Image on ‘Sacred and Profane’ in Southern Art
From Image journal’s Update:
Sacred and Profane: Voice and Vision in Southern Self-Taught Art
Edited by Carol Crown and Charles Russell
The essays in Sacred and Profane: Voice and Vision in Southern Self-Taught Art examine several artists from the last century whose vision has been shaped by the geography, religious imagination, and racial and economic struggles of the American south. Because self-taught art tends to be deeply personal, it would be difficult to make any generalizations about the works featured here: from the chewing gum sculptures, handmade dolls, yard ornaments, and knick knack arrangements of Nellie Mae Rowe, to the “sermons in paint” by the Rev. Howard Finster, to the decorated shoes, chairs, and household objects of George Andrews. Each work is imbued with the private fascinations and idiosyncrasies of the artist—many of whom create out of a sense of divine calling, including the musician-evangelist Anderson Johnson, whose Faith Mission chapel in Newport News, Virginia is covered in his portraits of Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and, of course, Jesus. Others are inspired with equal conviction to shape something meaningful out of the more ordinary, even profane, stuff of their world. Most of the works collected in this book (and there are nearly 100 illustrations) combine something of both, balancing what the editors call “the simultaneous demands of the sacred and the profane dimensions of existence.” If they share anything in common, the self-taught artists featured in Sacred and Profane possess a measure of creative improvisation that enables them to seize anything from found objects to Bible verses and appropriate them to their own unique artistic vision.
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Posted by Nathan Bierma on 07/05 at 09:49 AM
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