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High Museum Announces Touring Exhibition Exploring Rise of Self-Taught Artists
The High Museum of Art exhibition “Gatecrashers: The Rise of the Self-Taught Artist in America,” debuting this summer (Aug. 20-Dec. 11, 2021) and set to tour nationally, will celebrate more than a dozen early-20th-century painters who fundamentally reshaped who could be an artist in the United States. Featuring more than 60 works, “Gatecrashers” will investigate how artists including John Kane, Horace Pippin and Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses overcame class-, race- and gender-based obstacles to enter the inner sanctums of the mainstream art world, exhibiting their paintings widely and paving the way for later generations of self-taught artists. Following its presentation at the High, the exhibition will travel to the Brandywine River Museum of Art (May 28–Sept. 5, 2022) and The Westmoreland Museum of American Art (Oct. 30, 2022–Feb. 5, 2023).
“As one of the first American museums to establish a department dedicated to the work of self-taught artists, the High has spent decades studying, presenting and honoring their contributions to art history,” said Rand Suffolk, Nancy and Holcombe T. Green, Jr., director. “With this exhibition, our audience can see how they broke barriers of access to take their rightful place among the 20th century’s most celebrated contemporary artists.”
After World War I, artists without formal training began showing their work in major museums, “crashing the gates” of the elite art world, as the newspapers of their day put it. Benefiting from rebellions against academic artistic styles and an ongoing search for national character in American culture, Kane, Pippin and Moses became the most widely recognized self-taught artists of the interwar period. These three artists will be featured prominently throughout “Gatecrashers” and will be joined by other self-taught artists, including Morris Hirshfield, Lawrence Lebduska and Josephine Joy, who represent the breadth of the art world’s attraction to self-taught painters in the first half of the 20th century. Despite their lack of formal training, these artists’ paintings of American life in the cities and rural communities where they lived, as well as fantastical scenes derived from their imaginations, were celebrated by fellow artists, collectors and taste-making museums such as New York’s Museum of Modern Art, especially in the 1930s and early 1940s.
“Gatecrashers” is curated by the High’s Merrie and Dan Boone curator of folk and self-taught art, Katherine Jentleson, and is based on the book she authored of the same name, which was published in 2020.
“‘Gatecrashers’ — both the book and the exhibition — establish an origin story for how self-taught artists first succeeded within the mainstream art world,” said Jentleson. “Kane, Moses, Pippin and the other artists in the exhibition deserve to be reconsidered not only because of how their work intertwined with major cultural and social change of their day, but also because of how their gatecrashing set the stage for the vital role that self-taught artists still play in the 21st century, greatly diversifying our cultural canons across race, gender, class, ability and other important markers of identity that are all too often underrepresented.”
“Gatecrashers” will be organized in thematic sections that explore how these self-taught artists were embraced as examples of a uniquely American creative excellence and the role that their occupational histories played in advancing their reputations against the backdrop of Depression-era populism. The works on view also will demonstrate how alignments in style and subject matter led to exhibitions at major museums that integrated the artists’ work with that of their trained peers, foreshadowing how many museums today promote self-taught artists within their American and contemporary art displays.
In 1927, Kane succeeded in placing his oil-on-canvas painting “Scene From the Scottish Highlands” in the Carnegie Museum of Art’s contemporary art international thanks to the jaunty painting’s embodiment of the stilted realism of historical folk art, which was gaining popularity among artists and collectors in this era. Many of the self-taught artists who would go on to be celebrated in the subsequent decade were first-generation immigrants like Kane, whose painting shows the Scottish American heritage festivals he attended in Pittsburgh. Brooklyn-based Jewish artists from Eastern Europe such as Morris Hirshfield and Israel Litwak also found audiences for their work, demonstrating how the art world slowly became more inclusive of who qualified as “American.”
As African American artists struggled to find recognition in the largely segregated national arts scene, Pippin achieved great success with paintings like “Cabin in the Cotton” (ca. 1931-1937), a work set in the American South. In many of his works, including “Outpost Raid: Champagne Sector” (1931), Pippin recorded his experiences fighting in the trenches of World War I, where he was shot by a German sniper, resulting in an arm injury that he rehabilitated by painting. He lived in the part of Pennsylvania associated with the Brandywine River artists such as Newell Convers Wyeth, an early advocate of his work, and became a fixture in exhibitions of self-taught artists and in the first major surveys of African American artists that emerged by the end of the 1930s.
In addition to expanding definitions of American art in terms of both race and ethnicity, self-taught artists such as Josephine Joy and “Grandma” Moses also broke through the art world’s gender glass ceiling. Joy became the first woman painter to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art when her paintings of flowers, trees and sites near her home in San Diego were shown there in 1942. By that time, Moses was on a trajectory to stardom that was unprecedented for any artist in the United States — and arguably remains so — after her paintings were discovered hanging in the window of a New York pharmacist in 1938. Her pastoral scenes of life in New England became a potent force as the United States entered the Cold War era. Her paintings even traveled abroad to promote goodwill toward America, much to the chagrin of American critics who were more interested in promoting abstract painting abroad.
“As self-taught artists become increasingly visible within today’s art world, this exhibition takes audiences back to the moment when it all began,” Jentleson said.
“Gatecrashers” will be presented in the Special Exhibition Galleries on the Second Level of the Stent Family Wing.
Exhibition Publication
“Gatecrashers: The Rise of the Self-Taught Artist in America,” is accompanied by Jentleson’s book of the same name, published by the University of California Press.
The museum’s fundraiser gala returns on October 5
Fernbank Museum will once again host its annual black-tie gala, A Timeless Affair, on Saturday, October 5 at 7:00 p.m. This special evening of fun and fundraising will highlight Fernbank’s fascinating new Armored Animals exhibit and raise money to support the museum’s ongoing work. All proceeds from the event will help fund the world-class exhibitions, impressive giant-screen movies, family activities and immersive nature programs for which Fernbank is known.
This year’s Timeless Affair will feature a lovely sunset cocktail hour on Dinosaur Plaza, followed by a seated dinner among the dinosaurs in the Great Hall. Live music and dancing, a private viewing of Armored Animals and a silent auction will round out the evening. Guests will have the chance to bid on a showcase of exclusive items generously donated by local businesses and supporters.
There will also be a paddle raise to support Fernbank’s Museum Access scholarship initiative. More than 50,000 students throughout the state visit Fernbank on a school field trip each year — made possible, in part, by the success of A Timeless Affair.
“The annual gala plays an important role each year as it helps fund programming for Fernbank, allowing the museum to spark curiosity and foster a deeper understanding of human history and the planet’s rich biodiversity,” said Jennifer Grant Warner, president and CEO of Fernbank. “The funds from this event help bring innovative exhibits, dynamic programs, captivating films and essential school programs to our community.”
Event organizers and sponsors
The honorary chair of this year’s fundraiser is philanthropist Margaret Hodgson Ellis Langford, whose dedication to Fernbank continues her family’s environmental legacy. Langford’s mother grew up in a house located in Fernbank Forest, which the Hodgson family, alongside Atlanta civic leaders, had the remarkable foresight to preserve as “a school in the woods for nature studies.” Established as a non-profit in 1939 — making it one of the oldest conservation-focused nonprofits in the United States – Fernbank has continued to preserve and restore the 65 acres of old-growth forest as part of its ongoing mission.
Event chairs, Robin and Neale Fisher, Stewart and Crawford Jones and Mary Clancy and Kevin Peak generously support Fernbank’s mission to ignite a passion for science, nature and human culture through exploration and discovery.
The planning committee for A Timeless Affair includes corporate chair, Wab Kadaba, as well as patron chairs, Stacy and Sachin Shailendra. The event’s scholarship chairs, Elizabeth and Shane Hornbuckle and Cherie and Ed Van Winkle, along with auction chairs, Abby England, Jean Harvey Johnson and Juan Johnson and Holly and Townsend Young are also recognized — and appreciated — by the museum.
A Timeless Affair 2024 is sponsored by Delta Air Lines, Georgia Natural Gas and Romanoff Renovations. The patron party hosts are Susannah Frost and Jeff Yost. And the advisory chairs are Michelle Davis and Honorable Walter W. Davis and Drs. Kalinda and Kevin E. Woods.
The details
The fundraiser takes place on Saturday, October 5, starting at 7:00 p.m. and promises to be an enchanting night of glamour, connection and generosity. Fernbank’s fall exhibit, Armored Animals, opens the same day and will run through January 8, 2025.
For more information on A Timeless Affair, including how to purchase tickets or make an online donation, visit fernbankmuseum.org/atimelessaffair.
Fernbank Museum is embracing a new golden opportunity starting in late August with the opening of Golden Opportunity: Botanical Illustration, a special artistic exhibit showcasing the science of the color yellow — how it occurs naturally in plants, how pollinators see yellow and how the color is used as a pigment — through a collection of art pieces and other objects.
Created by the Denver Botanic Gardens’ School of Botanical Art & Illustration, Golden Opportunity includes 15 botanical art works of yellow plants that were created with colored pencils, watercolors, graphite, ink and mixed media, including the daffodil, Buddha’s hand, sunflower, pansy and more.
Art and nature
“Art and nature are natural companions,” said Jen Tobias, associate director of exhibitions & art collections; curator of art, Denver Botanic Gardens. “We love talking about nature as both material for artists and aesthetic inspiration, and we thought that color would be a fun way to explore the relationship between those two ideas. Showcasing the different ways that plants, natural dyes, and colors are interconnected is also such an interesting way to think about all the different ways the natural world influences our daily life.”
Along with the artwork on display, visitors also have the opportunity to learn how different yellow-based pigments, made from plants such as turmeric, saffron, Dyer’s rocket and marigold, are used in textiles. Guests can admire the natural wonder that goes into creating and coloring everyday objects and appreciate the science and artistic inspiration that comes from botanical sources.
Additionally, visitors will learn more about the daffodil (which has an estimated 18,000 different variations); play a game with flip panels to match dye colors to the plant or animal it comes from; watch a short video explaining how certain insects see the color yellow and how flower color helps aid in the pollination of plants; and view bowls of dye powder that have surprising appearances and origins — such as henna or powder made from cochineal bugs.
Sponsored locally in part by the Francis Wood Wilson Foundation, “Golden Opportunity” is presented in both English and Spanish and will run from August 31, 2024 to January 1, 2025.
For more information about Fernbank or to purchase tickets, visit fernbankmuseum.org.
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