American Folk Art Museum’s ‘Self-Made’ enters its final weeks in New York

‘Self-Made: A Century of Inventing Artists’ is entering its final weeks at the American Folk Art Museum in New York, where it remains on view through September 13, 2026. The exhibition brings together work by more than 60 artists and reconsiders the historical category of the “self-taught artist,” focusing on how artists without formal academic training have defined themselves and their practices on their own terms.

Drawn primarily from the American Folk Art Museum’s collection, the exhibition includes paintings, sculptures, photographs, videos and artists’ notebooks. Its selection includes recent and rarely seen acquisitions alongside works by artists such as Bill Traylor, Clementine Hunter, Henry Darger, Minnie Evans, Morris Hirshfield, Lee Godie, Horace Pippin, Martín Ramírez, Adolf Wölfli and Joe Coleman.

Rather than treating these artists as amateurs or isolated “geniuses” working outside history, ‘Self-Made’ examines the diverse systems of knowledge and community that shaped their practices. The museum describes the featured artists as having worked largely beyond conventional art-school, gallery, museum and peer-exchange structures, while emphasizing that their practices could be rooted in professional expertise, community traditions and other forms of learning.

The exhibition is organized around three forms of artistic “self-making” and self-fashioning: self-portraits, alter egos and autobiographies. Its galleries unfold chronologically, presenting the artworks as firsthand accounts of identity and intention. The approach places particular emphasis on the makers’ perspectives and aesthetic decisions, shifting interpretation toward the agency expressed through each artist’s chosen image, material and form.

The project grew out of the American Folk Art Museum’s ‘Rethinking Biography’ cataloguing initiative, launched in 2023 to strengthen the institution’s stewardship of its twentieth- and twenty-first-century art collection. That initiative prompted a reassessment of how works are defined, exhibited and contextualized. ‘Self-Made’ was curated by Valérie Rousseau, the museum’s Curatorial Chair and Senior Curator of 20th-Century & Contemporary Art, with Suzie Oppenheimer, Ponsold-Motherwell Curatorial Fellow at the City University of New York Graduate Center and a research associate.

A related public programme, ‘The Art of Minnie Evans: A Conversation,’ will take place on September 9 from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Co-presented by the Whitney and the American Folk Art Museum, the ticketed discussion will consider Evans’s mixed-media drawing practice and her position within American art history. Admission to ‘Self-Made’ itself is free, and the museum also offers a virtual tour through its YouTube channel. The American Folk Art Museum is located at 2 Lincoln Square, New York City.