Collins Obijiaku @ Luce Gallery, Turin - Traces of Me

Collins Obijiaku: Traces of Me 

Luce Gallery, Turin 

May 4 - June 30, 2023 

Luce Gallery presents Traces of Me, the first solo exhibition for COLLINS OBIJIAKU with the gallery. On view are series of new portrait paintings - all with his signature meandering charcoal line-work.

Collins Obijiaku is a Nigerian-based painter who uses the tradition of portraiture to examine the depths, truths, and complexities of humanity. In each work, the artist paints quiet, composed figures, with expressive gazes, to directly engage the viewer. To further strengthen the allure and intimacy, Collins Obijiaku draws a winding line—with no detectable beginning or end—that weaves throughout the sitter’s face and skin reminiscent of ‘mapping’ each person’s life journey. Together, the paintings in Traces of Me encourage viewers to contemplate the individuality of each person, as well as their distinct contribution to the diversity and complexity of the human experience.

This exhibition brings together a collection of portraits of people the artist has known since childhood. As the title Traces of Me hints, the paintings conceal a small element of the artist’s connection between him and each kindred spirit on view, a sentiment Collins Obijiaku felt after working on the series. In every elegant composition, he observes an old friend, memorializing their likeness, and thoughtfully records their inner conviction of strength, hope, positivity, and intelligence. Although usually indifferent to incorporating symbolism into his work, his use of ochre yellow, in many of the paintings, references the artist’s nostalgic connection to the hue from childhood. He recalled that all the brightest students were selected for the yellow group — a color he still associates with intelligence to this day. While aesthetically pleasing, the true strength of Collins Obijiaku’s work is how he marries observations of each sitter’s distinct mannerisms and expressions, with his meditative charcoal line work, to gently guide the viewer to see more deeply and encourage profound empathy.

In Portrait of Gladys (woman in blue dress) we see an elegant, young Nigerian woman donning a periwinkle blue dress. In a pale yellow room, she sits with her arms pressing downward, shifting her weight slightly left while leaning ever-so-slightly forward toward us, meeting our gaze directly. There’s a brief pause in her expression — her eyes slightly squinting— as if she’s examining us, rather than the other way around.

Her demeanor is calm and poised, while simultaneously exuding an inner confidence. For Collins Obijiaku this confidence is particularly important to emphasize with his female sitters, as he seeks to change common misconceptions of women, and instead emphasize their power. Meandering throughout her face, across her chest, and cascading down each arm, Collins Obijiaku’s signature charcoal lines create visual pathways for the viewer to explore. Working much like fingerprints or wrinkles, the lines identify her, as well as all the twists and turns of life. She knows who she is, where she’s been, and where she aspires to be.

COLLINS OBIJIAKU (b.1995) is a Nigerian-based visual artist working in portraiture. A self-taught painting and drawing artist, Collins Obijiaku creates alluring portraits of individuals from his home country. In each work captivating gazes and skin permeated with charcoal line work resembling topographic maps, foster a deeper understanding of both the individual, and ultimately humanity as a whole. In 2019, Collins Obijiaku was an artist-in-residence at Black Rock Senegal, the multidisciplinary residency program founded by artist Kehinde Wiley in Dakar, Senegal. Collins Obijiaku’s works have been also exhibited at the Museum of African Diaspora in San Francisco and the National Gallery of Arts in Enugu in Nigeria. His international exhibitions throughout Africa, Europe, and the United States include a solo show with Roberts Projects in Los Angeles, California. Additionally, his work has been acquired by numerous private collections and public institutions, including the Dallas Museum of Art in Dallas, Texas.

LUCE GALLERY

Largo Montebello, 40, 10124 Torino

www.lucegallery.com

George Widener @ Andrew Edlin Gallery, NTC – Tip of the Iceberg

George Widener: Tip of the Iceberg 

Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York 

May 20 – June 30, 2023 

Andrew Edlin Gallery presents Tip of the Iceberg, its first solo exhibition for George Widener since announcing its representation of the artist earlier this year. The show offers a twenty-two-year overview of George Widener’s oeuvre, which made a remarkable entry into the art world around the turn of the millennium, seemingly from out of nowhere.

An awkward social outsider during his troubled youth, GEORGE WIDENER (b. 1962) demonstrated exceptional memory skills and prodigious abilities in the fields of mathematics and temporal calculation. After graduating from high school with honors, he spent four years as an Air Force intelligence technician, specializing in aerial surveillance. An unhoused nomad for most of his twenties, he worked sporadically as a day-laborer before going to Europe without a plan, traveling from one city to another. During these seemingly aimless years he filled countless notebooks with numbers, calendrical sequences, architectural drawings, and statistics. After he suffered an extended spell of withdrawal and anxiety in the early 1990s, he was diagnosed with high-functioning Asperger’s Syndrome, which removed the stigma of mental illness that he carried from previous misdiagnoses.

Buoyed by a newfound self-confidence, George Widener started making larger, more ambitious drawings, in which he combined his architecturally related images with his obsessive lists of dates, numbers, and statistical information—material previously confined to his notebooks. These were his first works to attract the attention of the art world. George Widener’s compositions are often executed on patched-together napkins and scrolls stained with tea to affect the look of parchment. Seemingly torn from ancient manuscripts, his works are layered with accident, palimpsests, and esoteric knowledge, incorporating elaborate numerical puzzles and games, complex puns, palindromes, and prophecies informed by historical events. Visually arresting and mysteriously compelling, the work is numerically dense and can be difficult to decode. George Widener explains that complex pattern relationships among some of the numerically rendered dates can only be appreciated by super-computers that haven’t yet been built. For him the processes of calculating and rendering the numbers constitute “an effort akin to meditation,” and mathematical analysis is not required to appreciate the work.

George Widener has long been intrigued by historical catastrophes and traumas—their circumstances, the dates on which they occurred, and all the related details. He has made many drawings about such events, especially on the sinking of the ocean liner Titanic on April 15, 1912. The disaster, along with and cross-sectional views of the ship, figures in several drawings here, and the exhibition’s title alludes to it.

George Widener’s “Megalopolis” series represents his vision of a humane approach to urban design. His ideas about sociological balance are visually expressed in the bilateral symmetry of these urban plans and their street systems.

Other drawings incorporate his renditions of magic squares (or magic circles)—a numerical grid in which the rows, columns, and diagonals add up to identical sums. Appropriating the form for his own purposes, he assigns calendar dates to each section.

A more recent category of George Widener’s art is represented by a large-scale self-portrait from 2020, a selective autobiographical overview consisting of block-lettered texts and miniature-scale imagery in a narrative format. In the concluding passage he obliquely references the COVID-19 pandemic through a depiction of beak-masked plague doctors from the fourteenth century—the era of the Black Death.

George Widener’s engagement with current events is reflected in a relatively new series, “Krakow to Ukraine,” and specifically with his direct, on-the-ground involvement in the war as a volunteer with a Polish group transporting non-military supplies into Ukraine. Some of his experiences in that endeavor are mapped in these drawings.

The thread that links all of these personal, social, and historical themes is numerical—lines, columns, and blocks of meditatively rendered, calendar-referenced numbers. With rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and the continued articulation of his individual experiences and thought processes, George Widener holds out hope that his work might one day yield a new understanding of time and the unfolding of human events.

George Widener’s art has appeared in numerous exhibitions at museums in the U.S. and Europe. In addition to a solo exhibition, Secret Universe, at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2013), group exhibitions have included World Transformers: The Art of the Outsiders, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2011); The Alternative Guide to the Universe, Hayward Gallery, London (2013); Great and Might Things: Outsider Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art, (2013); Memory Palaces: Inside the Collection of Audrey B. Heckler, the American Folk Art Museum, New York (2019); and Outsider Art: The Collection of Victor F. Keen, Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, Chicago (2019). His work has been presented at numerous galleries including Henry Boxer (London), Carl Hammer (Chicago), Ricco Maresca (New York), Susanne Zander (Cologne) and was featured in the group exhibition System and Vision at David Zwirner Gallery (New York) in 2015.

The artist’s work can be found in many notable public and private collections, including, among others, the American Folk Art Museum (New York), the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C.), the Collection de l’Art Brut (Lausanne, Switzerland), the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the abcd/art brut Collection Bruno Decharme (Paris), the Museum of Everything (London), museum gugging (Klosterneuburg, Austria), the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art (Chicago), the High Museum of Art (Atlanta), and the Asheville Art Museum (Asheville, NC).

ANDREW EDLIN GALLERY

212 Bowery, New York, NY 10012

www.edlingallery.com

_____________

American Outsider Art @ Philadelphia Museum of Art - Of God and Country: American Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection

Of God and Country: 

American Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz  Collection 

Philadelphia Museum of Art 

May 19, 2023 – January 1, 2024 

Josephus Farmer

Cotton Kingdom,1987

Paint and enamel on carved wood

Collection of Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz

Jon Serl

Between Two Worlds, 20th century

Oil on board, artist-made frame 

Collection of Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz

Elijah Pierce

Untitled, 20th century

Paint, glitter, and varnish on carved wood 

Collection of Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is presenting an exhibition devoted to an important group of works by artists historically marginalized or excluded from traditional narratives of art history and typically described as “Outsider artists.” Of God and Country: American Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection explores their work through themes ranging from history to daily life, including the nation’s legacy of enslavement and racism, the landscape, and meditations on death and mortality. The exhibition features voices that variously critique and celebrate American life, often expressing ambivalence toward both the past and present while strong faith in the future, whether in this life or the next. Each work is drawn from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection, including gifts, promised gifts, and loans to the museum. 

Sasha Suda, the George D. Widener Director and CEO, said: “Surrender your ideas of genre as you enter Of God and Country and allow yourself to let codified art hierarchies and categories melt away. That is the special pleasure of this collection of work often called Outsider Art.  We are immensely grateful to Jill Bonovitz, and to our longstanding museum Trustee Sheldon Bonovitz, for this remarkable array of works. Not only did they generously present the museum with a major promised gift of their collection in 2011, but the Bonovitzes have continued to collect with insight and passion and have generously contributed additional gifts during their shared adventure.”

Many of the artists represented in the exhibition ultimately achieved considerable reputations. Martín Ramírez and Bill Traylor are considered iconic figures. Sister Gertrude Morgan, Rev. Howard Finster, Joseph Yoakum, and Purvis Young are also widely known, while others remain less well recognized practitioners in the field of 20th century American art, including Jon Serl, Bruno del Favero, and S.L. Jones.

Purvis Young

Untitled (Truck & Protesters), Late 20th century 

Mixed media, paint on wood construction 

Collection of Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz

Herbert Singleton

The Enemies Within, Late 20th century

Enamel on carved found wood

Collection of Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz

The exhibition includes a broad range of media, sizes, and styles, and is organized in four sections, beginning with U.S. History & Life in America, which contains potent symbols of the US, including the flag, Uncle Sam, and portraits of figures ranging from Abraham Lincoln and Dwight D. Eisenhower to Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Some works highlight positive aspects of American life while others, such as Jail was Heat, by Purvis Young (1943-2010) and The Enemies Within, by Herbert Singleton (1945-2007), contain themes of discriminatory policing and incarceration policies that target Black communities.

Joseph Yoakum

Mt Willow in Ozark Range, Jefferson City Missouri, 

Early to mid-20th century

Watercolor, pen, and ink on paper 

Collection of Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz

A section called The American Landscape contains lively images of people and animals, agrarian life, and mountain ranges. Many of the artists represented here grew up in rural communities, often working on farms, while others traveled widely. Works by Martin Ramirez (1895-1963) include Horse and Rider, which evokes mineshafts and tunnels that the artist would have known working as a miner and railroad worker in California. Another drawing, by Joseph Yoakum (1891-1972), evokes dreamy mountains, rivers, gorges, and rocky outcroppings, suggesting an anthropomorphic vision infused by memory and imagination.

Sister Gertrude Morgan

The Lamb and his Bride, 20th century

Ink, acrylic, and crayon on repurposed Tide laundry detergent box 

Collection of Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz

Christianity and Spirituality reflects a history of American evangelicalism, as these artists often felt divinely inspired to make art and used their work to teach religious devotion. The section contains a focused grouping of works by street preacher Sister Gertrude Morgan (1900-1980), who established a gospel mission in the lower ninth ward of New Orleans. She represented herself as the bride of Christ there in New Jerusalem Highway, a painting also populated with images of angels.

Howard Finster

People and Time Come Together . . ., #16,977, 1990 

Paint on wood cutout

Collection of Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz

Death and Mortality, the final section, reflects upon life’s fragility and Christian afterlife. In People and Time Come Together, Rev. Howard Finster (1916-2001) offers us a scaly dinosaur, painted on wood, surrounded by warnings of apocalypse; he dedicated himself to art at age 60, following a vision, and produced thousands of works, often evoking the urgency of end times. Another highlight is St. Helena First Black Embalmer John, painted on a corrugated iron sheet by Sam Doyle (1906-1985). He often rendered Black celebrities, such as Ray Charles or Joe Louis, but here focuses on a man practicing his craft as an embalmer, readying the deceased for the next journey.

The exhibition is organized by Louis Marchesano, Audrey and William H. Helfand Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs; Jessica Smith, Director of Curatorial Initiatives and Susan Gray Detweiler Curator of American Art; Jun P. Nakamura, former Suzanne Andree Curatorial Fellow; with contributions from Monique D'Almeida, Margaret R. Mainwaring Curatorial Fellow and Kendra Grimmett, former Carl Zigrosser Fellow.

“This exhibition is devoted to works created by people who operated far from the world of galleries, museums, and art schools, and yet they created astonishing works of art," said Louis Marchesano. “Of God and Country argues for a much wider, open-ended and more inclusive consideration of artistic vision in the United States of the 20th century and today.”

This exhibition is made possible by Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz.

About the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection

It is considered one of the finest private collections of works by American self-taught artists, and Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz assembled it over the course of several decades before making part of it a promised gift to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2011. Including 177 works of art, it contributed significantly to establishing the Museum as one of the primary centers for the study of artists who once rarely found a place in American museums, many having operated without academic training and outside traditional artistic discourse. The works in the Bonovitz collection were often produced in remote places using unconventional methods and materials such as reclaimed wood, sheet metal, house paint, and stove soot. These works draw upon the artists’ own experiences, immediate surroundings, and popular culture. In 2013, in association with Yale University Press, the Philadelphia Museum of Art published Great and Mighty Things: Outsider Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection, on the occasion of a major exhibition of the same title.

PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART

2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA 19130

philamuseum.org

We Are Made of Stories: Self-Taught Artists in the Robson Family Collection @ Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington

We Are Made of Stories: Self-Taught Artists in the Robson Family Collection

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington

July 1, 2022 - March 26, 2023

Sister Gertrude Morgan

Fan, ca. 1970

Paint and ink on card, 9 3⁄4 × 8 1⁄2 in.; irregular, double-sided 

Smithsonian American Art Museum

The Margaret Z. Robson Collection

Gift of John E. and Douglas O. Robson, 2016.38.43r-v 

Artists without formal training, who learned from family, community and personal journeys, have long been a presence in American art. But it was not until the 1980s, with the help of dedicated collector-advocates, that the collective force of their creative vision and presence reshaped the mainstream art world. “We Are Made of Stories: Self-Taught Artists in the Robson Family Collection” traces the rise of untrained artists in the 20th century and examines how, despite wide-ranging societal, racial and gender-based obstacles, their creativity and bold self-definition became major forces in American art.

The exhibition celebrates Douglas O. Robson’s 2016 gift of 93 artworks collected by his mother, Margaret Z. Robson (1932–2014). Margaret Robson embraced art that reflected diverse and personal journeys, and she supported museums and scholars in making it more available to the public. Her son now carries these efforts into the future. The exhibition features selected works from the original gift, 32 additional promised gifts and a major painting by Dan Miller that Douglas Robson donated to the museum in 2022. It is organized by Leslie Umberger, curator of folk and self-taught art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

“We are delighted to share recent gifts from the Robson Family collection with the public, and we celebrate Margaret and Doug Robson’s commitment to supporting the creativity of American artists,” said Stephanie Stebich, the Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “Since the 1970s, the Smithsonian American Art Museum has been a trailblazer in recognizing the broadest range of artistic expression. With this exhibition, SAAM continues its commitment to building a truly diverse collection that reflects the unique stories and voices of all artists.”

“We Are Made of Stories” confronts issues of marginalization that extend far beyond definitions of “self-taught” versus “academically trained” artists. Featuring 110 artworks, the exhibition examines the extraordinary lives of 43 artists, including James Castle, Thornton Dial Sr., William Edmondson, Howard Finster, Bessie Harvey, Sister Gertrude Morgan, the Philadelphia Wireman, Nellie Mae Rowe, Judith Scott and Bill Traylor, among others. By bringing the personal stories of the artists into focus, the depth and meaning of the artworks they made comes more fully into view.

“The works of art in the Robson Family Collection give voice to people who faced challenge, oppression and often extreme marginalization in their lifetimes, but by leaving their imprint in the form of art, moved the needle toward a more enlightened age, a more humanistic moment,” Leslie Umberger said. “This project amplifies unique perspectives and argues that multivocality is essential for a full and genuine picture of the United States. It looks at the solitary paths many of these artists traveled, as well as the collective ground they gained by asserting their personal views of the world and telling their own story.”

An introductory video features interviews with curator Leslie Umberger and collector Douglas Robson. Fourteen artists identified as “game changers” are examined in greater depth in the exhibition through text panels featuring biographical information and portraits of the artists. Through audio clips, the voices of artists Calvin and Ruby Black, Finster and Morgan are in the galleries and provide critical insight into select artists’ practices and unique environments. In-gallery kiosks highlight additional artworks from the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection, allowing visitors to further explore the creativity of these influential artists.

We Are Made of Stories: Self-Taught Artists 

in the Robson Family Collection

Exhibition Catalogue

Smithsonian American Art Museum / Princeton University Press

The lavishly illustrated catalog features more than 100 works with essays by Douglas Robson and Leslie Umberger that offer important and critically expansive contributions to the understanding of self-taught artists and how their individual stories have altered and enriched the complex history of American art. Co-published by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in association with Princeton University Press.

SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM - SAAM

Eighth and G Streets N.W., Washington, DC

americanart.si.edu

Philadelphia Museum of Art: Outsider Art Works acquired by the PMA - Exhibition is planned for 2013

The Philadelphia Museum of Art acquires major private collection of works by self-taught artists through a donation from Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz. The museum become one of the major holdings of Outsider Art in the USA. An exhibition is planned for 2013. 

Approximately 190 works by self-taught artists have become promised gifts to the Philadelphia Museum of Art from Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz, who have assembled over the past three decades one of the finest collections of outsider art in private hands in the United States. Their donation, which the Museum will celebrate with an exhibition and catalogue in spring of 2013, will increase the Museum’s holdings of outsider art by more than sixty percent. Sheldon Bonovitz is a member of the Museum’s Board of Trustees.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art began acquiring works by self-taught artists in 1993 and has organized a major traveling exhibition in this field, James Castle: A Retrospective (2008-2009). The Museum currently owns approximately 300 works by more than 50 self-taught artists. It is committed to showing their work in the context of mainstream production, as it often resonates in evocative ways with major movements represented in the collection, such as Dada and Surrealism, and with many aspects of contemporary practice. This was demonstrated in an exhibition mounted in 2000, entitled When Reason Dreams: Drawings Inspired by the Visionary, the Fantastic, and the Unreal. The new promised gifts will place the Museum among the major public holdings of outsider art in the USA, along with those of the American Folk Art Museum in New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the Milwaukee Art Museum.

“Jill and I are delighted to make this commitment of the works in our collection which have been selected by the Museum’s curators,” said Sheldon Bonovitz.  “With our gift, we are helping the Museum build recognition across a wide audience for the remarkable contributions of self-taught artists. We thank the Museum for recognizing the importance of self-taught artists within the broader field of contemporary art and hope that it will encourage other donors to help us further this important mission.”

“Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz have been pathfinders in this field,” said Timothy Rub, the Museum’s George D. Widener Director and CEO. “Their dedication to the work of self-taught artists and the exceptional vision they have brought to the development of their collection will now benefit the public and enable others to understand and appreciate this important, but little known aspect of modern and contemporary art.”

The exhibition planned for 2013 will focus on American artists active between the 1930s and 1980s, many of whom are African American, and will feature works by such iconic figures as William Edmondson, Bill Traylor, and Martín Ramírez, as well as by somewhat lesser-known but widely respected artists such as James Castle, Howard Finster, William Hawkins, and Elijah Pierce.

“Self-taught artists use a wide range of inventive working methods and often employ unconventional materials, including house paint, wood scraps, roofing tin, and shirt cardboard,” said Ann Percy, Curator of Drawings. “The individuality that characterizes the work and the artists’ methods of conceiving images independently of familiar styles, trends, or movements will appeal to a diverse audience interested in exploring new terrain in the art of the 20th and 21st centuries.”

Among the highlights of the Bonovitz collection are six works by William Edmondson (1874-1951), including the stone sculpture Horse. A retired janitor from Nashville, Tennessee, William Edmondson took up carving tombstones and outdoor stone ornaments in his mid to late fifties, sometime in the early 1930s. Over the next decade and a half he filled his back yard with small figures of birds, animals, and people, which he sculpted from found chunks of limestone using an old railroad spike for a chisel. Masterful in their simplification of form, pared down to the barest essentials, minimally articulated as to surface and texture, and almost geometric in their near abstraction, these works are today considered among the finest achievements of self-taught art in the United States.

Mexican-born Martín Ramírez (1895-1963), who ranks among the most respected self-taught artists in North America, is represented by seven spectacular works in the Bonovitz collection.  Working with found materials from the confines of DeWitt State Hospital, Auburn, California – diagnosed with schizophrenia, Martin Ramírez spent the greater part of his adult life in mental institutions – he reportedly employed ad hoc substances like spit, bread, and perhaps even mashed potatoes to bind together bits and pieces of used paper into large drawing surfaces.  On these irregular sheets he laid down thick, expressive crayon and graphite lines to create remarkably conceived, semi-abstracted images of trains, tunnels, Madonnas, horsemen, animals, and landscapes, often adding collaged elements from popular books or magazines.  Combined with the works by Martin Ramírez already owned by the museum, the Bonovitz gift will place Philadelphia’s holdings of this important artist among the finest in public institutions in the USA.

Known for his vibrantly colored, dramatically stylized paintings, William Hawkins (1895-1990) turned to art seriously at around age 85, after a life spent working – mostly in Columbus, Ohio – at jobs such as farming, truck-driving, demolition, and steel casting. The Bonovitz collection includes six major works by this artist, who employed brightly colored semi-gloss enamel paints, often poured directly onto large pieces of plywood or Masonite and energetically mixed, swirled, and scumbled with a stubby old paintbrush. His images, dramatic in effect and whimsical in composition, were derived from newspapers, magazines, photographs, and advertisements, and he often incorporated found materials into his works. In Boffo, the animal’s head and shoulders are built up with a heavy application of a bituminous substance such as tar or asphalt.

Bill Traylor (c. 1853-1949) 's works consist of flattened, simplified, and silhouetted images that are drawn with great skill and ingenuity on often-irregular paper or cardboard surfaces, as seen in House with Two Men, Dog, and Bird, one of a dozen superb works by the artist in the collection.  People, birds, and animals are in constant action in Traylor’s work, running, climbing, shooting, fighting, yelling, drinking, poking, chasing, pointing, or sitting, often within or on top of strange, unidentifiable geometric structures. Born a slave, Bill Traylor spent most of his life as a farmhand; however, for a few years in the late 1930s and early 1940s, homeless and in his late eighties, he drew pictures in pencil, colored pencil, and poster paint on found pieces of cardboard, making his art on a sidewalk in downtown Montgomery, Alabama.

Philadelphia Museum of Art
www.philamuseum.org 

Lonnie Holley at Jeff Bailey Gallery, Hudson, NY - Assemblages and Drawings

Lonnie Holley: Assemblages and Drawings
Jeff Bailey Gallery, Hudson, NY
June 24 – August 6, 2010

Jeff Bailey Gallery presents Lonnie Holley: Assemblages and Drawings. Lonnie Holley, a self-taught artist, is a sixty year old native Alabamian whose work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States. This is Lonnie Holley’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, and his first in New York in sixteen years.

Lonnie Holley’s unique combinations of found materials and everyday detritus result in mysterious and powerful objects. They reference spirituality, African American art forms and history, nature, and family relationships. Simultaneously, the visual impact of Holley’s work invites comparisons to the work of other contemporary artists, and therefore continues to break down the distinctions often made between self-taught artists and those with an art education background.

Lonnie Holley’s assemblages can be simple or complex in their composition. Along the Rails combines old wire, iron, wood, colored paper, cardboard, plastic and other materials.  Assembled with both delicacy and verve, its title suggests a journey, escape or hardship.  Molting Lonnie is composed of three parts: found concrete with a rebar that serves as the vertical support for a piece of molten iron. The top of the concrete base is splashed with red paint, dripping down the sides.  The materials and their deft organization evoke a raw and formal beauty, while the title of the work suggests impending growth, a recurring theme in Holley’s art.

Featured prominently in Lonnie Holley’s work is a facial profile, found in drawings, wire sculptures and carved sandstone pieces. Small or large, single or in layers, they typically have big eyes, open and expressive. In the drawing I in the Teacher’s Chair, profiles face left and right, while one large eye dominates the center. A kneeling figure cradles a child, watched from above. It is a family or community of sorts, observing and caring for one another.

These faces and figures function as characters in an ongoing story. Indeed, Lonnie Holley’s vivid descriptions of his art stress the interconnectedness of all people and things, both past and present.

Lonnie Holley was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and is the seventh of twenty-seven children. Against significant obstacles he has been a working artist for over thirty years. In Birmingham, he created a unique outdoor installation of his art on the acre of property where he lived, until a forced relocation seventeen years later. Lonnie Holley lives and works in Harpersville, Alabama.

Lonnie Holley’s work is included in numerous public collections: American Folk Art Museum, New York; Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Milwaukee Museum of Art, Wisconsin; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., among others.

The gallery would like to thank Larry Crenshaw for his assistance with the exhibition.

JEFF BAILEY GALLERY
127 Warren Street, Hudson, NY 12534
www.baileygallery.com