Image: American Folk Art Museum, New York
AFAM-held works are allowed to reach new audiences.
This exhibition of self-taught artists grew out of Rethinking Biography, a reparative cataloguing project launched by the Museum in 2023. The exhibition examines how artists without academic training have depicted, conceptualized, and identified themselves on their own terms.
It aims at challenging reductive, long-standing narratives that have cast these artmakers as amateurs or isolated geniuses working out of time, without lineage, influence, or artistic networks.
‘The Artist and His Model,’ dated 1945, is by Morris Hirshfield, who lived from 1872 to 1946. ‘Untitled,’ dated 1939–1942, is by Bill Traylor, who lived from 1853 to 1949.
Joe Coleman’s ‘Sunday Go to Meetin’’ is identified as a vest from the artist’s outfit, made in various cities in the United States between 1984 and the present from pins, pendants, reliquaries, and personal memorabilia on fabric; Coleman was born in 1955 in Norwalk, Connecticut.
