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Untitled Document
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Self Taught: 7 African American Vernacular ArtistsJan.11 - Feb. 8, 2007
African American “Self -Taught” Art
By PAUL ARNETT
During the twentieth century, African American culture in the South became internationally known for its music, especially the blues, jazz, gospel, and early rock ’n’ roll. Alongside black musical forms, the visual arts were also developing, but more quietly, even clandestinely, until their discovery by “mainstream” culture during the last three decades. Since the 1960s, southern African American artists working within their indigenous cultural modes have begun to receive attention and, recently, acclaim.
As these artistic forms—primarily painting (the subject of this exhibition) and found-object sculpture—have moved out of their points of origin and into systems of consumption by collectors, galleries, museums, and scholars, the art has become a participant in new dialogues. These dialogues first require that a name be given to a genre of art that has usually been, within its home culture, left nameless. The silence of the art’s makers has allowed a host of competing and sometimes overlapping terminologies and labels to thrive. The best known of these are “self-taught,” “folk,” and “outsider.” Each term defines its subject relative to an implied norm: “taught” or “academically trained” artists; “high” or “fine” art; and “insiders” from the privileged or dominant culture. Once these pairs of terms (self-taught/academic, folk/fine, outsider/insider) are established, they become participants in broader systems for conceiving of cultural relationships bound up with issues of identity—class, ethnicity, geography, gender, and educational background. The “outsider,” though nominally accepted into the mainstream, is permitted entry only as evidence for the “insider’s” self-conceptions.
Other narratives are being told, however, within the “silenced” culture of origin. The artworks in this exhibition date to a period of social and demographic upheaval in the South, the late twentieth century, in the aftermath of the civil rights movement. For African Americans, particularly those who had been raised in the segregation and legalized inequality of the Jim Crow South, the issue of identity, both individual and collective, has at last become a topic for public representation through the visual arts.
The “mainstream” art world’s primary question—where does this art come from and what does it mean—merges with the makers’ primary questions—where do I come from and what do I mean? African American identity has transitioned from silence to speech, using the traditions and cultural aesthetics familiar to its makers. In lieu of a Western-art dialogue for source material, these artists look to indigenous art forms such as patchwork quilts and the “yard show” (symbolic outdoor displays of found materials which are ubiquitous in the African American diaspora); they employ narrative styles such as those of the griot (African village memory-keeper) or the preacher; they use construction techniques familiar to them from their manual occupations or domestic handicrafts; and they seek materials that are near at hand, autobiographically meaningful, or otherwise significant to their sense of the past. Their art’s narratives fuse the personal, the political, the historical, and the aesthetic in highly individualized yet remarkably consistent ways from artist to artist.
This exhibition encourages the consideration of artworks through two separate yet equally valid cultural lenses—that of mainstream artistic debates and that of the makers’ own worlds.
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Monday though Friday
