Three Correlations:
OUT & / or IN

There is something so special about this fair. It’s a wonderful way to get an overview of the field of outsider art, to see gems by masters old and new, find familiar faces and meet new dealers.

We think of outsiders as monastic in their endeavors. Creating a world of their own as either a way of communicating or an intimate, passionate act of self absorption. The way a conventional artist works in some sense, but without maybe the goal of fame or fortune.  If one ever has a chance to see the film Roger Ricco made of Williams Hawkins or the film of Jon Serl, there is not a word of explanation needed. This work is often visionary. By this I don’t mean fairies or outer space but a vision into a different kind of life right here. An intimacy in the work, missing the layer of academic gloss on most of what we find in conventional art. One feels as though they are breathing the same air as James Castle when standing in front of his work.

I am not a big believer in categories of art. I think all art is contemporary and that whatever is good, or great, will seek its own level regardless of categorization. It is wonderful to see the masters in this field crossing over and being incorporated into major museum collections. James Castle’s work has been acquired by dozens of museums, only some of which are folk art or outsider oriented. MoMA was just gifted by Kiyoko Lerner 13 double sided Henry Darger’s from her collection, which were shown at PS1 a few years back. Stunning work. The Metropolitan Museum of Art just acquired 57 pieces from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation.

Any artist’s job is to take a pile of materials and spin them into an object which then imparts an idea or feeling which is intense enough or important enough that we want to view or own the object. It is alchemical, or academic, or some of both. In corporate America, a masters from Yale may mean more than it should. Those who can see art, really see it, can easily sort through. Who would think that an African American “cleaning lady” from the 1940’s south would have less knowledge, sensibilities or artistic chops than a Yale grad? Pluralism and the opening of the field of contemporary art has enabled us to see the work of the “outsider” and judge all art with the same criteria.

The more homogeneous the world becomes the more precious this work becomes. It would be as impossible to build a Printzhorn Collection today as it would be for a modern Alan Lomax to find 100s of hours of regional music to record in the back roads of America. Art schools and colleges are training more and more “taught” artists, but as time goes on it becomes more difficult to find new “outsider” artists. There are fewer nooks and crannies for these artists to hole up in. Folks who are institutionalized are (thankfully) on much better meds and may spend many hours in front of tv sets instead of working out their internal stuff by creating art.

I wonder how many more masters I will see in my lifetime.

One rarely realizes the halcyon of an era when it is happening. So true for outsider art. Thinking back not so many years ago when Phyllis Kind was still at the fair and exhibiting the likes of Wolfli and Joseph Yoakum, and Darger, the latter 2 natives of her home base Chicago.

Jennifer Pinto Safian, a private dealer, who at the fair always had grand “new” works from the European artists Aloise, Wolfli, Madge Gill and other pieces of Art Brut worthy of inclusion in the Lausanne collection.

Carl Hammer, also from Chicago, would bring Frank Jones’ Devil Houses and Dargers, which were magnificent.

Roger Ricco and Frank Maresca who wrote “the books” (American Self Taught and American Vernacular) and who exhibited incredible material, including William Hawkins drawings and paintings, Thornton Dial, Herman Bridgers, Judith Scott, and Americana of all sorts. They worked with the Mendlesons to build a grand collection and gave a gala party to show it the night before the OAF opened. Take a look at the catalogue The Intuitive Eye to see some of collection’s highlights.

Cavin-Morris used to have a brunch in their gallery on the morning of the fair’s opening day. I remember Jon Serls that were breathtaking and mediumistic drawings, tantric Vyakuls, work from Haiti. Fantastic work. They would have the gallery show going and a booth at the fair. Phillis Kind would give a huge party on the Saturday night of the fair in her gallery with a full blown show up as well.

There were 3 wonderful Carlo’s at this year’s fair. A couple of small but great Wolfli’s, two incredible pieces by Martin Ramirez, a Scottie Wilson here and there, same with the Traylors. But, remember when there would have been 20 or so Traylors throughout the show, half of them in Luise Ross’ booth with Minnie Evans as well. And 10s of Dargers? Remember when Jacquie Crist had a booth of just James Castle’s work?

Back in the day there was also much to sort through. Lots of dross from the south, not to mention any names.

The fair itself has gone through its own ups and downs. For many years it was run by Sanford Smith and held in the Puck building. Some folks complained that the vetting was a bit dodgy and set up camp in other venues outside the Puck Building during fair week – in hotel rooms, or in other galleries.

Andrew Edlin now runs the OAF and it is a wonderfully orchestrated affair. The old DIA building is the perfect size, 3 floors of gallery spaces for the 50 or so dealers who participate.

All of this is not to say there is a dearth of work. This year’s fair included some of the best James Castles I have ever seen. There were a dozen or so drawings and constructions at Fleisher/Ollman along with a magnificent Justin McCarthy Last Supper where Jesus and the Apostles’ bare feet protruded under the table. An Edmondson double bird carving. Classic.

Scott Ogden, who came here from Texas and worked with Phyllis Kind in the day, now runs his own space, Shine. He has championed Royal Robertson’s work for years and had two signs from RR’s yard environment which were fine.

Cavin-Morris Gallery offered a wall of Czech art, including Anna Zemankova and a very interesting new artist, Angkasapura, whose work is already in the Lausanne Collection. They travel the world in search of visionary, self taught work.

Hervé Perdriolle presented contemporary tantric paintings from the Franck André Jamme book called Tantra Song, which were powerfully fresh.

Huffington Post is not alone in sensationalizing art, reporting things like “this drawing took 2,000 pencils to make,” and so on. The contemporary art market relies too heavily on what Robert Hughes called “the shock of the new.” Once the newness settles back into the sea of already forgotten images, what are we left with? We go looking for something to sustain us. Something which is a talisman we can refer back to to get our spiritual bearings, vision or some glimpse of the authentic. All the academic training in the world is no substitution for it, nor is a lack of education or knowledge going to get us closer to it.

•

I watched the film clip for the documentary Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts, written and directed by Jeffrey Wolf, who also produced James Castle: Portrait of an Artist (2008). There’s clearly a strong commitment to pull together the scattered pieces of what little is actually known about Bill Traylor. “Curiosity” almost seems to act as a lure as you enter into the filmmaker’s journey as he begins to decipher Traylor’s gifted talent and vivid truth telling. This project acknowledging Traylor’s contributions to African-American art is still in progress and slated to be completed for a 2018 retrospective at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. From the few photos of Traylor seen drawing intensely, sitting on a wooden box under the awning of a pool hall, you can immediately sense his deepness in calling the spirit into image.

I found myself getting entangled in the art world’s “romance” with Charles Shannon’s 1939 discovery of Bill Traylor, who had been born into slavery in 1854. Accounts vary, but he was said to have been close to 85, when, with the fall of cotton prices and family either dead or gone, he left the plantation where he’d been a sharecropper and moved to Montgomery. It was there that he picked up a pencil and began drawing striking silhouettes of animals and people. Many had white, rounded eyes with a centered black dot that seemed to jump right out at you. These animated constructions depicted events gathered from recollections of what he had already lived through and what he was now witnessing on Monroe Street.

If you listen to the sounds in Traylor’s work, you can hear field hollers, power writing on the ground, circle dances, chases, disputes, the blues, secrets, yearnings, rhythm, more rhythm, mules plowing, Jim Crow, rage, distances and attractions, fingers, staffs pointing, humor, tints of Vodou and elongated lips tingling from booze.

In Merchal Sobel’s book, Painting a Hidden Life, he wrote that he was certain that the lynching of Traylor’s son Will had “forced him to find a way to break through his wall of silence. He painted out of pain, and painted to conjure as a way for black people to overcome a message that white people never understood.” Sobel also thought that “conjurers and their clients believed that drawings could alter reality and that Traylor was likely to have drawn conjuration figures long before he began painting on a Montgomery street.”

Fame was the farthest thing from Traylor’s mind. Charles Shannon, an artist himself who was also involved in organizing the Black Sharecroppers Union, became fascinated by Traylor’s paintings that were done on found cardboard scraps with poster paint, mostly red, blue, black or brown right from the jar. Marvelled by Traylor, Shannon saw him as being “calm and right with himself, beautiful to see,” and felt that he should “protect” him as “it would have been wrong to show him a single picture which might have influenced him.” He collected over 1,200 of his drawings, some in exchange for much needed art supplies and others for nickels and dimes.

In 1992, Shannon found himself in the middle of a lawsuit when Traylor’s great-granddaughter, having known little about Traylor “the artist,” had heard about a museum show that was being planned in Detroit. The family either wanted all Traylor’s work returned to them or the money that had been made from it. An out of court settlement awarded more than 40 descendants 12 pieces.

From his collection, Shannon had been able to arrange a 1942 exhibition in New York, Bill Traylor: American Primitive (Work of an old Negro) at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in hopes of attracting galleries and museums. Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art, was said to have praised the work and sent a check for the purchase of over 16 pieces. But Shannon refused to sell since he hadn’t been consulted about the price, one dollar for each of the small pieces and two for larger ones. Traylor wasn’t really interested in Shannon’s pursuits, and according to Sobel, Traylor knew that his paintings had “a life of their own, apart from himself and could help others unmask themselves.” Bill Traylor died in 1947. After having seen the films Middle of Nowhere & Selma by African-American director Ava Du Vernay,  I’ve began wondering how she might envision Bill Traylor.

Tennessee’s William Edmondson, born to former slaves in 1874, a hospital orderly and tombstone cutter, started carving stone sculptures later in his life from visions that only he could see in the sky. A fashion photographer for Harper’s Bazaar, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, who’d discovered his work, contacted Alfred Barr. MoMA then organized a solo exhibition, its first given to an African-American. In the 1937 press release, Barr said “Recognition of the achievements of naive or self-taught artists is one of the discoveries of contemporary taste.”

Still, not much attention had been given to Traylor until the late 70s when Shannon felt that the debate as to whether or not self-taught art could be considered “serious” was changing and the time ripe. He was able to get Traylor included in the 1982 exhibition Black Folk Art in America” 1930 – 1980 at the Corcoran Gallery.  Traylor’s popularity began to soar.

Documentation of the paintings and poetry of Scipio Moorhead, who was born 100 years before Traylor, is even more scarce. His work never was saved by an advocate or art patron. The only surviving evidence is an etching made from an ink drawing he’d done of Phillis Wheatley sitting at her desk, gazing outward, the frontispiece of her book Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), which was the first issued volume of poetry by an African-American. She’d written that Scipio was a “Negro servant to the Rev. Moorhead of Boston, whose genius inclined him that way.” The Reverend’s signature was listed in the book’s preface among the 18 prominent Massachusetts Colony leaders who had been assembled to verify that Phillis was indeed, the “real Author.”

Phillis had been taken at the age of 7 from West Africa to Boston with a shipment of captives in 1761 and purchased by John Wheatley as his wife’s companion. Impressed by how quickly she learned, they raised her more like a daughter, teaching her to read and write. Hungry for intellectual challenges, Phillis absorbed herself in a well versed literary atmosphere. At 13, the Newport Mercury printed her first poem, and four years later her elegy for the English Reverend George Whitefield was published in London, spurring international admiration.

Mrs. Wheatley, in hoping to find an audience for Phillis’s manuscript of poems, ran an ad in the Boston Censor seeking 300 subscribers. Unable to secure commitments,  inquiries in London were then made which led to Selina Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon, who agreed to finance the book while suggesting that a portrait of the “young enslaved woman” would be an asset to sales. Phillis Wheatley included the poem To S.M. a young African Painter, on seeing his Works in honor of Scipio Moorhead.

For Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects was a “political and moral statement intended to incite controversy.”  In one of the eight articles in London magazines, the Critical Review commented that: