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art reviews from around new york

To wrap up from last time on folk art, the American Folk Art Museum is out to add color to American art and history, people of color. With “Unnamed Figures,” through March 24, it asks how folk art drew on African Americans as artists and subjects while refusing to name names.

It shows how their absence testifies to unseen presences, while its presences testify to exclusions. In fact, it does that so well that one can almost forget what it leaves out. The show passes over conflict, the slave states, life after the Civil War, and a specifically African American art. They appear nonetheless right next door, if only in part, with “Marvels of My Own Inventiveness“—and I bring them together with an earlier report on outsider artists as a longer review and my latest upload.

Each of its five artists has only a handful of works, but enough to leave a mark and a name. One can see their determination with the oldest of the five, Mary T. Smith, born in 1905. Working in the 1980s, she applies black in broad strokes, for big outlines, big egos, and big hair. Her figures face front, like the familiar icons of black power, but with colorful, casual compositions that take nothing for granted. The people themselves could just as well be nameless. They do not so much confront the theme of black invisibility as rebel against it.

By the time one reaches the youngest, Claude Lawrence, colliding colors are more than half the point. As a title puts it, Why So Blue? Born in 1944, Lawrence packs them in, not so much layered or intermixed as fighting for space. Faces appear, but an explicit politics is gone. Certainty must have given out anyway after the election of Ronald Reagan, even for Smith. That still leaves presences, if only one could pin them down.

The modest show comes as a postscript to the larger one, but also a counterpoint. The very hallmarks of the older folk art are gone, from its stiff, firm outlines to its narratives. Black artists today have often drawn on the flatness and patterning of African American art in the South or African art itself, but not here. Smith’s scrawls suggest street art and defacement, not unlike those of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Yet they avoid his deliberate clichés and aggressive juxtapositions. They leave open just what is left of outsider art other than the outsider.

The show’s awkward title adapts a line from Hortense Spillers, a literary critic who has sought an “African American grammar.” Echoes of William Butler Yeats, with art as “monuments of its own magnificence,” may be deliberate as well. The combination points to identity politics, but also shifting perspectives. J. B. Murray has a reputation as an Abstract Expressionist, which accounts for his freely detailed brush, but not much more. The tiny marks could be figures in half a dozen history paintings at once. One could almost treat its divisions as panels in a graphic novel.

Purvis Young is fond of busy marks and crude divisions, too. Wood slats overlay his paintings, like stretchers that have moved to the front or frames that refuse to close. There is a riot going on. It may or may not be race riot, and Leonard Daley depicts both blacks and whites amid a painting’s discarded materials. If a white figure looks to a livelier black figure for help, its whiteness has faded to a bright, pure, ghostly white. If the black figure is a tempter, painting has its temptations, too.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Edward Hicks has become an exemplar of American folk art for his visionary landscapes filled with life. His earthy realism is far more sophisticated than his status would suggest. Warm colors and well-rounded figures all but pop out of the canvas, even as faces remain emblematic and the construction in depth more than a little awkward. It is still the country you only wish you knew.

Peaceable Kingdom, his most popular painting, embodies that wish, and more than sixty versions survive. Well-dressed Americans, adults and children, share the scene with wide-eyed animals, with equal claims to nature, culture, and an emerging nation. Still another painting extends its harmony to black and white America as well, but prospects were hardly peaceable, and the Civil War was only fourteen years away. The American Folk Art Museum gives it pride of place in “Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Absence in the Early American North,” through March 24. The museum also brings the story up to date with five recent and contemporary African Americans, as “Marvels of My Own Inventiveness.” Drawing on its enormous collection, it aims to make presences and absences alike difficult to overlook.

Hicks aimed for much the same. He lived among Quakers and others opposed to slavery, and his painting describes a community in which blacks work the land as autonomous beings. This kingdom was in truth a republic and not a distant utopia, but within reach. Now that outsider art is finding an audience, in galleries and collections, it helps to remember that it had one all along. Folk art always belonged to the community—and quilting or glazing to those who knew and admired craft. For Hicks, that community could still return.

Not that Hicks was naïve about the future or, for that matter, about art. His community had developed its own rifts, and more than one version of Peaceable Kingdom shows a majestic tree riven as well, as a warning. The Folk Art Museum, too, intends a warning. Slaves and free blacks alike are a presence in American history that many would just as soon overlook, while legal and other restrictions enforced their absence. The same story applies today. Still, “Unnamed Figures” paints a pretty upbeat picture.

It includes black faces, like a fully realized couple by William Matthew Prior in 1843. It includes black presences in landscape. Can you spot them, and just what are they doing? For whom are they doing it at that? Longer, narrower landscapes once hung high above furniture or a door. They served their purpose in the home, but they make anyone, black or white, that much harder to spot.

It includes black artists, like Joshua Johnson, a successful portrait painter. Did you notice that he has white sitters almost every time? His one black sitter was family, painted not for the market, but for their sake and his own. Ammi Phillips is another rarity, a woman in early American art with a white, middle-class following. Did you notice that two of her portraits include a strip of cotton and (lord help us) a watermelon? n each case, you have to supply what is absent and why.

Still, this is not a game of “Where’s African American Waldo?” Blackness itself becomes visible. Another black artist, Moses Williams, renders it in profile silhouettes. Early photos turn to blacks as well, and the museum throws in more recent photos of the descendants of slaves as well. They breach the show’s limits, but they reinforce that presences still matter. The museum also recovers a well-worn headstone, its name crying out to be read.

The museum makes room for well over a hundred works, on top of the room for “Marvels.” (It does not feel crowded.) It has other media as well, such as a powder horn and embroidery. If women could find a voice in textiles, like the Gee’s Bend weavers in the Deep South, why not blacks? It has minstrel shows in works on paper and a diorama as surreal as a Joseph Cornell box. But then where would racial tensions be without embarrassing stereotypes?

The show makes a point of the ubiquity of those tensions, by skipping right past the South. It sticks to New England and the mid-Atlantic states, including Joseph Shoemaker Russell with a black storekeeper in Philadelphia and Francis Guy in a Brooklyn winter. It benefits from folk art’s near indifference to traditional distinctions like landscape and genre painting. A view of a house by Rufus Hathaway in 1795 opens onto an active port in Massachusetts. Just what is folk art anyway? You never know these days, but this once it speaks for true outsiders in the peaceable kingdom.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.