Art from outside the walls

The Smithsonian's traveling art exhibit features people who don't know the rules and don't have the tools but do have a need to express themselves.

By MARY ANN MARGER

© St. Petersburg Times, published October 8, 2000

They lack the money to buy paints in a tube or camel's hair brushes or priming coats for canvases. Mostly, they pick up scraps of lumber, leftover enamel and a whittling knife.

It's the single "have" that transforms these mundane things into art: an overpowering urge to express their vision.

The show of 70 works comes to Tampa for two reasons. First, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., has recognized the work as folk art, often witty, clever, meaningful or profound and always fresh and inspired.

Second, during the museum's current three-year renovation, it has sent a significant portion of its treasures on tour throughout the United States. "Contemporary Folk Art" is one of eight themed shows on the road. The only other one scheduled for the bay area, "The Gilded Age," reaches the Ringling Museum, Sarasota, on Dec. 15.

Two major collections, those of Herbert Waide Hemphill Jr., and Chuck and Jan Rosenak, make up a significant portion of this exhibit.

"Folk art" is actually a misnomer for this show. Traditionally, the term refers to the learned decorative and functional craft forms of a culture. That's not what's here.

[Photo: Smithsonian American Art Museum] Josephus Farmer, Samson, 1982, carved and painted redwood with rhinestones.

Technically, this non-mainstream art would more aptly be called outsider or self-taught, but, when Hemphill began collecting, he preferred to call it folk art. The Smithsonian kept the name more as a matter of convenience and a reference to the show's beginnings than for matters of accuracy. Nitpicking doesn't fit the mood and style of this show, anyway.

These artists have bypassed learning the techniques and history that make Western art look the way it does. They don't strive for a naturalistic style or know about conventional anatomical proportions and vanishing point perspective. They don't understand the continuing evolution of the avant-garde.

Few could have afforded college. Some have been confined to mental institutions or to prisons. Others are a hundred miles from the nearest art center class.

None of that has prevented them from pouring out their spiritual feelings or a reaction to injustice or their need to tell a story or simply to make an image.

Their work is often autobiographical, colorful and loaded with detail. Crudely executed written words frequently explain or add to the visual message, though they write with little knowledge of spelling and grammar.

[Photo: Smithsonian American Art Museum] William Hawkins, Food Bar, 1980, enamel paint on plywood.

They look for things that have outlived their functional intent. They recycle, though not out of any altruistic drive to save the universe.

Hawkins Bolden saw a face in an old washtub full of holes; it tops his untitled seated figure. An unidentified artist made a giraffe of bottle caps and marbles 6 feet tall. For whom? A grandchild? His own amusement?

Followers of outsider art will find many familiar artists among those on view. Thornton Dial Sr. turned to painting after he retired. When his family laughed at the result, not recognizing its sophistication, he turned to working in secret.

Purvis Young is a Florida artist who discovered his talent while in prison. Based in Miami, he has exhibited in several bay area museums.

Jimmie Lee Sudduth's media include mud.

Howard Finster achieved fame as designer of an album cover for the rock group Talking Heads. The show includes Finster's commissioned portrait of his benefactor, wordily titled The Herbert Wade Hemphill J.R. Collection Founder of American Folk Art the Man Who Preserves the Lone and Forgotten. The Unknown Collection.

In 1978, when the work was done, the collection was little known, but that was before the Smithsonian acquired it.

Finster, a minister, is also among the artists in the small Focus Gallery just before the main gallery where works themed "Divine Inspiration" are grouped. Here the viewer will find Josephus Farmer's Samson, which also includes other biblical figures: Adam and Eve, Jeremiah in chains and a crucifix. Farmer, an itinerant pastor, sold paintings to finance his missions.

Among the more poignant political statements in the main gallery are George W. White Jr.'s Emancipation House, showing the plight of the African-American, and Herbert Singleton's The Way We Was, which depicts the Klan, a lynching and a black woman bearing a baby of lighter color.

William Hawkins often signed paintings with his date of birth, July 27, 1895. At the time he painted Food Bar, with enamel house paint on plywood, he was 85 years old.

Alexander Maldonado was a Mexican immigrant known for his visions of a utopian future. In San Francisco to New York in One Hour, he paints an airport for a rocket that would make the routine trip.

Maldonado died in 1989; a passenger rocket is yet to be, but, right now, most of us in the bay area can reach these Smithsonian treasures in even less time.

At a glance

"Contemporary Folk Art: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum"

Tampa Museum of Art, 600 N Ashley Drive, Tampa.

10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday, 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday, through Nov. 26.

Admission: adults $5, seniors $4, students and children 6-18 $3. Admission by donation only: 5 to 8 p.m. Thursday and 10 a.m. to noon Saturday.

Major sponsor: Principal Financial Group.

Information: (813) 274-8130 (Tampa) or Web sites http:// www.tampamuseum.com. and http://americanart.si.edu/treasures.

Also on temporary display:

"The Urban Landscape: Selections from the Permanent Collection," through Oct. 8.

"Boldly Stated! Contemporary Paintings from the Permanent Collection," through Jan. 21

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