inspired her to create large-scale works on immigration. Hoping to start a new life, people arrive needing to face the problems of survival in a new country. Thus, the artist returns to her reflections on the adaptation of a living

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being to the surrounding environment. Postic returned to Lyon in 2006 and entered the Dettinger-Mayer gallery, who specialise in contemporary drawing and primitive arts. This initiated a new stage in her artistic life as she started to exhibit new drawings of black ink on canvas. Although she often works with a lot of colour, which is more of an instinctive than a symbolic choice, sometimes she returns to monochromatic painting as if to free herself from emotional charge. In doing this, in her drawings of this time she exorcised the fears from her subconscious. In 2010, her drawings on tracing paper were presented by the art brut Gallery Hamer (Amsterdam), in the exhibition “Outsider” at the art centre in Aalsmeer. In these drawings, the imaginary world of the artist was contained in the depiction of a monstrous fish. If Postic’s first drawings were filled with vegetal creatures, by 2010 her characters had become more hybrid and floral forms intertwined with the organs of living beings. Sometimes,

Les Samourailles [sic] (The Samurai), 2017, ink on washed paper, 9.1 x 6.6 ins. / 23 x 17 cm

bodies resembling snakes or fantastic creatures invade the body as if they were themselves becoming the living beings. The following year, the Spontaneous Art Museum (Brussels) organised a solo exhibition of her black and white drawings on canvas and drawings on tracing paper. Among the drawings exhibited in Brussels, Scolopendrium resembles the cosmological drawings of the sixteenth century. This “eye” represents the wheel of life and the macrocosm at the same time. Its gaze absorbs us in the whirlwind of the universe where the marine world, and mammals and humans, intersect in different parts of life. The African theme returned tin 2012 after Postic’s long-awaited trip to West Africa. In Togo and Benin, where she travelled with the Alain Dettinger Gallery, she was inspired by the voodoo feast during which villagers took their ancestors out of the convent for the celebration Postic created a series of works dedicated to this ritual and belief system. In the same year, she had a personal exhibition at Halle Saint Pierre where, among her works from other periods, she presented the new drawings that had been inspired by her trip. In them, it could be seen that the graphic aspect of her works had changed. Colour had started to return to her works, but the hues were

softer. The faces, in profile with big eyes, in her first drawings started to resemble African masks. Sometimes their eyes are invisible or they are filled with spirals symbols of the cycle of life and transformation. We have the impression that they do not see, but rather feel the surrounding world. As the artist herself explains, “because the glance of the characters is behind his eyes, it is inside. It’s happening inside everyone.” The following year, Galerie Bourbon-Lally exhibited Postic’s drawings at the Outsider Art Fair in New York. Also in 2013, the Conil et Artingis gallery (Tangier, Morocco) organised her solo exhibition, and her book Vaudou was published by Le Dernier Cri in Marseille. In 2014, Postic began to collaborate with the Polysémie Gallery (Marseille), which exhibited her works at the Outsider Art Fair in Paris and in numerous fairs in Europe. She started working on a series of coloured drawings of the “Vièrges Ethniques” (Ethnic Virgins), which were presented at a solo exhibition at the Galerie Dettinger-Mayer, Lyon, in 2015. Like voodoo objects, the “Vièrges Ethniques” drawings combine iconography, Christianity and African traits. The central figure in a large trapezoidal mantle is surrounded by small figures that look like the angels

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R AW R E V I E W S

Prophet Blackmon

Lee Godie

Eugene Von Bruenchenhein

EXHIBITIONS

TO BE SEEN AND HEARD Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, Chicago March 23 – June 17 2018 Wisconsin folk and self-taught art has been documented periodically since John Rector Barton’s Rural Artists of Wisconsin in1948. However, of the some 30 artists cited in that book, none are particularly recognisable today. Gregg N. Blasdel’s landmark 1968 article “The Grass-Roots Artist” in Art in America named four seminal Wisconsin environmental sites: Herman Rusch’s Prairie Moon Sculpture Garden; Fred Smith’s Wisconsin Concrete Park; James Tellen’s Woodland Sculpture Garden; and Father Mathias Wernerus’ Dickeyville Grotto. A decade later, the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh’s historic 1978 exhibition and catalogue, Grass Roots Art: Wisconsin, Toward a Redefinition, also included these same four Wisconsin masters, yet among the more than 50 other artists that took part in that exhibition, only one other name seems even remotely familiar today: Albert Zahn. Zahn (1894-1953) and Josephus

Farmer (1894-1989) are the senior artists in “To Be Seen and Heard,” the latest exhibition of Wisconsin self-taught art at Chicago’s Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art. Curated by Matt Arient and Tim Bruce, this is a modest but powerful survey of five Wisconsin artists. Of the five, only Zahn’s work can be connected to an environment, as many of his hand-carved cedar wood figures were initially part of his Birds Park habitat. In addition to birds, square-shouldered and stiff-armed angels, stoic sea captains with long chin-beards, and a remarkably handsome “Stag” painted a dusky purple by his wife also represents Zahn here. The sculptural centrepiece is a gigantic snowy owl whose outstretched wings preside majestically over not only Zahn’s work, but also the entire show. The four remaining artists — Farmer, Prophet William Blackmon, Simon Sparrow, and Eugene Von Bruenchenhein — are practitioners whose works are non-sitespecific. Reverend Farmer was a street preacher who created sculptures and redwood bas-reliefs on religious and patriotic themes. They are reminiscent of

Elijah Pierce’s better-known wood reliefs, but Farmer’s are quite memorable in their own right. Sparrow (1925-2000) was also a street preacher who saw the destruction in a fire of his representational paintings as a sign from God that he should make more spiritually abstract works using glitter, beads and found objects that reflect humanity’s inner nature. Nevertheless, one can discern several amorphous faces peering out from the seven large-scale pieces on view at Intuit. Von Bruenchenhein’s (1910-1983) astonishing oeuvre has received much attention in recent years and rightly so. Notable in this selection of paintings and photographs is a rarely seen early, 1955 painting of a blue nuclear explosion. Prophet Blackmon’s (1921-2010) ambitious compositions are so exuberant and animated they fairly jump off the wall. Dizzying details are compartmentalised into heavily populated heavens and hells that careen at odd angles across the picture plane. Blackmon’s works are standouts in an already excellent exhibition. Michael Bonesteel RAW VISION 98

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ELIJAH PIERCE Elijah Piece: An American Journey November 23, 2017 - March 4, 2018 Canton Museum of Art Canton, Ohio, USA A few months ago I flew down to Columbus, Ohio to attend the opening of the William L. Hawkins show at the Columbus Museum of Art. The show was powerful and breathtaking as I had expected. The next day I drove to the Canton Museum of Art to see the “Elijah Pierce: An American Journey” show. I was curious how it would compare to the Hawkins show. Both men were good friends of mine and I loved their work equally. As soon as I walked into the Pierce show I was completely blown away. The Book of Wood, one of his masterpieces greeted me as I walked into the exhibit. It brought back many fond memories of Pierce explaining the pages of the Book of Wood back in 1980 when I first met him. It was like visiting an old friend. My head was flooded with memories of our visits 66

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Elijah Pierce, Wise and Foolish Virgins

Elijah Pierce, Book of Wood

Elijah Pierce, Jesus Calming The Storm

Elijah Pierce, Universal Man

EXHIBITIONS

over the years, watching him carve as he told me stories. The show in Canton was important for several reasons. There were many of his known masterpieces on display, “Universal Man” being one of my favourites. But what was different about this show was that in the 1990s many of the carvings that Pierce had given to his fellow church members were discovered. Several excellent examples of these religious gifts were shown. Many of these carvings had never been shown publicly before. It was a revelation to see these works from the 1960s. Most of them were stories from the Bible and very specific gifts for individuals that he admired from the church. It is easy to think of Pierce as a religious artist but he also did many secular carvings such as “Louis vs.

Braddock’, ”Horse Racing”, “Girl Scouts” and “Picking Cotton”. What struck me the most about this Pierce show is that it reconfirmed in my mind that he is the best woodcarver America has ever produced. I know this is a bold statement but seeing the early works, the wonderful compositions, the careful and beautiful carving and painting of the reliefs was breathtaking. And I have been looking at and living with his works for almost 40 years. It was amazing to have seen two wonderful shows by two of the greatest self-taught artists I have ever known. Hawkins and Pierce were very different people but both masters in their own way. The Canton Museum of Art did an excellent job of reminding us of one of America’s greatest artists, Elijah Pierce. Michael Noland

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Greg Bromley

Mose Tolliver painting for auction

EVENTS

EUROPEAN OUTSIDER ART ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE 2018 ‘THE ARTIST’S VOICE’ May 4–6, 2018, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, UK From May 4–6, arts charity Outside In hosted the 2018 European Outsider Art Association (EOA) Conference at Pallant House Gallery. This year, the conference’s theme was ‘the Artist’s Voice,’ focusing on the work of artists and the organisations that support their creative journeys. Through a medley of presentations, film screenings and workshops delivered by artists, practitioners and academics from all over Europe - and further afield, the conference shone a light on what it means to be an artist facing barriers to the art world, and the important work of the supporting organisations. In line with Outside In’s mission and ethos, the conference saw artists at the heart of the event, shifting the focus of the EOA’s annual assembly and conference and ensuring the voices we heard throughout the three days were primarily those of the artists. The conference kicked off with a powerful key note speech from renowned artist Bobby Baker and an opening event for new Outside In exhibition ‘Colliding Worlds,’ featuring work by artist Greg Bromley in response to Scottie Wilson’s ‘Evils and Greedies.’ Highlights included five inspiring presentations delivered by Outside In artists about their artistic practice – an array of performance, 3D mixed media pieces, poetry and paintings; and film screenings and talks from international projects including Out by Art (Scandinavia), the Living Museum (the Netherlands), and Le Grand BAZ’ART (France). Panel discussions enabled several organisations from across the 70

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world to share their work, joining conversations about supporting artists and what it takes to ensure the artist’s voice is audible when curating exhibitions. The conference ended with a ‘creative afternoon’ which included a community music workshop, creative activities delivered by Outside In: Step Up trained artists, and a tour of ‘Colliding Worlds’ by artist Greg Bromley. The conference encouraged delegates to reflect on how we talk about outsider art and outsider artists, putting emphasis on the artists themselves and their creative journeys. The hope is that this emphasis will be carried forward, making artists a central part of every future EOA conference. Kate Davey

SLOTIN FOLK ART AUCTION April 28-29, 2018 Buford GA, USA Slotin Folk Art Auctions have become both a fixture and a barometer of American folk art values. In a time when the internet has replaced the live attendance at many sales, Slotin still fills their converted grocery store, now an auction house, twice a year. The distribution of southern folk pottery lots across both days, new this time, and a group of “box lots” of recognised artists’ work may have contributed to a larger than usual crowd on Sunday. This 1140 lot April 28-29 Spring sale grossed $1,062,160 USD (all prices include the 20% buyers premium). For the third time in the last four Slotin sales, the lone Bill Traylor drawing offered drew the top bid, this year at $43,200. This Traylor will join a notable American folk art private collection in Montgomery, Alabama.

With many key collectors on-site and others present on the phones, as well as the entire internet world, few lots are bargains in the manner of pre-internet days. Although nearly half of the winning bids were online, the majority of the high value lots sold to these in-house or phone bidders. The pattern seen for the last few years of strong bids at high and low ends with some mid-range softness continues. Auction highlights include Stag Hunt by Ellis Ruley, a Connecticut AfricanAmerican artist, whose entire portfolio history could make a mystery novel. Thought lost in a suspicious house fire, individual pieces of his art began to surface many years later. Rarely seen at auction this Ruley work sold by phone bid for $24,000. Among the recognised visionary artists in this sale Sister Gertrude Morgan took top dollar with her mixed media on paper I Saw Four Angels, with images and text at $9600. Howard Finster’s The Great Holy City featuring a cityscape of church towers, angels and clouds reached $8400 and Myrtice West’s visual overview of Daniel Ch 7 was next at $7800. Both Sam Doyle house paint on found roofing tin brought strong bids including a drummer Penn reaching $20,400 and an untitled baseball catcher at $9600. Two James Castle double-sided drawings drew $7200 and $6600. Five Clementine Hunter paintings ranged from $2040 to $4800 each for a typical Cotton Pickin’ scene, and also $4800 for Going Fishing. Nearly a dozen of Purvis Young expressionistic examples, primarily of horses and trucks, ranged from $600 to $8400. Described as “symbolically rich”, six drawings by Thornton Dial brought solid prices from $1920 to $7800. Approximately 400 artists were represented in this sale from across the spectrum of folk and outsider art. Marty Steiner