Review: Elijah Pierce’s America

Elijah Pierce’s America, edited by Nancy Ireson and Zoé Whitley, with contributions by Sampada Aranke, Theaster Gates and Michael D. Hall. The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, in association with Paul Holberton Publishing, London, distributed by the University of Chicago Press, 208 pages, 120 color plates, 2020. ISBN: 9781911300878. Hardcover, $50 To the long list of reasons to resent the pandemic beyond death, sickness and unemployment, of course, we can add missing the opportunity to see Elijah Pierce’s carvings in person at Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation.  The retrospective ran from September 2020 to January 2021 and included more than 100 works. But pandemic

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Review: The Power and Fluidity of Girlhood in Henry Darger’s Art

The Power and Fluidity of Girlhood in Henry Darger’s Art, by Leisa Rundquist, Routledge, New York, 126 pages, 13 b/w Illustrations, 2021. ISBN: 9781138314559. Hardcover, $59.95 In this admirably concise volume, Lisa Rundquist works diligently to normalize Henry Darger. That seems like fair play considering how he’s been pathologized. Being a working-class self-taught artist and a loner made him vulnerable to whatever excesses of interpretation anyone wanted to throw at him. The eccentric and sometimes extreme nature of his art was a contributing factor. But, in effect, Darger remained a victim of the same epithet applied to him in his youth:

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Review: Loud, Naked, & In Three Colors

Loud, Naked, & In Three Colors: The Liberty Boys & The History of Tattooing in Boston, by Margaret Hodges and Derin Bray. Rake House, Portsmouth, N.H., 160 pages, 2020. ISBN: 9780578758404. Hardcover, $70 This volume presents a nicely balanced combination of tattoo art and tattoo lore. The book by its own account “looks beyond the connoisseurship of historical flash art” to tell the story of the tattooers, “an often transient, marginalized group,” which it does effectively, in the form of one family.  The 70 pages devoted to flash art aren’t bad, but the most exceptional part of the book is

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Review: Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective

Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective, by Elaine Y. Yau, Lawrence Rinder and Horace Ballard. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 175 pages 2020. ISBN: 9780983881384. Paperback, $39.95 Here’s another pandemic art disappointment—the grand exhibition of Rosie Lee Tompkins’ quilts at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). Like Elijah Pierce’s carvings at the Barnes Foundation, these quilts clearly need to be experienced in person to get a true sense of their scale and material impact. Tompkins is widely praised as the greatest quilter of her time, certainly up there with the women of Gees

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Review: Prisoners’ Inventions

Prisoners’ Inventions, written and illustrated by Angelo in collaboration with Temporary Services. Half Letter Press, Chicago, 200 pages, 2020. ISBN: 9781732051423. Paperback, $20 If you’re looking for conventional prison art, this book isn’t the place. No warrior princesses or hands holding bars here. But if you are interested in the incredible creativity that incarceration can generate, this book is a good place to start. In the first instance, there is the creativity of “Angelo,” the one-time California prison inmate who made the drawings featured here and who is responsible for most of the text. His sketches are both interesting and

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Review: Gatecrashers

Gatecrashers: The Rise of the Self-Taught Artist in America, by Katherine Jentleson, University of California Press, 264 pages, 53 color photographs, 18 b/w illustrations, 2020. ISBN: 9780520303423. Hardcover, $50 Gatecrashers might best be described in terms more typical of a page-turner novel than an art book—it’s a story of tragedy and triumph, of drama and historic happenings. The overarching tragedy is the opportunity lost in the 1930s to open up the definition of art to myriad forms of creativity beyond the academy. That process seemed to be gaining momentum until it was precipitously halted in the early 1940s. It only restarted in earnest

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Review: Unheard Conversations/Carved Coconut Heads

Unheard Conversations: A Wonderful Collection of Carved Coconut Heads, by John Turner, Blurb, 72 pages, 103 color and 11 black-and-white illustrations, 2019. ISBN: 978-1714598229. Paperback, $85 Kitsch and art each have their virtue. Art, at least when recognized as such, is reputable, upmarket even when inexpensive, and trades on originality. Kitsch is disreputable, down market even when expensive, and trades on clichés. Yet kitsch can be fun, funny, and sometimes even meaningful. It is remarkably effective in evoking a time or a place or a feeling. Consider tikis, pink flamingos or Hello Kitty. It also can say a lot about a culture, revealing

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Review: Becoming Mary Sully

Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract, by Philip J. Deloria. University of Washington Press, Seattle, 336 pages, 221 color illustrations, 2019. ISBN: 9780295745046, Paperback, $34.95. Mary Sully’s story is a saga of identity, from her signature artistic project — 134 iterations of what she called “personality prints” — to her name, which was actually Susan Deloria, to her ancestry, which gets complicated quickly. Indian and Anglo, it included tribal leaders and a military officer who slaughtered tribes. There is also a famous painter in her lineage and, not surprisingly, a lifelong struggle to find a place for herself. 

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Review: Walks to the Paradise Garden

Walks to the Paradise Garden: A Lowdown Southern Odyssey, by Jonathan Williams, photos by Roger Manley & Guy Mendes. Institute 193, Lexington Kentucky and New York, 352 pages, 100 color images and 80 black and white , 2019. ISBN: 978-1732848207. Hardcover, $45. It’s a shame this book wasn’t published as intended in the 1990s. Not only would its author have still been alive, but so would most of the artists he encountered on his travels across the back roads of the South.  Inspired by William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, Jonathan Williams, poet, publisher and lover of the vernacular, undertook a series of

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The Diary of John Evelyn, cover page

John Evelyn: Diary Of A Different World

I loved the three years I spent with John Evelyn and his lengthy diary. But poor John Evelyn — polymath, public citizen (and official), friend to kings and scientists, but destined always to be second fiddle to his friend Samuel Pepys in the 17th century diarist derby. Pepys is the one who is (sometimes) still read, and still frequently cited whenever the English Restoration era is mentioned. Where Evelyn was a pious man and a devoted Royalist, Pepys was scurrilous and a political skeptic, making his commentary more consistently pointed. Both let you enter the everyday life of someone in

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