[The following commentary was compiled from video interviews with the curator and reflects that lively informality.]
"Unsigned, Unsung, Whereabouts Unknown...Make-Do Art of the American Outlands"---boy that's a great title. Over the years, it was the artists themselves as much as the work that fascinated me: the story of how the artists started or what got them going, the "make- do" part of it. Take what you have, bring it up to a supposed 'higher' style and celebrate something about your life. In some cases, of course, it's at the end of your life (Jesse James Aaron is a good example). You start studying for your "finals," so to speak and you might have some kind of divine intervention.
When you're talking about "Unsigned, Unsung, Whereabouts Unknown," that characterizes most of these artists, for sure, at one time in their lives. Some have come into prominence now, but at one time, they were completely obscure, no one, sometimes, not even themselves (like Sybil Gibson) had any special faith in what they were doing.
A question comes to me as I look back--should these artists have been talked about at all when they were still undiscovered, so to speak? I remember giving a lecture as a visiting artist at the Chicago Art Institute and immediately after that a bunch of graduate students who were artists just went down the road to Kansas and grabbed Jesse Howard's work--I later saw it in their apartments. They just went and took it. And people took Butler's work--just took it, just went to his house. I remember going there and seeing him towards the very end when he was so depressed, he wouldn't even talk to you, because they had stolen his house. So I wonder sometimes, we all come to grips with that, what's been done, what hasn't been done, what should have been left alone, what should have been unsaid and the like--the pre-contact, post-contact discussion.
For this exhibition I selected post- and pre-contact work by the now-famous Thornton Dial, Sr., and there's no doubt he is a major artist. The viewers can compare for themselves the vitality, quality, color, and line between the work done while he was relatively unknown and painting with left-over paint on found materials with the new works of high quality pigments on BFK triple weight 100 % rag paper.
Naive art is too big a deal now, it's too collectible, it's out there. And so we ask ourselves, "Where are the new make-do artists going to come from?" as we move into a society where there is cradle to grave care. Will there be the same compulsion to put 'make-do' into art and life? Will there be the potential to have a revelation at the end of life that can give rise to this expression?
I went to Birmingham to see a young artist--and was it the same? I don't think so. I don't think the "spiritual" dimension (even when it is not an orthodox spirituality) is there in the same way; I didn't have that same feeling that I got from some of the older artists I've seen. If I could have done this exhibition any way I wanted to, it would have been with people who have had a revelation later in life, where they didn't even start working until they were at least 55 or so. I'd like to see an exhibition like that sometime. Being an artist normally and not a curator in a museum, I feel intuitively attuned to the condition of 'make-do.' I started with nothing my own self and have looked at this condition for a long time through a lot of this type of work. We can talk about the translations that go down from culture to culture, and talk about the psychology of it, or even the physicality of the work. Why is it popular? Why are other artists envious? It's often readable, believable, and pertinent, that's what interests me. Why it's so 'grabable' for an audience, the way it takes them in, the immediacy of it. You don't have to read Art Forum to appreciate a Jesse James Aaron. You don't have to study over some archives somewhere to see the sensitivity in a Sybil Gibson. They're just there. The fanaticism of W.C. Rice speaks for itself.
One more thing: I also am beginning to feel that someone should do--along with one of these exhibitions--a documentation of a make-do artist or an artist in progress who doesn't even "do" art. What am I saying? That you see sometimes these people who would be the counterpart in the fine arts to "new genres." Just like painting and traditional media, there is a whole alternate set of media-- performance art is one aspect, and I am suggesting that there are aspects of make-do art that go beyond even the definition of this exhibition, and it is sometimes performance-oriented. For instance, when I was in Haiti one of the most poignant (everything in Haiti is poignant, but one of the most poignant) things that happened to me was when I was going down the road...here we go, it was kind of tough and on the political edge down there at the time. We were there in late '86, but we're going down the road when all of a sudden I see something coming at me and I say,"Whaaaa...!" and I take my camera and say, "Wha...!" again, and I photograph it, click. What did I get? I photographed a man that had tied himself in wire. He's got whisker-like strands of wire sticking out; he is all wrapped up in wire. His face is wrapped up, his body, hands, legs, ankles, everything wrapped in wire. He can walk, hell, yeah, he can walk but he is completely enwrapped. He had reached the final point-down for whatever it was that motivated him, whether a voodoo context or the mores of that culture, or just within his own psychological self, and he covered himself in wire and declared himself an independent: "This is me, this is my shell." We stopped the car, you know how it is in Haiti. I get out immediately. GONE. Disappeared. Thin Air. Gone. But I have the photograph.
Here in America I've seen also this a number of times and you've seen it right where you are. I talked to a man the other day, Charles Alpine, whom I've been talking to for a number of years. He goes out with his own bow that he's made, his own arrows, his own tent, his own shoes and clothes all hand made, belt, hat, snare and the like.Born in Baltimore. He's about 48...calls himself an Independent. Will not take any money. "I do not accept contributions," he says, "I am an Independent. I am a slave," he says, "to America." But going around with these physical symbols of home made garments and tools; he's his own performance, something that he's done to his body that identifies him, so he becomes an art piece himself. There are counterparts here in everyday culture that some day should be shown in a make-do context, with the new genre artists beyond the mainstream.
I always wonder, what will get somebody going? What would make them start? Some of my favorite stories are, for instance: Hugh "Big Daddy" Williams...he was living in a house there in New Orleans. They condemned the house, they evicted him, asked him to leave because it was condemned, he declined, they threw him out anyway, threw all his stuff out over the yard; there he was left, he sold what he had and bought a van that wouldn't run. He parked it at the end of Claiborne Street and lived there till he died.
Earlier in his life he'd gotten his nose shot off. He kind of looked funny, felt funny, disfigured, a black man without a nose. He felt so conspicuous--living there under the overpass in his old van and people felt sorry for him. They decided to buy him a prosthesis. He was ecstatic, but there weren't any black noses available, so they gave him a white nose, because he couldn't afford to wait much longer. He tried that, wearing a white nose, and hated it; his solution was to carve his own. He found a nice piece of mahogany, carved it the right shape and glued it right onto his sunglasses. And that's kind of how he got his carving going. He had been carving already, but he really, once he carved his own nose, became a celebrity. He carves those incredible canes. Evidently Hugh "Big Daddy" Williams only wanted to carve for the black mardi gras: he related to musicians, and sold canes out of his van. Carved canes, very interesting vocabulary of subject matter where you had girls in convoluted sexual poses, these funny jalapeno pepper looking leaves, some reference to a drug, I'm sure, but I don't understand them, snakes, alligators and the like, very sought after with musicians of the jazz and blues culture all around the country.I love that kind of story where a person starts working in a completely unusual or strange way because of a bizarre set of circumstances.
Buddy Boone, snow bird, paper hanger, alcoholic, made the Macon paper and although I didn't see it, he said he made the New York Times in 1957 when, at the age of 48, he married the fourteen year old Peanut Queen of Macon County, and they drove away in his 1957 Ford with the retractable hard-top. I did see the articles about him in a Macon paper, I believe that was the paper...where, on Sunday he would dress up in all green and walk his little ducks on a golden chain around the only lake in town. So Buddy Boone, what a character; always talked about meeting the little girls at the circus where he liked the midget girls, he was only about 5'2" himself. Anyway, when he did finally get throat cancer after all those years of hard drinking and hard living, he moved to Tallahassee, to await death and live out his final years in a cheap motel. He was the last person still alive from an original medication test group of seventeen people once gathered around Shands Hospital in Gainesville. He lived on for some reason and he just kept making these canes--obsessively gluing stuff on: weird kind of off-beat things, sometimes bordering on the pornographic. Always fastidiously perfect in his gluing, very very careful. He did a body of wonderful canes, music boxes, shovels, and paddles, some with x-rated pictures glued on. He fits in a category of people who generate for just the one occasion, or they're going through something, and they complete one body of work. Or, perhaps, once everything is pretty much over, they decide to encapsulate and assimilate and through their work re-live some of the past joy they had in their lives. His canes are unusual and speak of a different life, a life of the '20s and '40s.
John Ellis, Henry Ray Clark, Frank Jones and John Harvey are artists who were incarcerated in one way or another, whether in a hospital or a jail. John Ellis had an argument with his wife-to-be over another man being in the house when he came home. He accidentally (he told me) killed the man with a karate throat kick, and went to prison for quite a while. In there he made that transformation that you often see incarcerated people make--where they are all the time dueling with the way they wanted it to be and the way it actually turned out to be. So he began to refer to himself as "Mr. Teach," "Christ, Jr." and "The Sinner," and he'd put "Mr. Teach" in different places with different people. He might have "Mr. Teach" with Reagan or Margaret Thatcher, or Ghaddafi or some Japanese guy or Russian leader and he'd put them in there but then always come back and put "Mr. Teach" in the social position that he thought "Mr. Teach" would be in if "Mr. Teach" were outside and not in prison. Many of his drawings show a dilemma of unfulfilled romance, street savvy badness, and where-did-I-go-wrongness. John Ellis--how artists get to where these images might come from, making do in a completely unorthodox way.
So there he was in prison, struggling with time, marking and drawing. And with Ellis's work, it's not like Frank Jones' similar marks over and over, or Henry Ray Clark's left hand, right hand, top half, bottom half; but John Ellis involves psychology...there he is posturing himself in a forced psychological schizophrenia as "Mr. Teach." One John Ellis is "Mr. Teach" the other a more subdued, almost Christ-like follower of Jesus. He was in prison for 6 years and the work we are showing has never been shown, small drawings. We practically had to force him to sign the work. Like Sybil Gibson, he didn't want to, because he was convinced that we were putting him on, that there was no value in it.
Henry Ray Clark, whom I have not met, is apparently going to stay in prison for a very long time. There is a story that even at his own opening for his own show, he was caught pick-pocketing people. At his own opening! People who might be completely incorrigible in one way, but then look at what they do. Those incredible drawings of his that exemplify what Dave Hickey from Texas used to call "amphetamine classicism." Here you have one tiny little mark, symbol, or theme that is repeated one after another (Frank Jones was that way), very much over and over and over because time is expendable. All people who are incarcerated have a clock that tells them when they started and when they are going to get out. Henry Ray Clark, very interesting in that way--making do with what he had, a younger artist, back in prison again (can not seem to stay out of prison). You can tell from the drawings the intensity of the individual is probably part of his problem. If intensity is misdirected, perhaps he will be in prison for quite awhile. A personality with fantastic obsessiveness within the drawings, some of them with sexual imagery, tunnel like, and an undulation of deep space. In the Henry Ray Clark works you can think of mandala patterning to the outside often times right, left, top, and bottom being symmetrical in some ways. The center focus of attention on deep space is cave-like and obsessive, line and time-marking activities perimeter the image. The whole essence of time marking activities as repeated pattern in prison work is well documented; we see it in a number of cases, but often times the subject matter (the obsession of the theme) becomes a time line of obsessive psychological activity and sometimes is overlooked. Henry Ray Clark, incarcerated, Huntsville, Texas.
Bessie Harvey. I'm a hard-core cracker, obviously, born and raised here in the south, and I've talked to Bessie Harvey a couple of times; she strikes me as a woman who damn sure worked hard all her life. She had her own house, and children to care for. Proud of it: "This is my house, this is my place." And she just got out there and started drawing things; she was working at a hospital or something, and she told me that one day they had an animal contest or some kind of contest and she knew she could make an animal. So she went out and grabbed a couple of roots, painted on some features and she'd done it--making do with the immediate circumstance.
I like her drawings. She is primarily known for the root sculptures, but her drawings, with their ability to match a spoken narrative to the actual thing painted on the paper is the closest to telling a story. Even though the sculptures may be more appealing to a collector or to a buyer, the drawings are more immediate and insightful. She encapsulates the culture around her in a rough and tumble way where imagination is everything and finesse counts for little.
A more complex variation on this was Laura Pope Forester up in Georgia. She had her surroundings, but she was dissatisfied with them. She wanted to change things. Those artists who create environments--it might be the 'hubcap house' or it might be a 'bottle house--they take their circumstances, say, "I'm going to change them--immediately," and do it.
Laura Pope Forester, in Pelham, Georgia, started off there building concrete sculptures. Mrs. Pope Forester has to take her place as the first, the first, feminist outsider artist of this century. And not being politically oriented, my way of expressing it is probably not right. She was a woman who had children and a family and had to take care of all that, but on top of everything, she decided to make art. She never lived more than about four miles from where she was born and died in the same place. Over time she made literally hundreds of concrete fixed tableaux sculptures--homage to men and women from the past. Very obscure characters, some of them, but she took them and made figurative sculptures from 1901 on, although she did not start the large outdoor concrete tableaus until 1918. And she dedicated them not only as war memorials of people who made sacrifices in WWI, but to the founders of the Red Cross, to the maker of the first flag, to the first woman to fly across the Atlantic, the first woman granted a legal divorce in the state of Georgia, the first woman to found a school for under-privileged children in Georgia, and so forth. We are left with very little, we are left with one wall--all of it in concrete, reinforced with old sewing machines and rock, all in one environment to stay there on location-- only miles from where she was born. She was one of these people to take what was around and to change it. She built over two hundred sculptures, and her place became the 'Pope Museum.' Her paintings have never been shown, but she also painted large sky and mountain scapes in the style of the Hudson River School and then decorated the homemade frames with glopped on plaster. Her canvas was sometimes flower sacks stretched over scrap crate wood, but most often she painted directly on an early form of beaver board. These haunting, darkened scenes suggest a passing from this life into another. She also painted directly on the walls of her house. During the thirties and forties, people would come from all over to see it; but in one day, a new owner, Mr. Nixon, who had known her when he was a child (actually been by her bedside when she died) bought the farm and in a fit of dislike for the work in 1981, had a crew come in with sledgehammers and destroy over 200 pieces within 48 hours. I remember going out behind the house and seeing just piles of faces and hands and such...but anyway, Laura Pope, someone who wanted to change her circumstances, like Dinsmoor. Being at your house, middle of nowhere, taking what you have and making do, paying homage to the culture around you, stay right with it, don't take no for an answer, and go for it.
In Montana, absolutely astounding, The Bible in Stone...again, someone who'd left another life, things didn't go so well, he'd gotten on up in years, knew it was going to be over, moved to this harsh but beautiful area, took what he had which was local stone, local color, local shape, and began to put the stones together, stack them, lay them over, concrete 'em, until he made and depicted the scenes of the entire Bible. The guy started in 1957, worked all those years on it, no money, just started sending out: "Hey you going up there on that mountain with the red stone? Bring me some of that back. You going up there with the green stone? Bring me some back. Bring it here, drop it off, I'll use it." So he created whole scenes from the Bible. Finally died somewhere, late seventies. Nothing else like it in this country, I've seen very little documentation of it--even when Martin Friedman was curating the original naives and visionaries exhibition, had he known the Bible in Stone was there, he'd have shown it. (The Yellowstone Arts Center in Billings has assisted us in documenting this work.) It's that idea of taking command of your environment and making do with those materials available to you. This is what interests me so much. Perhaps that's what they all do. I won't even give them a name, I just call them 'make do' artists. They make do with what they have and create something with it.
Dinsmoor just simply lived to be too old (he was born in 1843). Dinsmoor got married, had his family like everybody else, began to work, was a damn good farmer, did a damn good job, lived in that area south of Selina where they had that strange rock that would cut into almost log-like sections, very unusual--the only place in America where they used stone fence-posts as much as they do, that was where he was. His house--no two windows in the house were the same size, no two doors either, no cabinets are the same size, and he built a stone house in the log-method. Then around it, what did he do? You know what he did: he formed a concrete wall, narrative like and large entitled "The Garden of Eden." He compared the way it was supposed to be to the way it actually came out in his life. He had a guidance of what it was going to be, a biblical guidance, and he shows you that, right up to the corner of the wall, at the corner of the lot where he turns and takes off into the modern times. He takes a good clean shot at everybody; I like his shots primarily at trusts and usury funds--they were wonderful. Also the way the laborer could be crucified, not only by the politicians and doctors and lawyers, but by preachers and union people as well. So Dinsmoor was there, wife got old, children were old; he should have died, he was ready to die, but he just kept on going. So, got him a new wife, she was twenty, he was eighty-one, had two more children. Dinsmoor in Lucas, Kansas; the same compulsion as we might see in smaller works, but the scale is exploded. A whole yard of art. Jesse James Aaron had an entire yard of his works, too--something most people don't realize when they see his individual sculptures. Jesse Aaron practiced tree- scarification as a form of tacit property protection, animals cut on the trees--as the tree got big, so did the face of the animal. That's rare. Scarification on trees may precede carving in some cultures. Dinsmoor is well documented for his Garden of Eden in concrete.
W.C. Rice was doing pretty well, living near Prattville, Alabama, worked hard, everything going fine, he's got kids, came out of that tiny house that he grew up in and built himself a nice, fine brick home for his family there. Something happens and they go away but he's there--he's got plenty of land, plenty of money, but meanwhile his mother and father are still living in the shack. He doesn't build them a brick home, as he says later in some things that he wrote, but he decides to get them a mobile home, which they didn't want. Anyway, W.C. Rice buys it, sets the home up, they move in, and very soon, it burns to the ground, killing both of his parents. He's already pretty religious, fundamentally religious; W.C. Rice, you'd have to call, a hard-core, dead to the right, burn-in-hell fundamentalist, as opposed to a forgiving fundamentalist like "Preacher Lyles," for instance. So what does he do?
He buries his mamma and daddy over in the cemetery, gets to thinking about it, maybe he thinks he needs a little extra credit, so he starts to take pieces from the mobile home, burned pieces, and he makes crosses out of them. He takes these to the graveyard, puts them there, and begins to "overdo" the graves with plastic flowers. People complained, the townspeople got up in arms telling him--"you can't do that". He says "Well, fine," takes the bodies and buries them in his own front yard. And begins to transform two entire hills into messages about repentance, damnation, vengeful God, the power of numbers, puts it all in barbed wire, posts warning signs not to steal the crosses, and makes, in my opinion, the best outdoor statement that I have seen. W.C Rice, someone driven to make do, driven. No matter who you talk to or who you think you know, W.C. Rice in Prattville, Alabama, is the watermark by which other Christian Fundamentalists can be judged. I don't know if he's alive anymore, I don't know whether there's anything left of it anymore, but during the years of his obsessive reaction to his parents' death, he produced these two entire hillsides of work of slogans, messages, churches, frozen and fixed tableaux; everything pivotal to any installation artist.
These installations on the sides of hills, or inside closed spaces, have been very influential to other artists. The Preacher Lyles from Taylor County, Florida, is another. Born in 1921 in Jacksonville, but raised from infancy in Shady Grove, Taylor County, he is still active writing out the gospel in plain view, often criticizing the unholy workings around him. He paints all these messages up on a long plywood wall that fronts his property. And ever so often the other fundamentalists come and paint them over or attempt to burn the whole wall. He lives near Spring-Warrior Creek. His marking is incessant and frenzy-like with word size and paint color changing to fit the emotion or importance of a phrase. He is a parable maker much more extensive than Jesse Howard; he's much more poignant, much more vehement in his disagreements with those around him, not cataclysmically a believer in damnation, like W.C. Rice, but very critical of the fundamental churches around for not allowing him to go out into the masses and baptize. Writing his signs in the middle of nowhere in Taylor County, writing his signs, coming home, and they've been fire-bombed by people from the other church. Up the next morning--early--to start over again, similar message, different day.
As a carver, Jesse James Aaron is extremely well known, but he wasn't when he first had a vision--Jesus came to him at night, woke him up, said "J.J., go out there and start carving"--and he did go, immediately! And he didn't turn over like you and I would do, and just put his head on the pillow and go back to sleep, say it was a bad dream. He got up out of bed, went out there, took something and carved something, that minute. What was he carving for? He'd been worrying for some time, he was already deep in his eighties when he started carving; his wife was getting cataracts, how was he ever going to pay for the surgery? How was he ever going to finish paying for his children to go to school? He put every one of his children through college, except one, before he started carving; he worked so hard. But his wife had cataracts, and he had been praying for a way to get money to have the surgery done. Jesus came to him and said, "Start carving," and he did. I like that impulse, that idea that God can move suddenly and that he might ask you to do the same (if you were a fundamentalist, you might be thinking that the earth was created instantly, over night and we were all here). In some ways I like outsider--if we call it that, or make-do art, that started the same way, from divine intervention or cataclysmic occurrence, 'near- death'--fall out of a tree, get shot, have a car accident, whatever. Changes your life. J.J. offers a counterpoint to others in the exhibition in terms of representing the roughest and the most primitive work. Critics have suggested that he was making a conscious reference to African art: I knew him, talked with him, and I think it was something different, entirely.
Of course I remember Jesse from 1970. I used to cut wood for him, and I was very close to him, but didn't know enough to get any pieces. I was just so fascinated that this man was practicing something you don't see much, that scarification of trees... very interesting to me. You know, scarification on people preceded tattooing. (Unless the "Iceman" proves otherwise.) And, too, scarification of trees as a way of marking your area--we have seen that in Alaska. I saw it with Jesse James Aaron. I'm curious to know if there is a precedence for it in Africa also. So, anyway, Jesse James Aaron and carving and all those wonderful animals he did, what a great man. But always, taking what he had, making do with it...made his own eyes, his own nails, cut his own wood, made his own paint-- out of brown tempera, mud, and turpentine--loved him as a carver. Miss him a lot.
Columbus McGriff. Columbus "Dude" McGriff, recently deceased, unsigned, unsung, nobody knew him for years; he's what we call the Lost Wireman--you've heard of the Philadelphia Wireman--well, Columbus was 'the lost wireman.' He was in some shows in '76-- before that people had seen the work in NYC; Robert Goulet bought some of the work, Mel Torme bought some of the work--they were at the hotel where Columbus--he was almost blind in one eye and the other one was glass--worked as a shoe shine man. When we started this show, Columbus was in perfect health. He was born dirt-poor, near a large plantation, dependent on that for work. Many families are not unhappy about that way of life, and Columbus was that way. Came from a family in Gadsden County, Florida, but right off from the beginning, they were working in the fields; he would go off, play with the other guys, but when he was five years old, his eye was punctured with a piece of wire. He cut his other eye, too, later on, but first he started with one good eye, and he had these huge hands and you can tell his work because of the tightness of the wire, then he had a few shows, nobody much heard of him, but he stayed in Cairo, Georgia, until his death very recently, the last day of last year...he was supposed to leave the hospital, but died that night. Blind completely in one eye and punctured in the other eye. He just couldn't see, so he would go around picking up scrap pieces of wire from the baling machine so that people wouldn't step on it with their feet--that was his job. How'd he find the wire?--he'd step on it: pick it up, to keep people from steppin' on it. But at the end of the day he'd come back with the wire and start building stuff, and he really built with wire all of his life.
Columbus started making toys. He made little cars and airplanes and trucks every way, he made them his whole life. He died at sixty years of age. To me, he is the best wire bender that we've seen. No one bends wires the way Columbus McGriff did. And I'll tell you why. He was known in Cairo Georgia as "Dude" McGriff. But I also came to find out that he was known to some as "Mr. Grip." Now, what does "Mr. Grip" mean? "Mr. Grip" means that Columbus had seriously strong hands and could take this steel bailing wire (like you and I could take a piece of kite string and wrap it around our finger), and curl it and pull it and curl it and pull it--any way he wanted to. Mostly, because his hands were twice the size around as mine. It's easy for me to spot a piece by Columbus McGriff because no one wound wire as tightly as he did. All steel. He's dead, he's gone, but what a wonderful legend: toys, animals, and the joy that he gave to children. I never saw a child that wouldn't immediately love and want to come over and pick up a Columbus McGriff toy, or sculpture. I call them toys because they were childlike, he was like a child.
A lot of these guys go quickly, know what I mean? In bad health, bad situations. Columbus choked to death, no excuse at all. He was in a little hospital.
Sybil Gibson. Perfect example of some one who--even though she was working--had a feeling either about herself emotionally or about the world in general that what she and they did was not worth doing; even though her work was an important component of life to her, she was so modest, and thought it was not worth celebrating. And when people did commend her artwork, she actually got upset and would throw the work away or give the work away and disappear--not want to deal with the work not want to deal with people. So she fits that runaway, unheralded artist profile, an unknown. She worked a long time. We now think she is here in Florida somewhere, perhaps in a rest home.
She is primarily known among collectors and gallery people for the faces of women, but we hope to bring out the paintings of couples as well as the animal paintings. She would, occasionally, put a man and woman together or paint--also on rare occasions--birds, dogs, cats, and the like. She's got to be the original 'bag lady.' There are other people that lay claim to that medium, but it was Sybil who really did start early, getting paper bags and cardboard and working on it. She would flatten it out in kind of a weird way, and drew mostly faces of women, but when she would draw men, she seemed to spend a lot more time on them. Again, an artist who made do with what she had, brown sacks or cardboard, what ever was at hand, and started drawing: this is the primal impulse to draw and record. She was born in 1908 near the mining town of Cordova, Alabama to well- off parents. Sybil married, and had a daughter, and moved to South Florida where the Miami Museum of Modern Art offered her a one- woman show in 1971. They came to pick up the work for the exhibit and she had disappeared leaving the work strewn all over the front yard of her house. The local news paper ran a headline asking "Sybil, where are you?" She said she never recovered from that. There is work from the late sixties, seventies and a little into the eighties--it has that far-off whimsical look of a person who is painting a life that perhaps she didn't live. It's very, very sweet, thoughtful in that way. Showing respect for a person who was there very early in the make- do system.
Another perspective is that of Daniel Pressley, known, of course, for his carving. His carving doesn't interest me as much as his paintings. He has a 'New York series' and that's what we're going to show--where, every day, he would just get up and look around, but it wasn't Pressley who was making do, it was the people that were making do around him. For Pressley, as for many of these artists, the profile is the same: born south of the Mason-Dixon line in rural areas, a hard-scrabble kind of life, do the best you can when you're too young to move away, then when the opportunity comes, move up north, try to get a job and live like regular people.
Pressley's carvings won him a positive response from people who saw them, but when he was left to his own devices of what he would like to express, in a narrative form, he went to paintings--to which no one responded. Down along the side he wrote what the subject was, then signed and dated the painting in works that tried to explore the genre of the active life of Brooklyn in the fifties and early sixties. But when you view these pieces, there are indications of a different type of narrative; my favorite is Soldier's Wife--there she is on the couch, its hot as hell, the fan's blowing, he's off in the army somewhere, he's looking into the apartment from his military photo framed on the wall, squalling young'uns, two cats and a dog and the two children fighting--pun, fighting like cats and dogs. She's there and just doesn't know what to do; it's too hot, no air conditioning back then. She's already stripped down a little bit, perspiring, and just thinks, "Well, man, I'll just take a drink and leave here." And Pressley would capture some of those moments, washing women and the like, in a very poignant way. The Dog Fight is an incredibly fine painting with seven or eight dogs just having it out in the middle of this road, deep perspective, cityscape in the background, dogfight in the middle of the road, a reflection on the violent nature of society. He looked at firefighters, organ grinders, graveyard grief, streetworkers, and the like.
Son Thomas : there's no question of why he started. I've read all different accounts of how he was an African carry-over and such...that's not what he said. First thing, he was a grave digger--let's get that straight. Gravedigger that he was, he started off with skulls, where he worked, erosion washed some skulls out of the hillside, and teeth, and he'd try to get the right skulls back in the right graves, and he'd put the teeth back in, sometimes the only way he could was with a little clay, you'd just have to make do, he told me personally, it was a very short step from there to just making the clay pieces, like the Neolithic skulls of Jericho, 7000 B.C., he could take and coat the skulls with clay and then build the features up, it being a quiet sort of occupation with a lot of sitting around, waiting. So he'd put a little clay on the skulls, really really raw, earthy stuff. He didn't want anybody to die but if nobody died he wouldn't make any money, okay? Somebody needed to die on a fairly regular basis so that he could dig something. He was also digging in a place where there was clay, in Mississippi. So what he would find while he was digging was this clay, a white clay; it's very, very slippery and hard, kids make mud-balls out of it and the like. And after some of those heavy rains it wouldn't be unusual for some of the graves to get washed out, the older graves. Sometimes there would be heads there, you know, skulls, and sometimes, the artist told me, he would try to put things back where they belonged. Every now and then there would be a few teeth left over--a few teeth left over. So just joking around one day he made a head because he had a bunch of spare teeth and he just put the teeth in. They weren't saving them for anything, that's for sure. One thing he said to me was that a couple of times he and his co-workers would take a skull and put clay on the skull, to kind of playfully just see if they could "get to know what the person looked like."
I'll never forget being at a fancy place with him one night in Alexandria, Louisiana, everybody came out (all these white people as polished as they could be and Ford Thomas, sick as a dog after he'd eaten canned chili in the bus station); they had all these hors d'oeuvres, you couldn't even recognize half the food, so they had all these things and Son Thomas came out there, and they offered him some and he said, "No, that's all right--they'll be fried chicken when I get home."
So Thomas started by applying clay first to skulls, just to check it out, and then by putting in teeth that he would find after a 'wash- out.' That's why his work is also important in the exhibition--it's about working with what you have in relation to your job, the time spent, what you have to do to get at what you make.
Also in the exhibition are works by several anonymous artists; from one of them is this very rare 'ghetto' or 'high stepper' bicycle, built in Thomasville, Georgia, in 1964. The young man who built it was later killed in Viet Nam in 1970, but his mother kept it, in his memory, though it later came into the hands of a collector. These bikes were a symbol of upheaval, 'rise-aboveness,' and of 'cool mobility.' They were the precursors of 'pimp mobiles'--cars of the late '60s and early '70s, common in the big cities of L.A., Detroit, Jacksonville, and Atlanta, and these bicycles were the assimilation of a turned-over world, and were fashioned from discarded parts in a make-do manner.
No one has identified "The Philadelphia Wire Man" (or woman). Whoever the person is or was, s/he was obsessive, single-minded in technique, probably always walking. Perhaps even homeless. Over 600 of these small, tightly-wrapped, street-debris, fetish-like clusters were found in an alley during the renovation of South Street during the late '70s. I like to envision a slowly-moving figure walking the streets, picking up trinket-like pieces of trash, wire- scrap, etc., an intuitive wrapping and tieing taking place until a hand-sized conglomerate object was obtained. Once hand-sized, this fetish object was no doubt stuffed in a pocket and another piece started. At the end of the day or the week, pockets were emptied into the hiding place.
Minnie Evans: I like the way she worked unmolested without anybody knowing about it. This has always appealed to me; with some of these artists you don't even know they were generating the work until after they are dead. In her case, working as a ticket- taker and sometimes gardener for rich people keeping their landscapes and their ideas of themselves immaculate and then going home to her much lesser place, you can see that she rendered her own ideal world. Of course, her work is now very sought-after and expensive. Her anonymous works during her most fruitful period, the '40s and the fact that she could work in anonymity for that long appeal to me, strongly.
Inez Walker. The appeal with Inez Walker is different. She is someone who didn't start working until something cataclysmic happened; the way I heard her story is that she's having a rough life, she's picking apples and she's hooked up with the wrong guy (who mistreats her). She says "the Hell with it!"--he dies in the house and charges are brought against her so that she has to go to prison. In prison there are remedial programs; she's not too easy to get along with and there are personality conflicts. She begins working and creates straight ahead confrontational drawings (much like she is). The idea that she would work, begin to generate, get out of prison and disappear points to the fact that something happened to her (but we don't know what). There have been rumors that she reappeared, though since the early '80s no one has really known where she went. Yet she left this wonderful, obscure body of work: "whereabouts unknown"--fits perfectly, here.
Henry Speller is someone I came to more slowly. Some of the subject matter I had seen didn't really affect my thinking one way or the other, but he covered a lot of ground, and a lot of imagery. A lot of the imagery is sexually orientated, but not all. This is an artist who has probably worked longer than many others in this show. He started drawing around 1941/42; he drew quick drawings when he had a job, but once he retired, he didn't slack off. He threw the pencil on the paper, he stayed with it; it works today. My picture of this guy is of him sitting in a slum in the projects of Memphis, in front of a TV, a few of the kids around, drawing. I think as long as he has the eyesight, Speller will keep on drawing. He was obscure for a long period of time, but his work is recognized now.
Ted Gordon is 69 years old and attended college--so, not as obscure or unknown or unheralded as I would like. He's wanted to be an artist all along, but somehow the frontality of his work, the "confrontationalness" of the faces, again (like Inez Walker)--where it's a single explosion of the human face gets us back to the basis of outsider art and plain common sense. When we look at somebody, we look them in the eyes and make a decision about character, whether we're right or wrong. Ted Gordon's work is like that. By using the large heads, explosive in his expressionism, he makes that snap judgement about a situation or a character that I think is an essential part of the rawness of this kind of art.
Louis "Slingshot" Hamm was born around 1905 in Oklahoma. His father was a Payute Indian who served as "spirit carver" for the tribe. Louis "grew up wild like" and started off his career as a trick roper with his brother. They travelled around giving demonstrations at local events until joining the Cells-Floto Circus where "Slingshot" would eventually meet his wife who had a trained dog act and his lifetime best friend Doc Webb who was completely covered with tatoos. In the off season "Slingshot" would do railroad work and sold a few carvings. He was actually an "ace" slingshot shooter and eventually this became his best act for the carnivals he travelled with. He had the "biggest hands anyone had ever seen" and got in the habit of making his own shoes with the soles held on by brass screws: 136 to the foot. Louis also carved his own teeth out of wood as he began to lose his natural ones. He and his wife never had children and he never had an exhibition of his work during his lifetime. He worked in carved wood that was then painted; he worked on wall panels, and one of these works is a Pearl Harbor scene in low relief while another is a bullfight featuring a woman bullfighter in high heels and a bikini. He also sculpted animals and traditional themes where the mongoose and snake are fighting. The style and the technique that he had puts him well up there with the carvers and the shapers. Obscure. He worked on the side of a hill in the mountains of California until his death. He didn't sell work, but put it out in his yard and in his house. The work didn't surface until he was gone but survives in several VFW lodges and private collections.
John Gerdes is a very, very interesting man--doesn't fit the normal profile. He grew up and worked for years in the Cleveland area, having come from Germany when he was a baby. He's about 80, now, and he ended up doing some very unusual painting that looks like inlaid wood, then, later, robots, and then went on to fantasy-type drawings and inlays. He is different in that he takes a more mathematical approach to his painting, and it stands in stark contrast to the more rough and tumble raw make-do of most of the work in the exhibition. He was trained as the type of craftsman who paints furniture to look like the color and grain of natural wood and so he's done pieces where the entire painting looks like inlaid wood. These are often fool-the-eye geometric patterns that are completely persuasive. He uses ground pigment and beer to paint with.
O.L. Samuels, the first time I went to see him, actually had a small heart attack while I was there. He's a big man, but we had to lay him down, get some medicine to him, get him going again. I'm always interested in what it took to get someone started working. O.L. had a job working in the pulp wood industry; he started out in the sure enough country, real back woods, of Georgia. His salary to begin was half a penny a tree as a tree-sweeper; a tree-sweeper goes out before they burn the forest and sweeps all the stuff out from around the tree so that when the fire comes, it won't burn the tree. He stayed in pulpwood all his life until, finally, he had a tree come back on him, crush him, first, then hang him up 80 feet off the ground, big tall pine. He up in the air, presumed dead, and the crew is in no hurry as they go about bringing down what they imagine is just his lifeless body, blood dropping down. Finally, they get up there and find out he's alive, and they get him to the ambulance. During the time he's convalescing, he begins to work, making small pieces, very tentative at first, very small; but when he begins to recover, he came back with this obsessive and often very perverse expression. Perverse can mean a lot of things. It can signify meanness and badness, and being a real native cracker myself, then I can recognize real crackerness. Black cracker experience. He'd not be averse to a sentiment like being bad, right to the bone--voodooistic, almost. He works in carved wood, painted, with unusual subject matter, there's one that is a dog, a large dog, inlaid teeth, with a little white hand sticking out of it, and then another is a monkey man: half-monkey, half-man, it has a tail on it, and it is bad, bad to the bone. He lives near Moultrie, Georgia.
Willard "Texas Kid" Watson, may be alive, may not be--no way to know, when artists get over 80. I first met him in the late '60s when he was still pretty young, and he was working even then; then Jonathan Demme put him in a movie (Something Wild) and I met him again. Like J.J. Aaron, he was half-Indian, half-black, and lived in the south on the coast. From the beginning he started doing drawings of reminiscence, writing the story of something and then doing the drawing, with Pentel color pens, and the like. This is basic work from suppose and remember situations; he just worked with what he had- -but it never caught on, maybe it's not weird enough for northern people (and southern people, maybe they were put off by the impermanent materials, I don't know).
Justin McCarthy's work is like melding J.J. Aaron's roughness with O.L. Samuels' slickness--both of them started working suddenly, from cataclysmic events: but one ends up extremely slick, and one ends up extremely non-slick. Justin, incarcerated, everybody knows the work, he represents, as much as anyone, that idea of painting your fantasy, the world as you would like it to have been, or even as you would have liked it to have been in your memories. Minnie Evans did that, too--she went home and painted those faces, moths or butterfly shapes almost, which were idealized presentations of a garden if you looked down on it, an aerial view. Justin McCarthy sometimes painted an idealized situation or psychological dilemma with people, objects, and events. Minnie painted an ideal--whether a couple embracing one another, or a face, idealized, and Justin painted out those dreams, whether it was the people or the small ships on the rough ocean. His ability to take his inner world directly to the painting, was really good. No excuses, take it and do it--very obscure once, now, of course, appreciated.
Frank Jones was someone who would stay in prison till the end of his life. Another man--I can't get the work--called Clockwatcher Hess, was his main competition in prison; matter of fact, I have a Jones drawing that--after he died--was still there at the prison, and as soon as he was gone, this Clockwatcher Hess, protecting his turf, drew over Jones' work because during their lifetimes in prison, Jones had always come out on top as the best artist in the whole prison. As mentioned before, Dave Hickey called work like this "amphetamine classicism"--repetitive, because of the drugs. Prison has the same effect on some people: repetitive marks, delineated shape, the pattern remains the same, over and over and over.
Clyde Jones has sometimes been known as Jungle Boy, but he doesn't like that nickname, anymore. The first time I saw Clyde Jones' work, I was struck with his ability to see figures in rough sections of log. He is like Aaron in that respect; it didn't take J.J. two seconds to make something out of any piece of wood he picked up. I like that direct guerilla approach to making work: it is really good, rough, primitive, fabricated out of raw chunks of wood. Sometimes it's painted. Again, he started working because of a cataclysmic event; a woodworker, he got hurt--a log fell on him. He almost died, but he came back out, and decided he didn't want to do things the old way, but wanted to do this, instead.
Raymond Coins. This guy is almost unapproachable; you don't get around his property much, but I managed to locate him for a videotape. His place is so hidden, where he lives. Richard Craven's directions were "over this mountain, across the gully, over the bridge, turn back to the right, he's on the left"...that kind of direction.
His work looks just like he does, not Aleutian at all. He looks like that! Low relief, hard sandstone pieces. Why are Eskimo sculptures so rounded and smooth? Because of the wind up there; you have to go to the far north, like I did, to see carving like that: everything looks like that. People look like that, igloos look like that, seals look like that. Mr. Coins had several visions in the '30s and in one of these he sees the future and is led up a shining path by a small deer. He carved many variations based on these visions as well as traditional themes such as Adam and Eve, Temptation, Moses receiving the Ten Commandments and the like. He also carved beautifully sensitive turtles, frogs, birds, and other animals; all in a rounded, Eskimo style. Anyway, Coins, working in his house, obscure, working on the side of a hill. His first pieces used to be in the driveway to stop erosion--what a wonderful way to start carving.
And what about the kid in this exhibition, Donovan Durham, is that ever a story. Born there in York, Pennsylvania, he developed sickle cell anemia and was referred to as retarded by some. He couldn't speak in complete sentences and was encouraged to start drawing by his doctor. (As a form of communication.) Himself and his two brothers, going to the doctor, washing his face, and other events became his subject matter. Lots of needles in the drawings (always having to take injections).
The Fire Department in York sponsored an art contest along the theme of fire prevention in 1976 and Donovan won first place--at which point his parents said "That's it! no more graven images!" They were Jehovah's Witnesses and felt the drawings he had done to show his doctor over the three years ''74-''76 were improper but marginally ok because no one saw them except the family. But when Donovan's work appeared in the local newspaper, the family took his materials away, dismissed the physician, forbid Donovan to ever draw again, and moved away to Philadelphia where all trace of Donovan has been lost. The drawings we exhibited were done when he was eleven and twelve years old. That a child made-do with his condition in life and produced sensitive, perceptive works while sick, rejected, and unable to communicate with language is astounding and touching at the same time.
His story reminds me of a time when looking for slave sites near Fowltown, Alabama, I tripped over a small child's grave marked by a home-made slab with these hand-written words: "Budded On Earth To Bloom In Heaven."
James Harold Jennings. Wonderful guy, I talked to him not long ago. He has the same answer for every question you ask him, or any comment; you can go up to him, you lead up to your question, you bring him right into it, and he has the same answer, yes, or no. It's either yes, or no. He's living across the street from the house he was born in, in school buses, with a bunch of cats; he has no power and no running water. He worked in a film theatre for a long time, as a projectionist--very obscure life--then one day, I think his mother died or something. That was it, it was over, he made no more concessions to normal life. He moved back to where he'd been born and now just lives with nothing. You send some money or you buy a piece from him, and he puts the money in the bank, or gives it to a church--one thing is certain, he doesn't spend it! He does all this stuff without power saws; just takes some scrap wood and starts to make a statement about the ideal that he thought things might be, but it didn't turn out that way. For him, it's the idealized version. Perhaps he projected too many violent movies, I don't know.
Joseph Hardin, born 1921, committed suicide Christmas Day, 1989; wheelchair-bound most of is life, he was discovered by a caregiver in the Meals on Wheels program. He had lived in a high- rise apartment across from a ballet school and loved to watch the girls dance and play. He didn't feel very safe in the apartment though, and slept with a pistol tied to a cord. Even his pencils and brushes had to be tied to cords and inserted in his hand, and he had to paint from the shoulder, so serious was his motor skills impairment from arthritis. He painted a world in which he could not participate--female figures that became more and more vicious in characterization as the years went by.
The Reverend Johnnie S. Swearingen was born in the Black community of Campground Church near Chapel Hill, Texas in 1908, where his daddy was a farmer and his mama "a religious woman" who brought the Lord to her children. Young Johnnie had his first revelation when he was seven years old, and then a second revelation when he was nine--at which point he joined the Methodist church. It was still his mother, however, who spoke religiously to him the most, and he was "with the Lord in childhood." When the children played he always played the Preacher and, thus, received his nickname "Reverend." When Johnnie turned fourteen he began to "weave away from his parents," and "got overcome by unruly behavior" such as skipping school, skipping church, and lying to his father. By age seventeen, the condition had worsened; he said of himself that he got "mean, hateful, and toted a pistol all the time." His caring parents took him to several doctors who suspected he had "too much blood." Nothing worked--so his parents gave up and sought help for their eighteen-year-old from a fortune teller in Waco. She prayed for him and gave him some special medicine, and after staying with her for three weeks, "the Lord appeared [to him] in the form of a little girl" showing him his own death and telling him to go preach The Word.
He disobeyed the vision and when his mother died suddenly, Johnnie blamed himself. This caused him to start preaching the Word mostly about "obedience to mother, father, and Bible." The Reverend took off through the southwest, "chopping cotton, trainhopping, and odd-jobbing" his way to California where he was married, they had a baby, but the child died the same week he got word that his "daddy was down" and wanted to see him "one last time."
He returned to Texas in 1948, but his father died only hours before he got home. In 1949 he married again, and settled down in Brenham, Texas, with his wife Murray, to start farming after eighteen years on the road. One day in 1962 the Lord called him again, and he started going to church on Sunday, farming in the day, and painting at night.
Johnnie S. painted actively for the next thirty years until his death in February, 1993. He had two shotgun shacks side-by-side, one to live in, one to paint in, and could often be found in the front room painting with a bottle of Lone Star on one side and a spit bucket on the other (Peach brand snuff). He had curious huge hands, that were washed but never entirely cleaned of the paint: the paint caked up over the years until his hands were crusty and multicolored--which he preferred.
Johnnie would hang his paintings on his front fence to sell and in later years would take them to the town square to sell off of his pick-up truck. He had been drawing and painting all his life, and as a child "used shoepolish to paint on the house walls and cardboard when he could get it." Later on, as he got older, he was most happy when he "started making some money" from the art he loved.
He was well known to the young white painters around Huntsville; they loved and cared for him, sometimes inviting him to critique their paintings, and Johnnie S. would always start off with "Boy, you don't know nothing." One of his favorite stories was the time when the "white boys" took him to the hospital for a "look over" where something caused him to punch out the nurse, a man, and "run out of the hospital--still in only the hospital gown--with black butt showing!"
He was a big man who would paint in a tie and white cowboy hat worn Texas-ranger style; he had a Chaplin-style mustache, and suspenders holding up khaki pants. He made his young painting friends cut his hair as needed telling them "I don't have money for no barber"--even though he always in his later years kept five thousand in cash in his wallet "just in case."
Sarge Stone has just one body of work. He did things all his life for the military; he joined the service in 1938, so he was in WWII, and he stayed in the service, served in the Korean War, went right on to Viet Nam, and stayed in the service until they forced him to a medical discharge in 1969. Very curious man, lives in a trailer park in Apalachicola, Florida. The whole ceiling of the place is covered with memorabilia and rods and reels, and he completed while he was there a series of targets--you take your pistol, or your 22 rifle, and start plinking at them. Stone harkened back, sort of like Buddy Boone did before he died, to a time of '30s symbolism--they're almost carny-like, some of them x-rated. A target means you're shooting at somebody, or you're shooting a donkey in the butt, or you're shooting at Tex (but you could hit him in his delicate parts). Curious stuff-- sure, he's got the one-hung-low and the no see'em and the blue- eyed, cross-eyed tribe of Indian targets. Very much like you'd have seen in the late '30s when he was first in the military, the cavalry. He joined because he could ride horses. There are only 16 pieces total, all late '70s into mid-'80s.
Dilmus Hall: First time I went to Dilmus Hall's house, Andy Nasisse took me. This artist was totally obscure, the work was not sought after, then, and probably never will be. But when I went to the house, I was immediately struck by the small patch of dirt there. Hall had dealt primarily in red and black and I liked the either/or- ness of that, like James Harold Jennings, everything was either red or black--either dead or alive, and it was a passionate give or take in this way. He came up with lone figures, like you'd see in Haiti, that had a coming-to-get-you feeling about them. And again there were small pieces at the house, and around the house black and red rocks. I can respond to just what these pieces are--it's not that the work is going to change the life-style of mankind or be sought by public museums, but we are showing it because it represents that make-do under all odds philosophy, design and artistic expression in comment on something around him. We ought to be able to respond to the private input from these artists; Dilmus Hall as much as anyone gave us that.
Z.B.D. Armstrong--he's really weirded out now, someone was telling me that he got off on the wrong track when people started coming by. But now he's on the right track again; in the early pieces, he makes what would be perpetual clocks or calendars, puts these numbers on them and starts matching them up, writes on them. He's on up in years, and I'm not sure if he's still living.
Some of the other artists included in the exhibition are Chelo Amezcua and John Harvey. Chelo never married, but raised her young brothers and sisters after her mother died. She worked in a 5 & 10 and was said to have been very religious, but interested in fortune telling as well; she wrote narratives on the back of her drawings. We know she was born in 1903 and died in 1975. Harvey, born in 1951, another artist with prison experience, is back in prison again. Galleries are asking a lot for his work; he's an anomaly in this show because he's so young, though he is rapidly rising out of obscurity. By contrast there's Ezekiel Gibbs who was one hundred and four years old, and still living when we started curating this exhibition. He lived in this house, two or three wives all died, his children, some of them died, too, but he keeps living, and evidently just got up one day and started painting everything around him. Sometimes they're watercolors and there's a type of pointillism involved. He passed away the same day that Dude McGriff did.
Roger Rice is the third youngest artist in this exhibition and certainly one of the most vehement in his interpretation of the liturgy. He was born in 1958 in Mississippi, and is an ordained minister who has occasionally preached. Now living in Oklahoma, his paintings explore themes of sexual temptations, faith under duress and similar topics. He's controversial; once he is reputed to have gone to church with a Playboy foldout stitched to his jacket. His works are characterized by active brushwork and often dark colors, mysterious figures, devil helpers, full-figured women, and strange animals with human-like faces. He seems to concentrate more on evil than on good in his pictorial compositions; who knows where he'll go next?
I once found a body of work, done by a homeless person somewhere on the road, done during a time of stress--we know because of what was written on it. I found this work, ink drawings on cardboard, in the middle of an intersection; it was strewn all over everywhere. The work had been carried in a bundle, maybe the guy got hit, the packet itself had just been hit and slammed all over. We asked around for a long time, but never could find anyone who knew anything about it. Anonymous, make-do work, unsigned, unsung.
Jim Roche
Professor
Department of Fine Arts
Florida State University
Tallahassee
1993