The Primitive Dignity of Self-taught Artists

C.S. Lewis, one of the great minds of the twentieth century, wrote in Mere Christianity that, “free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.”

The same is true of self-taught artists—those who create not from the school of this or that, but who bring their insight and understanding of the world to their art.

“Amazing Grace: Self-Taught Artists from the Mullis Collection” at the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens, Ga., brings together pieces from one man’s impressive collection of 90 works by more than 50 artists.

Atlanta attorney Carl Mullis has collected from the works of folk art masters such as Mose Tolliver, Howard Finster, Gerald Hawkes and Sister Gertrude Morgan. Mullis also holds evocative pieces from contemporary and lesser-known artists, such as Alpha Andrews, Lorenzo Scott and Ned Cartledge. The collection, largely of works by African-American artists, includes self-portraits on paper, wood cutouts, house paint on tin, oils and acrylic on canvas and sandstone sculptures.

The time spent with the exhibit, housed in three galleries designed by Paul Manoguerra, the museum’s curator of American art, was fulfilling and timeless in the way it pointed to universal subjects. Themes of religion, family life, and political and social commentary were the strongest and most purposeful. The section on popular culture, with portraits of Alabama coach Bear Bryant and Otis Redding, left me cold. In contrast to the exhibit’s more substantive pieces, these seem silly and out of place.

The hidden jewel of the exhibit is by late Baltimore matchstick sculptor Gerald Hawkes, a former heroin addict who became a visionary artist. Bursting with vibrant hues of blue, red, gold, orange and yellow, his energetic “Fancy Dancer”—colored matchsticks, dyes, oils and glue on canvas—reveals a faceless, sassy, fan dancer, arms outstretched and body “on fire” with a painted matchstick. The roughly 16-inch-by-20-inch piece conveys an elemental sense of joy, dignity and grace in movement.

A Georgia native’s strikingly simple statement about the divinity of Jesus also stands out. With the added element of an artist-made, gold-painted, wood frame, Lorenzo Scott’s “Baptism of Jesus” is a study of the non-traditional Savior. In the large, oil-on -canvas piece, Scott depicts a white-robed Jesus in the translucent, blue water with arms toward John the Baptist, an angel bowing on the shore amidst a landscape of lush, green grass. Above the baptismal lake is the benevolent figure of an ascended Jesus, looking down. That the faces of the angels, Jesus and John the Baptist are brown is controversial and more inclusive of the Black experience.

“American Eve,” an acrylic on canvas by Georgia resident Alpha Andrews, is a pull-up-a-floor-and-get-lost look at a contemporary Garden of Eden. A vaguely innocent-looking, dark-haired woman wearing a white-flowered, royal blue dress, stands looking out her window onto a verdant garden with colorful subjects and handwritten labels satirizing American politics. The slithering yellow serpent in the foreground wears a label that reads, “trust me,” as he tempts Eve with a bright, juicy, red apple with “socialism” written on it. Andrews evokes the hero image with a man on a white horse labeled “free enterprise,” and utilizes darker imagery with a black female figure in red carrying a laundry bundle on her head. The bundle, a burden, reads “affirmative action,” “quotas” and “EEOC.” An even more sinister image is in the upper right, a lynched, human figure labeled “media,” and “hung for treason.” On the lighter side, the “average voter” label is attached to a monkey hanging from another flowering tree. It’s the type of piece that you can stare at for hours and gain insight each time. Those are just three works in a vast collection teeming with primitivism and dignity, tenderness and memory and a reverence for a shared past. That “Amazing Grace” is also filled with hope means that these self-taught artists found or have found hope in their own lives, and perhaps even in the world. The complex understandings of life, death, sin, grace, heaven and hell inhabited by these works make this exhibit one worth experiencing.

By Kimberly Davis