folkartwork

As told by me @folkartwork

MORRIS HIRSHFIELD

Morris Hirshfield, considered one of the most critically acclaimed self-taught masters of the 20 century has had many exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, including his own one man show in 1943 after only six years of painting. Born in Poland and originally a women’s shoe maker, he retired in 1935 due to failing health and took up painting two years later.

While today Hirshfield’s brilliance is widely celebrated, particularly in folk art circles, in 1943 at MoMa Hirshfield’s received many negative reviews and harsh criticism, earning the brilliant painter the nickname “The Master of Two Left Feet” as his figures were not always anatomically or proportionally correct. Nonetheless, Morris Hirshfield’s works, 8 in total at MoMa and none currently on view, remains some of the most whimsical and beautiful of any artist.

BILL TRAYLOR

There was a chance, back in 1942, that a plethora of Bill Traylor works could have entered the Museum of Modern Art permanent collection. Charles Shannon friend of Traylor’s had a small show of his work at Fieldston School, in the Bronx, and the work caught the eye of the then MoMa director Alfred Barr. While Barr was known to enjoy “primitive” work, likely thanks in large part to Pablo Picasso’s “inspiration” from African Art around that time, he didn’t feel that Bill Traylor’s work was worth more than $1 or $2 each at the time. Insulted, Charles Shannon passed on the offer and Bill Traylor would die five years later. It wouldn’t be until the mid 1990s after the death of Shannon when MoMa finally acquired works by Bill Traylor.

Born into slavery, living on the streets and making art on found things at the age of 80, Bill Traylor would become one of the greatest artists (not just self-taught) of the 20th century. His originality, the storytelling, the emotion and feeling in each work will make the hair on your arm stand up. None of these are currently on view at MoMa, but they all should be.

HENRY DARGER

One of the most famous self-taught artists who is internationally known, the world of Henry Darger is both sad and beautiful. An orphan and a man who lived a very private life, Darger completed a 15,000 page manuscript in his free time, in a small one room apartment in Chicago, Illinois when he wasn’t working as a custodian at a nearby hospital. The manuscript, titled “The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion” was complete with hundreds of stunning and other worldly watercolor works that can now be see at MoMa, galleries and museums across the United States and the entire world. A true “outsider” artist, the Museum of Modern Art has fifteen works in total of Darger’s and included the in an exhibition in 2001 alongside Francisco de Goya titled “Disasters of War”.

JUDITH SCOTT

An artist who always brings a smile to my face, Judith Scott has one work currently at the Museum of Modern Art (more can be found at the Brooklyn Museum or American Folk Art Museum in New York City). It’s impossible to not find joy in the work of Judith Scott and get lost in trying to figure out what she was trying to say with her work and what in the world might be tangled up so gracefully and intentionally in her found objects sculptures. Born in 1943, Judith was deaf and non-verbal, working at the Creative Growth center in Oakland since the early 2000s — Creative Growth is a non-profit art studio for artists with developmental disabilities and Judith Scott lived with down syndrome — so your guess is as good as anyone’s as to what her work meant or what was in it. As Tom di Maria told me at the 2023 Outsider Art Fair, “there might be a stolen shoe in there or a ham sandwhich, you just never know”.

MARTÍN RAMÍREZ

Entering the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection after a curator visited the American Folk Art Museum and instantly fell in love, this is the first of two pieces by Martín Ramírez MoMa currently owns. Subtitled Alamentosa, this work by Ramírez is just another brilliant example of his line work and magical constructed worlds of modernization in the United States with imagery and symbolism from his home country of Mexico. Ramírez was born in 1895, left his family in Mexico to try and find work in the United States and was ultimately diagnosed with schizophrenia and would live the rest of his life in DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn, California. With no formal training in art, a professor of art and psychology at the local California State University would bring Ramírez art supplies and document his process as well as save his works. Today, works by this self-taught genius are some of the most sought after and expensive works of art in the world of “outsider” art.

HORACE PIPPIN

Born in 1888 in West Chester, Pennsylvania, Horace Pippin served in World War I in K Company, the 3rd Battalion of the 369th infantry regiment, known for their bravery in battle as the famous Harlem Hellfighters. After the war, Pippin returned to West Chester and began painting as a way to rehabilitate the paralysis he had suffered during the war in which he was shot in the arm by a German Sniper. Drawing on themes such as the war, racial segregation and biblical tales, the artist was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1938 exhibition ‘Masters of Popular Painting: Modern Primitives of Europe and America’. The work above, created in 1942 and acquired by MoMa in 1977 includes a scene from the Civil War in which Abraham Lincoln gently touches the back of the kneeling, white-shirted solider, while General Ulysses S. Grant and two infantrymen look on.

WILLIAM H. JOHNSON

William H. Johnson was born in South Carolina in 1901 but left as part of the of the Great Migration, the mass exodus of Black Americans from the South that had begun in earnest in 1917, and in the years to come would thoroughly transform American society and culture. This would be come one of the major themes of Johnson’s work. A classically trained artist, he attend the National Academy of Design, where he excelled so much that his teachers raised money for him to go study in Europe. He returned in New York at the height of World War II in which his work changed dramatically, it was time to paint how he wanted to paint and paint his people, how they were. Simplified forms and flat planes of bright color laid down in inexpensive opaque inks were a hallmark of Johnson’s works for years making him a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. The Museum of Modern art has nine works of his in the permanent collection, none currently on view.

JANET SOBEL

Ukrainian abstract artist Janet Sobel would often work quick and “only paint what I feel”. Like many self-taught or outsider artists, Sobel started painting mid-life, at age forty-five in 1938 and may just have pioneered the drip painting technique that directly influenced Jackson Pollock. (Hilma af Klint may have also been the first abstract artist and influenced Kandinsky but that’s for another day) With only gaining wider recognition as of late, large in part due to the events unfolding currently in Ukraine, Sobel had her first solo museum exhibition, “Wartime,” at the Ukrainian Museum in New York, taking place more than 50 years since her passing and nearly three quarters of a century since fading into obscurity. The work above, as well as another work by Sobel titled “Milky Way” are not currently on view but have taken place in recent exhibitions, with hopefully more soon.

JOHN KANE

Born in Scotland in 1860 but today widely known for and celebrated as a painter for his skill in Naïve art, John Kane inadvertently paved the way for many self-taught artists such as Grandma Moses and Morris Hirshfield. As the the first self-taught American painter in the 20th century to be recognized by a museum, in 1927 as his work was admitted to the Carnegie International Exhibition, attracting considerable attention from the media, which initially they suspected that his success was a prank. Today, the self-portrait created in 1929 is currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art, with much more of his work in permanent collections of major museums such as Carnegie Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

THORNTON DIAL

Thornton Dial has one of the most impressive and stunning oeuvre’s of any artist I’ve seen. Head over to Souls Grown Deep Foundation and take a look for yourself if you don’t believe me. But I know you do. The reason I bring that up is because the Museum of Modern Art only owns one of these one of a kind works by a man who didn’t start making art until he was in his fifties. While they do only have one, they do have a really good one. The Bat Lady is a metaphoric and coded rendering, an insolent depiction of women as quick and magical, with an uncanny ability to be everywhere at once — except on view at MoMa, because that it is not.

JAMES CASTLE

Although James Castle did not know about the art world outside of his small community — he was born in Idaho in 1899, a town of no more than a few hundred — he now has works and exhibits all over the world. The fifth of seven children, born two weeks premature and deaf, Castle never learned to read, write, or speak despite spending five years at the Idaho State School for the Deaf and Blind. According to his sister Julia, Castle was close to four years old before he began walking, but that he started drawing “as soon as he could get up and use the pencil.”