A sumptuous collection surveying a half century of self-taught art from the American South. Distributed for the New Orleans Museum of Art.

In recent years, the artwork of the self-taught has gained increasing recognition in the mainstream art world. The New Orleans Museum of Art, a leading institution in the field, organized this exhibition identifying and documenting the superb aesthetic achievement of selected artists from thirteen Southern states who, by definition, have not sought didactic art training, traditional diplomas, or association with other artists or with the established art world in general. This overview of painting and sculpture is the first large-scale effort to consider the work of self-taught Southern artists according to intrinsic artistic merit and without regard to race, religion, or gender.--Adapted from foreword, p. 6.

A fascinating examination of the Bible's influence on seventy-three self-taught artists and 122 works of art

Flashes of a Southern Spirit explores meanings of the spirit in the American South, including religious ecstasy and celebrations of regional character and distinctiveness. Charles Reagan Wilson sees ideas of the spirit as central to understanding southern identity. The South nurtured a patriotic spirit expressed in the high emotions of Confederates going off to war, but the region also was the setting for a spiritual outpouring of prayer and song during the civil rights movement. Arguing for a spiritual grounding to southern identity, Wilson shows how identifications of the spirit are crucial to understanding what makes southerners invest so much meaning in their regional identity. From the late nineteenth-century invention of southern tradition to early twenty-first-century folk artistic creativity, Wilson examines a wide range of cultural expression, including music, literature, folk art, media representations, and religious imagery. He finds new meanings in the works of such creative giants as William Faulkner, Richard Wright, and Elvis Presley, while at the same time closely examining little-studied figures such as the artist/revivalist McKendree Long. Wilson proposes that southern spirituality is a neglected category of analysis in the recent flourishing of interdisciplinary studies on the South--one that opens up the cultural interaction of blacks and whites in the region.

Folk art is one of the American South's most significant areas of creative achievement, and this comprehensive yet accessible reference details that achievement from the sixteenth century through the present. This volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture explores the many forms of aesthetic expression that have characterized southern folk art, including the work of self-taught artists, as well as the South's complex relationship to national patterns of folk art collecting. Fifty-two thematic essays examine subjects ranging from colonial portraiture, Moravian material culture, and southern folk pottery to the South's rich quilt-making traditions, memory painting, and African American vernacular art, and 211 topical essays include profiles of major folk and self-taught artists in the region.

The first anthology to assemble the writings of the groundbreaking art historian, critic, and curator Marcia Tucker. These influential, hard-to-obtain texts —many of which have never before been published—by Marcia Tucker, founding director of New York's New Museum, showcase her lifelong commitment to pushing the boundaries of curatorial practice and writing while rethinking inherited structures of power within and outside the museum. The volume brings together the only comprehensive bibliography of Tucker’s writing and highlights her critical attention to art’s relationship to broader culture and politics. The book is divided into three sections: monographic texts on a selection of the visionary artists whom Tucker championed, among them Bruce Nauman, Joan Mitchell, Richard Tuttle, and Andres Serrano; exhibition essays from some of the formative group shows she organized, such as Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials (1969) and Bad Girls (1994), which expanded the canons of curating and art history; and other critical works, including lectures, that interrogated museum practice, inequities of the art world, and institutional responsibility. These texts attest to Tucker’s tireless pursuit of questions related to difference, marginalization, access, and ethics, illuminating her significant impact on contemporary art discourse in her own time and demonstrating her lasting contributions to the field.

Folk art is as varied as it is indicative of person and place, informed by innovation and grounded in cultural context. The variety and versatility of 300 American folk artists is captured in this collection of informative and thoroughly engaging essays. American Folk Art: A Regional Reference offers a collection of fascinating essays on the life and work of 300 individual artists. Some of the men and women profiled in these two volumes are well known, while others are important practitioners who have yet to receive the notice they merit. Because many of the artists in both categories have a clear identity with their land and culture, the work is organized by geographical region and includes an essay on each region to help make connections visible. There is also an introductory essay on U.S. folk art as a whole. Those writing about folk art to date tend to view each artist as either traditional or innovative. One of the major contributions of this work is that it demonstrates that folk artists more often exhibit both traits; they are grounded in their cultural context and creative in the way they make work their own. Such insights expand the study of folk art even as they readjust readers' understanding of who folk artists are.