joseph scissorhands: Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South

Mary Lee Bendolph - Burgle Boys, 2007

"This exhibition presents the work of Black artists born between 1887 and 1965 who spent their lives and forged their careers in the American South. While large numbers of Black people had travelled to the northern states between 1910 and 1970 to escape racism, poverty and segregation - a movement known as the Great Migration - these artists remained. With their works, these artists confronted the harrowing history of enslaved African Americans, whose forced labour shaped the economic, social and agrarian culture of the deep South, as well as depicting everyday realities of economic inequality and oppression, social marginalisation and racial conflict. They drew their inspiration from daily life, the local environment, historical and current events, religion, music and the the African traditions they had inherited and studied. Not only are these concerns reflected in the subjects of their works, but they are also implicit in the materials used. The artists often incorporated scrap materials and objects such as tree branches and roots, as well as clay and sand into their works to create some of the most imaginative and powerful paintings, sculptures, quilts and assemblages of the twentieth century. Without access to formal art education or traditional galleries, many artists were taught by family members or friends, and often displayed their work on their front porches, on abandoned storefronts or in their own yards. Their careers were rooted in local communities from South Carolina to the Mississippi River Delta, and from isolated rural areas such as Gee's Bend, Alabama, to urban centres including Atlanta, Memphis and Miami." - Exhibition catalogue.

This exhibition appeared to be vastly different to the usual fare presented at the Royal Academy. It brought to mind my trip of a few years ago to Lille's Métropole Musée d'Art Moderne, d'Art Contemporain et d'Art Brut (LaM), and the amazing collection of outsider art displayed there (here). There, as here, people with a creative impulse but no formal training in art followed their urges and personal muses to create art from unconventional materials. As a result the aesthetic is quite rough being created from everyday scrap materials, but utilised with skill and dexterity to create some quite sophisticated outcomes. Although the majority of artists featured are unschooled in art historical movements or traditions, visitors with any knowledge of art history can easily make connections and see parallels in the work of other artists and craftsmen. I saw ancestral echoes across the Atlantic to the craftsmen of Benin and their beautiful Benin bronze plaques in the work of Ronald Lockett's piece - Sarah Lockett's Roses. There were also startling similarities in the work of Thornton Dial and Robert Rauschenberg's combines, and most obviously to me a drawing by Henry Speller which could easily have been mistaken for a work by artist Jean Dubuffet. Apart from the wonderful patterned quilts of the women of Gee's Bend, (one in particular employing a geometric pattern of concentric stitched angles which was actually made at a time in the 1930s when the European avant-garde were experimenting with geometric abstraction), my favourite piece in the exhibition was Charlie Lucas's - Three-Way Bicycle, which was like a three-dimensional version of a Cubistic Picasso painting, and expressed the joys and freedom of cycling perfectly. On leaving the RA building I passed a lovely textile work by contemporary black artist Emily Moore (last picture below), which echoed the stitched and pieced works of the Gee's Bend quilters.