Do you think that you could be a detective? When you visit the museum bring this scavenger hunt with you and see if you can figure out which artworks the clues describe, just like Sherlock Holmes!   
    
Each artwork has 3 clues. Read all 3 clues and then find the artwork they describe in our sculpture garden. There are 5 sculptures to find. The game is afoot, Dr. Watson!

Scavenger Hunt


•    I am nine feet in height.
•    My creator was born in France.
•    People love to listen to me.
•    Who am I? _________________________________________


•    I am a mammal.
•    I am a carnivore.
•    You might have a pet that is a distant relative of mine.
•    Who am I? _________________________________________


•    I am located at the most southern point of the Sculpture Garden.
•    I am made from recycled objects.
•    My creator was born in the city that houses the Liberty Bell.
•    Who am I? _________________________________________


•    I am located on the east side of the Sculpture Garden.
•    I have a triangle for a face.
•    My creator was born in London.
•    Who am I? _________________________________________


•    I am located at the most northern end of the Sculpture Garden.
•    If I was real I might be a basketball player for the Miami Heat.
•    My body is covered with a maze.
•    Who am I? __________________________________________

Ann and Ted Oliver from North Carolina talk about the painting behind them: Jim Gary Phillips (American, born in 1951-), Little Maggie, 2009, acrylic on cabinet door, 28 x 19 inches. Courtesy of Ann and Ted Oliver.

"This is the first museum exhibition that Jim Gary Phillips’s work has been a part of," southern Outsider art collector Ted Oliver told us at the beginning of his lecture on Outsider Visions: Self-Taught Southern Artists of the 20th-Century, currently on view at the museum.  In spite of difficulties like low incomes, lack of formal education and health issues, the Olivers told us, southern Outsider artists have enjoyed an increase in both value and recognition over the past years.

Though there are 41 different artists included in this exhibition, common themes are apparent throughout the gallery. The Olivers succeeded in showing us the common underpinnings that exist in southern Outsider art and regaled us with tales of unexpected adventure from when they traveled throughout the south buying this art straight from the source. In 2005, after retiring from teaching in Georgia, the Olivers took to the road to meet the artists who live on unnamed side streets in rural towns from Texas to South Carolina. They amassed a collection of Outsider art that now numbers more than 1,000 pieces. In our downstairs galleries you can see such disparate scenes as the baptism of Christ to the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955. However, you could just as easily find artworks with a common theme, such as stories from the Old Testament and depictions of families attending church services.

 
The first thing the Olivers showed us on their tour was a quilt created by Chris Clark. Clark would both sew the quilts and then paint images right on top of the fabric. The one we have on display shows his aunt, Henrietta Clark, dressed in her Sunday best, a traditional large, fancy church hat attached to the quilt on top of the painted woman’s head. Ann Oliver ruefully recalled a visit with Clark when she discovered a large cache of fancy church hats that he kept for just that purpose, to sew onto his painted quilts. Ann was permitted to try all of them on until she grabbed for his mama’s, which resulted in some chastisement on his part and the learning of a lesson on Ann’s, that being, a mama’s hat is only to be admired with your eyes, from a distance. Nobody puts on mama’s hat but mama.

When the Olivers moved on to Lorenzo Scott’s paintings, the stories became a bit darker. Scott suffered the loss of his fiancée in a tragic accident and she figures prominently in his paintings, both before and after her death, such as in Self-Portrait with Children and Girlfriend. Scott claims to see visions of her still, and can sometimes feel her presence in other people.

Further along in the gallery, the Olivers discussed painter Bernice Sims, a southern woman who lived through the African-American Civil Rights Movement (1955-1968). Many of her paintings poignantly address the social upheaval of America during that time but one very special depiction, Edmund Pettas Bridge, Selma (currently on view in the exhibition), was chosen as an image for a U.S. Postage stamp in 2005! Painter Bernice Sims' artwork was 1 of 10 illustrations chosen to depict memorable events that took place across the South during the Civil Rights Movement.

Painter Bernice Sims' postage stamp image courtesy of The Folk Art Society of America

So, what can we learn about buying Outsider art directly from the source?  What is one of the main lessons the Olivers have learned over their 16 years of collecting Outsider art? “Always take your artwork with you right after you buy it,” Ted told us during his talk, “If you bought something from [painter] Richard Burnside and then left, and came back to get it, why, he might’ve sold it to somebody else while you were gone!” Perhaps we learned that Outsider artists aren’t so naïve after all.

The museum’s current exhibition, Outsider Visions: Self-taught Southern Artists of the 20^th Century, offers visitors a chance to observe a truly unique strain of American art. As Outsider art, the works on display reflect the visions of artists who worked and continue to work without formal training in the fine arts. Unencumbered by the constraints of tradition, their art represents a striving for a pure and deeply personal aesthetic. Even without a structured education, the works included in Outsider Visions reflect a wide range of subject matter, from contemplations on spirituality to austere studies of daily life.

Outsider Visions has proven to be a particularly timely exhibition, considering the precarious state of the American Folk Art Museum’s collection of non-canonical art produced in folk and Outsider traditions. A recent September 20 article in the New York Times detailed the unfortunate decline of the New York City based Museum, whose collection houses an encyclopedic array of Outsider and folk art masterpieces.  Article author, Roberta Smith lamented the possible loss of the Museum. She writes:

“The Folk Art Museum’s erasure from New York’s cultural skyline would be a tremendous loss, for the city in general and for its role as a center of both art viewing and art making. A full-blooded expression of century’s worth of instinctive, self-taught artistry is crucial…”

In a final effort to keep its collection intact, the Museum’s Board of Trustees and its staff have announced an audacious plan to ensure the Museum’s operation for the next three fiscal years in its original home at Two Lincoln Square in Manhattan.  Long-term survival of this cultural center will require attracting a broader public to visit the Museum and advocate for folk and Outsider art.

With Outsider Visions the Boca Raton Museum of Art hopes to advance the legitimacy and intrinsic value of Outsider art. Selecting works from the renowned collection of Ann and Ted Oliver, the curatorial team has crafted a show that offers viewers a chance to experience the immediacy of expression employed by these artists. Assistant Curator Kelli Bodle writes in the accompanying exhibition brochure, “Outsider art is a welcome reprieve full of earnest creation free from pretension.”

The value of Outsider Art and of collections like the Oliver’s or the American Folk Art Museum’s  lie not in their celebrity or courtship with mainstream taste, but in their celebration of creativity for creativity’s sake, a value any observer can appreciate.

Artist Sam Messer is associate dean and adjunct professor at the Yale University School of Art but may be better known as friend to famous writers Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) and Paul Auster (The Invention of Solitude, The New York Trilogy).  Messer recently created a cycle of paintings that depict Paul Auster’s typewriter and have earned him even more credibility among the art world set. 

Although Messer declines to put labels on his work his Mother and Child (1985) exemplifies one of the more popular styles from the 1980s, that being Neo-Expressionism. Neo-Expressionism dominated the art market in the early 1980s and was basically a backlash against the sterile, cold, minimal aesthetic so popular throughout mid-century.  Neo-Expressionism’s formal elements are characterized by a visceral treatment of paint and bright palettes aimed at generating an emotional reaction from the viewer.  Neo-Expressionism depicts recognizable subject matter, mostly figures and symbols, or even icons, like the Madonna and child. 

But Messer’s work is not a retread of an ancient religious theme.  The figures’ bodies, those parts that are discernible, are strangely dissociated from the two main portraits.  If paint can be considered an inherent part of the content in a painting, then here it has become the content itself, oozing and sliding the figures’ bodies across the picture plane. Messer’s intent is blurred and hard to decipher.  What’s your read on this painting?
Mother and Child can be found in our second-floor New Acquisitions gallery. 

IRVING PENN (American, born in New Jersey 1917- 2009), Frederic Franklin and Alexandra Danilova, New York, March 12, 1946, vintage gelatin silver print, 9 ½ x 7 ¼ inches. Permanent collection 2007.5.111. Bequest of Isadore and Kelly Friedman

On March 12, 1946, ballet dancers Fredric Franklin and Alexandra Danilova were captured on film by eminent fashion photographer Irving Penn (1917 - 2009). One of a series of photographs from this shoot is on display in our second-floor photography galleries.

Irving Penn defined a new look for magazines, beginning in the 1950s. As a photographer for Vogue Magazine, he was the first photographer to place his models against plain backdrops, thus erasing space and scale, which made the models the sole focus. Here, we see Alexandra Danilova against the silhouette of Fredric Franklin in a soft-focus vintage gelatin silver print. Very ethereal.

Sixty-five years later, visitors can marvel at the two world-class dancers’ strength and grace. Each dancer commands an impressive résumé. Franklin began dancing in 1931 with Josephine Baker at the Casino de Paris, an institution that continues to present grand ballets and musical acts to this day.

This legendary partnership between the Russian-born prima ballerina and her dance partner Fredric Franklin is part of Penn's early work that helped to usher in the minimalist look of fashion photography during the modern era.