Image: American Folk Art Museum, New York
The American Folk Art Museum is devoting a major exhibition to the idea of the “self-taught artist” in the United States, framing the category as something shaped by artists themselves rather than by a single outside definition. ‘Self-Made: A Century of Inventing Artists’ runs from April 10 to September 13, 2026, and brings together work by 60 artists working outside conventional art-school, gallery, museum, and peer-exchange systems.
According to the museum, the exhibition takes a critical look at the historical definition of self-taught art from the early twentieth century to the present. It asks how artists without academic training have depicted, conceptualized, and identified themselves on their own terms, and it challenges reductive narratives that have cast such makers as amateurs or isolated geniuses outside lineage, influence, or artistic networks. The show is drawn primarily from the American Folk Art Museum’s collection and includes paintings, sculptures, photographs, videos, and artists’ notebooks.
The exhibition is organized around three methods of “self-making” and self-fashioning: self-portraits, alter egos, and autobiographies. Each gallery unfolds chronologically, and the museum describes the works as primary documents, or firsthand accounts of the self authored by the self. The curatorial premise places artists’ perspectives and aesthetic choices at the center, shifting emphasis away from the viewer as interpreter and toward the makers’ agency.
‘Self-Made’ also emerges from a recent institutional project. In 2023, the American Folk Art Museum launched ‘Rethinking Biography’, a reparative cataloguing initiative intended to strengthen stewardship of its twentieth- and twenty-first-century art collection. The museum says that project prompted a broader reassessment of how works are defined, exhibited, and contextualized, and that the exhibition grows out of that effort by foregrounding artists’ voices in interpretation.
The featured artists span a wide range of names and histories, including Morris Hirshfield, Bill Traylor, John Kane, Henry Darger, Aloïse Corbaz, Clementine Hunter, Adolf Wölfli, Joe Coleman, Lee Godie, and Bill Miller, among many others. The museum’s checklist also points to recent or rarely seen acquisitions among the works on view, underscoring the breadth of the selection and the range of media represented.
The exhibition is curated by Valérie Rousseau, PhD, Curatorial Chair and Senior Curator of 20th-Century & Contemporary Art, with Suzie Oppenheimer, Ponsold-Motherwell Curatorial Fellow, City University of New York, Graduate Center, and Research Associate. Exhibition-related programs listed on the museum’s site include a virtual insights session on May 12, 2026, a June 25 workshop titled ‘Dialogue + Studio: Meditative Grids with Susan Janow,’ and an online program on Charlie Willeto on July 1, 2026.
A newsletter from the museum noted that ‘Self-Made’ is on view through September 13 and is presented with free admission. The same communication framed the exhibition as part of the museum’s 2026 programming around the United States’ semiquincentennial, while the exhibition page emphasizes that the show’s core focus is the way artists have named and defined themselves through their own work.
