Encountering God at the MFA

It is perhaps the most famous quilt in America; certainly one of the best ever produced. During a recent visit to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston's new Art of the Americas wing I encountered for the first time in many years. It is Harriet Powers' great Pictorial Quilt (done between 1895 1n3 1898), recently conserved and just put on view in a special folk art gallery at the MFA.

Recognition of Powers' work came very early. In 1886, a young artist of Athens, Georgia, Jennie Smith, went to the Athens Cotton Fair. There she saw Powers' other great quilt, the Bible Quilt (now in the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, below). She wrote: "I have spent my whole life in the South, and am perfectly familiar with thirty patterns of quilts, but I had never seen an original design, and never a living creature portrayed in patchwork, until the year 1886....in one corner there hung a quilt which 'captured my eye' and after much difficulty I found the owner, a negro woman, who lives in the country on a little farm whereon she and husband make a respectable living....The scenes on the quilt were Biblical and I was fascinated. I offered to buy it but it was not for sale at any price."

Harriet later sold the quilt to Ms. Smith, and hard times compelled the latter to only offer five dollars. Harriet and her husband, facing financial trouble themselves, readily accepted the money. But before leaving Ms. Smith's she explained all of the panels in the quilt.

In recent years another great quilter, Kyra Hicks, has done extensive research on this extraordinary artist who was born a slave in 1837 and became a landowner after the Civil War. Kyra's book, "This I Accomplish," broke new ground in the study of Powers and her work. The most startling find for many was that Harriet was actually a literate woman and a quilter of some local renown prior to her "discovery." Other surprises await in Ms. Hicks' volume, but I would rather have her tell you what they are.

For now, you can view another national treasure of textile art at the MFA. As you look at the fifteen squares, each a different story (mostly Biblical), pay particular attention to the brilliance of Powers' improvisational style. There is very little like it anywhere, except in her other quilt at the Smithsonian.

And look closely at the blue square in the center. It depicts the Leonid Meteor Shower that took place in 1833, a few years before Powers was born. The stories told by the slaves of this phenomenon must have left a deep impression on the young Harriet. By placing this image at the heart of her quilt, I think Harriet was connecting the spiritual with the physical. Her lively and profound affirmation of the presence of God on Earth is now on view in a spectacular new venue every bit the equal of the Athens Cotton Fair.

Joshua Johnson

Quite a few of the blog posts I have written in the past year and a half have dealt with folk portraiture. We've seen folk portrait painters from the Colonial era, the heyday of the portrait in the early and mid-19th century, and from the photographic era after 1840-50. We've seen famous portraitists as well as anonymous ones. In fact, there has been such a range and variety of portrait painters in these pages that it would be difficult to find a common denominator other than the lack of artistic training.

Difficult, but not impossible. You see, all of the folk portraitists that have appeared here so far have one thing in common: have were white.

There were probably scores of African American portrait painters in the 19th century; some slaves were specifically taught to paint. The problem is that so few are documented or known by name. There is one notable exception.

Joshua Johnson spent 30 years painting portraits in Baltimore, Maryland, from 1795 to about 1825. Thirty years in the same place, plying the same trade among the same community. And yet so little is known about him, other than the paintings which are ascribed to his hand. We do know that Johnson was a free man, which was not unusual for a city where the freed Blacks outnumbered slaves by more than two to one. A 1782 document cites a Joshua Johnson who was a blacksmith, aged 20, who was finishing up an apprenticeship and soon to be freed. It is not certain whether this is the same Joshua Johnson as the portrait painter. City directories list Johnson as a painter beginning in 1796, and trace his movements around the Baltimore area over the next several decades.

Other than that, very little is known about his life. But the paintings speak volumes.

The nineteen works known to have been painted by Johnson display a keen sense of design and color, and a subtle delicacy that is rarely equalled in Anerican art. The subjects, overwhelming white, are all rendered with great sensitivity despite the obvious challenges in the naturalism of the figures. This is a common problem in folk art but in the best works can be turned to advantage by emphasizing pattern rather than three-dimensional form and perspective.

It's a pity that we don't know more about Johnson, and that there is no known self-portrait of the artist. He remains a figure who devoted his working life to preserving the appearance of people in his city, and yet no one knows what he looked like.

I first encountered Johnson's work in 1992 at the Maryland Historical Society in an exhibit of their collection as interpreted by an African American artist, Fred Wilson, and entitled "Mining the Museum." It was provacative in many ways; Wilson applied his own labels to the pieces, inlcuding the slave shackles that bore the ironic identifying heading "Maryland Metalwork, 1750-1800."

But the Johnson portrait stands out as a distinct memory. As you walked up to the painting, your movement triggered an audiotape which said, simply and plaintively, "who will paint my portrait?"


From top:

Westwood Children, ca. 1807, National Gallery of Art

Grace Allison McCurdy and Her Daughters, ca. 1806, Corcoran Gallery of Art

Edward and Sarah Rutter, ca. 1805, Metropolitan Museum of Art

John Jacob Anderson and His Sons, ca. 1812-15, Brooklyn Museum

The Gatekeeper of Airlie Gardens

There is nothing more germane to folk art than a sense of place. Folk artists generally do not have the kind of resources or inclination to travel the world, and their rootedness in their communities manifests itself in an intense connection to the people and environment around them. To truly understand some of the nation’s best folk art, you must experience first hand the locale that the artist inhabited or created.


Two items in the news this past week have really given me pause to reflect on this fact. I found out about both via Facebook groups, which tend to make all local news spread further than any national news network. In one story, the city of Los Angeles had plans to close two arts centers that operate at the Watts Towers complex, which would have effectively closed the towers to visitors. The towers, built over a period of several decades by Italian immigrant Simon Rodia, are one of the greatest, if not the greatest, environmental achievements by a folk artist in the United States. A community campaign was successful in getting the City Council to reconsider its plans and keep the Towers complex open.

The other news item is the proposed sale of Airlie Gardens in Wilmington, North Carolina by the New Hanover County Commissioners, who are looking to close a $13 million budget gap. The gardens are described as 67 acres of quintessentially Southern garden history. Established in 1901, the gardens feature a 450-year-old oak and more than 1,000 azaleas. The site means a great deal to generations of North Carolinians who have enjoyed it for its beauty and serenity.

But for anyone who knows American folk art, Airlie Gardens means something more; it was the inspiration for the vibrant, colorful, and intricate paintings of Minnie Evans.

Evans came to Wilmington with her mother in 1893, when she was a year old. Her mother remarried a man who was employed by Pembroke Jones, a wealthy industrialist, and by the age of 17 Minnie found work as a domestic in the Jones household. Jones’ wife, Sarah Green Jones, was the one who established Airlie Gardens.

From 1948 to 1974 Minnie was the gatekeeper at Airlie, collecting admissions and selling her artwork. She painted her delicate and fantastical scenes as a result of a divine vision, but the lushness and greenery of the work clearly evoked the garden setting that she saw every day. She once said, “God has some 600 shades of green, and He dressed the world with them.” To her the natural surroundings were a divine revelation, as one can readily see in her painting in the Fenimore Art Museum collection (above, painted between 1963 and 1967, and donated to FAM by Jane Ferrara).

Minnie sold her artwork at Airlie, and had her first “exhibitions” there. She died in 1987, but her work is so connected with the site that a local artist created a memorial sculpture garden within Airlie in her honor (see Bottle Chapel below) And just last month, on March 10, Airlie hosted a “Green Day” tribute to Minnie with free admission to the Gardens.

It would indeed be a shame to see the Gardens sold to private enterprise, somewhat akin to selling Monet’s Giverny, at least for me. The landscape that inspired a devout and talented gatekeeper deserves to continue to inspire its community.

Bad Girls

“I just draw by my own mission, you know. I just sit down and start to drawing.”
-Inez Nathaniel Walker

Inez Nathaniel Walker (née Stedman) was born in Sumter, South Carolina in 1911. Her mother died when she was two; her father was killed when she was 12 or 13. Inez moved north as a teenager and worked in food processing plants, settling in Philadelphia and later Port Byron, New York. She married in her teens and had four children. Around 1969 she was convicted of the “criminally negligent homicide” of a man who had allegedly abused her. She was sentenced to prison time at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Bedford, New York in 1971 and was released by early 1973. It was during her time in prison that Inez began to draw, she said, to protect herself from the “bad girls.”

Walker worked exclusively in portraiture, using colored and lead pencils, crayons, pens, and markers to create her images. When she first began to draw she worked on the back of whatever paper she could get her hands on, from the prison newsletter, to training leaflets. Their similar palette, the forward-facing subject, and the similarities in the facial features, particularly the eyes, characterize her earlier works.

Elizabeth Bayley, a teacher in the prison, discovered Walker’s drawings after a class one day. Bayley “was struck by their originality, their humor and their amazing attention to detail.” Convinced of Walker’s talent, she showed the drawings to her friend Pat Parsons, who owned a gallery in town. Parsons quickly took an interest in Inez and the two became good friends. She encouraged Walker’s drawing, and provided her with better quality supplies. Parsons also put on Walker’s first exhibition, in her gallery in 1972.

Walker was known for her use of lines and patterns, often filling the page with them. The subjects of her drawings – it is not clear whether they depict the “bad girls” who surrounded her in prison – are rendered in a compelling and curious manner with an extraordinary attention to detail, something typical of folk artists. One of the most striking aspects of a Walker drawing is the eye. The vast majority of her subjects possess the same oversized eye that faces forward, regardless of the direction the body faces. The eye dominates the page in part because Walker always began by drawing the face and head, and then worked her way out until she ran out of page. The collection of the Fenimore Art Museum contains three of Inez Nathaniel Walker’s drawings: Man with Cigarette, Woman, and Woman with Hat.

Walker disappeared from society around 1980. Sadly, Pat Parson found her several years later, in the Willard Psychiatric Center in Willard, New York. Walker was in and out of the center for the last four years of her life, and died there in 1990. She left behind a collection of work remarkable in its size and consistency as well as in the remarkable manner in which the eyes engage the viewer. Clearly that is where the artist looked first to take the measure of a person.

This post was written by Johanna Blume of the Cooperstown Graduate Program as part of my elective course in American folk Art.

A Rock and a Hard Place

Stone is an elemental and stoic medium. In the hands of a deeply religious man with a lifetime of hard experience behind him, it can be singularly powerful and inspiring.

Will Edmondson (1874-1951) was such a stone carver, but he didn’t realize it until late in life. He was born in Davidson County, Tennessee about 1870 and his parents were slaves of the Edmondson and Compton families. In his younger days he worked as a field hand, and later as a laborer at Nashville’s sewer works. He was hired by a railroad company in about 1900, but lost that job in 1907 when he injured his leg. From 1908 to 1931 he was a janitor at the Women’s Hospital in Nashville. After the hospital closed and he lost his job, he received the inspiration to carve. Here is how he described his moment of revelation:

“I was out in the driveway with some old pieces of stone when I heard a voice telling me to pick up my tools and start to work on a tombstone. I looked up in the sky and right there in the noon daylight He hung a tombstone for me to carve.”

Convinced that Jesus had “planted the seed of carving” in him, Edmondson began his work by carving memorials, mostly embellished by doves or sheep, and most commissioned by members of his congregation for use in their cemetery (see photo).

Before long he was carving animals and human figures, angels and crucifixions. As he put it “First He told me to carve tombstones, then He told me to cut the figures.” His style was distinctly “modern,” with generalized forms and a tendency toward abstraction. He worked with a homemade chisels and files on locally available limestone blocks.

Between 1934 and 1937 fashion photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe, acting on a tip from a friend, photographed Edmondson and his sculpture. She shared her photos with Alfred Barr, Jr., then Director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Barr was the most important proponent of contemporary folk art during the 1930s.

In 1937 Barr did something no one had ever thought to do before: he put together a small one-man show of 12 stone carvings by Edmondson, the first single-artist exhibition of an African-American in the museum’s history. In 1938, one year after Edmondson’s one-man show at MOMA, Barr organized the MOMA exhibition Masters of Popular Painting, which featured both American and European self-taught artists, including Edmondson along with noted self-taught artists John Kane, Lawrence Lebduska, and Horace Pippin. Seven years after beginning to carve, Edmondson had reached the pinnacle of achievement in the emerging art capital of the world.

Will Edmondson died in 1951 at the age of 77, but his art has continued to be highly regarded in the museum world. He was featured in the landmark 1980 exhibition Black Folk Art in America: 1930-1980 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. The catalogue states that “more than any other painter or sculptor in this exhibition [there were 20 artists featured], William Edmondson has achieved recognition as an American artist, not only as a black or folk artist.”

We are very fortunate to have one of Edmondson’s pieces in the Fenimore Art Museum collection. It is s carving of three birds, very reminiscent of the artist’s early work in gravestone carving. Measuring 11 ½” in width, its precise meaning and date are unknown. Its minimalist lines and formal rhythms seem to me a reflection of the Edmondson’s mastery of craft and clarity of vision.

Black Barbie Comes to Cooperstown

The marketing staff at Keepsake Ornaments, a division of Hallmark Cards, was in brainstorming mode. They wanted to attract more Black costumers, and were floating ideas about different collectible Christmas ornaments that would appeal to a black clientele. The big idea that was being tossed around, an African American Barbie doll ornament, did not sit well with Marketing Strategist Kyra Hicks. Black Santa Claus, maybe. Christmas angels with different skin tones, maybe. But Black Barbie?

Kyra Hicks was more than a marketer. She was and is an acclaimed quilter. Following the meeting, she channeled her emotions into the creation of a remarkable quilt. This quilt was one of the major pieces featured in the Fenimore Art Museum’s exhibition “Through the Eyes of Others: African Americans and Identity in American Art.” At the close of the exhibition, we just couldn’t bring ourselves to send it back to the artist. So we bought it.

Hicks uses the medium of fabric in traditional, yet innovative ways to create pieces layered with rich narratives which reinterpret ideologies of popular culture. Hicks represents an American popular icon in her quilt Black Barbie (1996). The quilt features a black version of the original Barbie (1959). The use of text in this piece plays an integral role in communicating messages to the viewer. “Barbie” is scripted in its signature style across the top of the quilt, with “American’s Doll” written underneath. The choice to script “Barbie” in the traditional style enables viewers to instantly connect with the piece as their cultural memory is stimulated.

The bottom of the quilt, however, changes everything. It reads “Was never intended for me.”

Though the artist wrote these words from an African American woman’s perspective, this phrase has the ability to apply to many different women. The legacy of Barbie has impacted women of all shapes, sizes, and colors who feel they do not fit into society’s ideal framework. Painted behind the bottom text are five repeating lines of “Black Barbie has no name” This portion of the piece is not visible from across a room and encourages the viewer to further analyze the quilt. Hicks considers this one of her nuances, explaining that she creates multiple layers of messaging.

Black Barbie is a powerful piece which addresses issues of body image and society’s obsession with beauty. Standards of “beauty” are dictated in the media and in popular culture, whether they are based on race or class, on a local, national or international level. Hicks’ reinterpretation of the traditional Barbie offers and different view of beauty.

The quilt presents a story that transcends race and class boundaries, and has the ability to unite women of multiple backgrounds. Hicks explains that she tries to work through whatever she is feeling in a way that is universal. The reinterpretation of a popular iconic fictional woman enabled Hicks to present her personal emotions in a universal form.

Black Barbie will be on view in our folk art galleries beginning on April 1st, making its debut as part of our permanent collection. I have no doubt that it will have an iconic presence in the museum for many, many years. You won’t, however, be seeing it as a Christmas card any time soon.

This post was co-written by Cara Bramson of the Cooperstown Graduate Program as part of my elective course in American folk Art. To find more of Kyra Hicks’ work, as well as her thoughts on quilting, see her blog, Black Threads.

Clementine Hunter's Black Crucifixion

Simple, raw emotive power. The ability to form, in a few stark lines, an indelible impression representing a lifetime of experience. While much of the folk art in the Fenimore Art Museum possesses an intricacy and workmanship that can only be admired, virtually none has the impact of one small (15 1/4" square), unassuming piece: Clementine Hunter’s Black Crucifixion, painted sometime in the 1950s. And it’s not just the style. Hunter’s Jesus is black, and a woman.

Clementine Hunter had seen a lot of years, more than 100, actually. She was born in 1886 or 1887 at Hidden Hill Plantation in Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana, and grew up picking cotton. She worked for more than 75 years at nearby Melrose Plantation, not only in the cotton fields but also in the laundry and kitchen. The mistress of Melrose, Cammie Henry, made her home into a lively gathering place for artists, critics, and other cultural figures. By sheer happenstance, one of the visitors to Melrose in the 1950s left behind some discarded paints and brushes. Finding these items, Clementine did her first painting on an old window shade. It was the first of 4,000 works she would complete before her death in 1988.

Hunter’s subjects are usually memories of plantation life; weddings, funerals, baptisms, and cotton picking (lower right). In many of these works she includes a depiction of the “African House,” an old slaves’ quarters (designed and built by slaves; see below) on the grounds of Melorse. Painting in thick, expressive brush strokes, Hunter developed ways to enliven her works with color and composition. Rows of cotton pickers, for example, are often stacked vertically. She signed her work with her initials, writing the “C” backwards in deference to her mistress, whose initials were the same.

Few critics discuss her crucifixions, but they are her most powerful works. The one in our collection clearly shows a black woman on the cross, hands seemingly missing, suggesting mutilation. Blood drips from the nailed wrists and feet. She is flanked by angels signifying redemption. This is not an image you will forget any time soon.

Most critics refer to Hunter as a memory artist, and few of her paintings hint at the nature of her existence. Nor did she make much of it in the scores of interviews conducted with her over the years. Most of her work celebrates a good, long life.

But in a few pictures she quietly reminds us of the pain she must have witnessed and felt. Keep in mind that between 1882 and 1968, according to the Tuskegee Institute, 335 African Americans were lynched in Louisiana alone. Hundreds more, of course, in neighboring states. Clementine Hunter must have heard of these atrocities and, perhaps, alluded to them in her black crucifixions. Only when we establish this context can we appreciate the transcendent spirit of her art.

An African American Knife Box

This is the third in a series of posts highlighting the great folk art pieces from the Fenimore Art Museum collection included in our traveling exhibition “Through the Eyes of Others: African Americans and Identity in American Art” on view at the New York State Museum through January 6, 2010. My first two posts featured a carving of a Jim Crow figure for a tavern sign and an African American Cigar Store Indian. In both form and function these pieces are vastly different from the one I offer today: a knife box meant for domestic rather than public consumption.

Our knife box has intrigued scholars of African American culture for decades, at least since John Vlach’s landmark 1974 catalogue The Afro-American Tradition in the Decorative Arts. This box is distinctly African in carving style, which alone would make it a rare and important survival. But the truly striking reality of this piece is not the style; it is the subject.

One need only look at the knife box for a minute before it hits you: it’s a slave ship. The sides of the box, and particularly the rows of eight articulated figures along two of the sides, strongly suggest rows of slaves packed tightly onto a ship for a trans-Atlantic crossing. The handle of the knife box is a large upright in the center carved into the shape of a head, perhaps representing a slaver or overseer of the voyage and “cargo.” The area belowdecks, as you can see, is completely surrounded by vertical slats that appear to represent iron bars.

The guest curator for “Through the Eyes of Others,” Gretchen Sullivan Sorin, says of this piece: “African Americans expressed their identity through the creation of decorative objects as well as through depictions of self. This knife box tells a story of the movement of people and of the carver’s cultural identity.”

A utilitarian object, made for the home, carrying strong visual clues to a cultural memory of a nightmarish voyage. And like the voyage itself, the symbolic value of the box’s function – holding knives – is impossible to escape.

The African American Cigar Store Indian

This is another in a series of posts about the great folk art pieces included in the Fenimore Art Museum’s traveling exhibition Through the Eyes of Others: African Americans and Identity in American Art, which is on view at the New York State Museum in Albany through January 6, 2010. This exhibition is curated by Dr. Gretchen Sullivan Sorin, Director of the Cooperstown Graduate Program, who, by the way, has just been awarded the prestigious Katherine Coffey Award from the Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums. Unlike the first sculpture I discussed in my August 31 post, which was a depiction of a black man by a white artist, this piece was created by an African American carver.

Our “African American Cigar Store Figure” (above left) was found in Freehold, New Jersey in the mid-20th century. According to local tradition, it was carved in about 1825 by a freed slave named Job. This has never been substantiated, but the piece itself presents some compelling physical evidence that strongly suggests that it is the product of a black folk artist.

First, it is not made like any other known cigar store figures carved by white artists (many of them German immigrants) in American urban centers in the mid-19th century. These figures were usually made by sectioning off a length of solid log (usually pine, which was straight-grained: old ships’ masts were ideal for this purpose) and carving the figure’s body and head. The arms, which often extended outward, would be carved separately and joined to the body. Job’s figure is not made this way at all. Instead, the artist carved and joined thirteen separate pieces of wood to form the body and its appendages. The precision of the joinery suggests that Job may have mastered the craft of cabinetmaking, a trade he would have shared with numerous African Americans of his time.



Second, this figure does not look like any other known cigar store figure. The torso and arms are boldly stylized into angular, geometric shapes. Likewise, the face is flattened and mask-like. The vast majority of cigar store figures were naturalistic carvings with faces that were either brutally savage or idealized with Anglo-American features. Since our figure’s discovery and publication in the 1940s, numerous scholars have noted these distinctly African stylistic traits, as seen in the examples of African art at above left and right.


The folk art scholar and collector Michael D. Hall (whose collection is in the Milwaukee Art Museum) often used our Job figure to illustrate how the best American folk art was represented by those rare pieces that were within an established visual tradition yet displayed an individual’s stamp of creativity and innovation. I can’t help but agree. But there is also something about this figure that is quintessentially American in the delicate balance between this former slave’s cultural memory and his social, economic, and artistic aspirations.

The Negro Portrayed as "a Beast"

This is the first of a series of posts highlighting important folk art pieces that will be featured in our traveling exhibition Through the Eyes of Others: African Americans and Identity in American Art opening at the New York State Museum in Albany on September 8. This exhibition, curated by Dr. Gretchen Sullivan Sorin, Director of the Cooperstown Graduate Program in Museum Studies, explores the depictions of African Americans in 19th- and 20th-century American art created by white artists. A section of the exhibition also contrasts these images with works by African American artists dealing with the issues of race and identity.

The subject of this post is one of our most famous pieces, a sculpture of a dancing black man created about 1830-50 by an unidentified, almost certainly white, artist. This carving, which is 44 1/4" tall, was originally found in Charleston, South Carolina in the 1930s by the pioneering museum director and curator Holger Cahill. Cahill mounted some of the earliest folk art exhibitions at the Newark Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in the early 30s. At the time of its discovery, tradition held that this sculpture was originally a tavern sign. From Cahill it found its way into the collection of the modernist sculptor and folk art collector Elie Nadelman. After Nadelman’s death in 1947, it was purchased by Stephen C. Clark for the folk art collection at the Fenimore Art Museum. Its title at the time was “Dancing Negro.”

The sculpture certainly has seen the ravages of time and the elements. It was originally brightly painted and would have been an eye-catching image on a streetscape. It also would have been a familiar image, as the figure is a stereotypical Jim Crow character of the kind popularized in the minstrel music of Thomas Dartmouth Rice, seen below in a 19th-century engraving.

The amazing thing about our sculpture is how its racial caricature eluded so many knowledgable viewers over the years. In fact,the stereotyping of the figure’s dilapidated clothing and exaggerated facial features seems to have been, for most viewers, invisible. Cahill and Nadelman obviously admired it for its vitality and sense of physical movement. The art deco sculptor Paul Manship once called it “the greatest piece of American sculpture made before 1850.” And I distinctly recall scholars in the 1980s wondering aloud if this might be a portrait. Dr. Sorin’s label redresses this imbalance by stating: “The sculpture’s small stature and animal-like appearance reinforced ideas about black people as subhuman and beast-like.” The piece, now titled “Stereotypical Carving of an African American Man,” appears in the section of the exhibition that she entitled “The Negro Portrayed as 'a Beast.'”

Through the Eyes of Others is full of these provocative images of African Americans, juxtaposed with dynamic works exploring racial identity by such prominent African american artists as Lorna Simpson, Faith Ringgold, and Kyra Hicks. The exhibition shows how much of our nation’s history is bound up in considerations of race. It stands to reason that this great national dilemma would be reflected in our art as well, at all levels of society. Through the Eyes of Others will be on view at the State Museum through January 6, 2010.