The current Holmes Gallery exhibition at the Vero Beach Museum of Art is one to which curator Jay Williams can relate on several levels. “Folk Art from the Morris Museum of Art” presents 74 two- and three-dimensional artworks from the Augusta, Georgia, institution where Williams, a Southerner by birth, spent four and a half years of his career.
The Morris Museum of Art boasts that it is the first museum dedicated to the art and artists of the American South. Located in a large office building in downtown Augusta, the museum opened to the public in 1992.
Its collection of folk art has always been an integral part of its mission, says Williams, adding that the Morris, which collects a wide range of art made by Southerners, does not make a distinction between folk art and fine art.
“It doesn’t really serve much purpose to draw lines in the sand,” he says. “If the history of art shows us anything, it’s that our ways of categorizing art are often changed over time.”
According to Williams, the pieces on display at the VBMA are only the “tip of the iceberg” of the Morris’s folk art collection. He notes that over half of the objects on view were a partial gift to the Morris from Julia J. Norrell, the same collector whose Civil War photographs are currently on display in “Shadows of History” in the Titelman Gallery.
Jay Williams and Norrell (who recently spoke at the Vero Beach museum about her Civil War photos) go back a ways.
Sixteen years ago, when Williams was chief curator at the University of South Carolina’s McKissick Museum, he presented Norrell’s extensive collection of photographs of the rural South in the exhibition “Myth, Memory, and Imagination.”
Norrell is a former Washington lobbyist whose father, William Frank Norrell, was a long-serving member of Arkansas’s House of Representatives. She defines herself as a Southerner for whom the collection of art is political as well as personal.
In 2012 Norrell was quoted in Ohio Wesleyan University Magazine on collecting:
“… Art served as a way for me to reconcile many of the difficult political issues of the day. By that I mean I am a Southerner, and I was coming of age at the time of great crisis in the South. The Civil Rights struggle became essential to my view of the world, and art became the lens through which I filtered my thoughts and feelings.”
Nowhere in the present exhibition are the inequalities of the Old South more eloquently expressed than in two works from the Julia J. Norrell Grantor Trust that hang just inside the gallery’s entrance. They are by an African American artist, William Clarke.
Clarke, born in 1950 in rural Virginia, grew up in the era of segregation in Southern schools. So did Williams, a native of Fort Myers.
Created in 2001, Clarke’s untitled works are memory paintings. In the lingo of folk art, that means that the pictures are not reportage of contemporaneous events, but are based on the artist’s recollection of how things used to be.
In one of the paintings, two little girls, one black and one white, face each other in profile tossing a beach ball. Behind one girl is a water fountain labeled “Colored Only”; the other girl stands before a “White Only” fountain. The artist has emphasized the absurdity of the distinction by showing that the pipes running to each fountain unite at a common source.
Nine works by Clarke in the exhibition show other aspects of black Southern life, and while not all are from times long past, all have a timeless quality. “Church of Francisco” shows the site dedication for a new house of worship; other pictures show scenes of people in church or engaged in outdoor recreation. One of the most poignant works in the show is by Clarke. That painting depicts a snowy funeral procession led by a preacher with a black umbrella.
Many of the artworks in the show proclaim their authors’ faith in God.
“That’s not a surprise,” says Williams. “Black or white, whatever your ethnic background, in the South, religion has a very strong influence on culture.”
The exhibition opens with three tall and narrow paintings by Mary Louise Proctor that might put viewers in mind of stained glass church windows. The work at the far right incorporates a mosaic of mirror shards; it depicts a woman with arms raised in ecstatic worship.
“Have you ever saw a mirror that was broken in pieces?” it asks. “That’s how my life had been. Only the Lord continue to mend me back together again.”
An exhibition label next to another of Proctor’s works explains that a year after several of her family members died in a house fire, Proctor had a vision instructing her to paint. Thus began her career as a “missionary artist” whose pictures convey messages of both spiritual and practical import.
Williams points out that a personal tragedy or other spiritual crisis can lead a person to express his or her feelings through art. When pictures alone aren’t enough, folk artists – who, by the first-person appeal of their message, appear to take the presence of an audience for granted – use the power of the written word to aid imagery in getting the point across.
This use of words in art comes from the Southern tradition of testifying – that is, making a public statement of religious belief, says Williams.
“A lot of the inscriptions aren’t exactly grammatical; they are in colloquial Southern English,” says Williams.
He asserts that this lends authenticity to the art.
“It’s like you are being spoken to by the works,” he says.
Three of the five paintings in the show by Reverend B. F. (Benjamin Franklin) Perkins are as much about the compositional arrangement of words on the canvas as they are about their meaning.
“My Epatha” was created in 1990, when the painter was 86 years old (he died a month shy of his 89th birthday). Williams says that he realized that the artwork’s title was a corruption of the word “epitaph” after he read the inscription, a torrent of capital letters limned in alternating bands of red and black pigment.
The work is an inspired last will and testament. In it, Perkins first thanks God for a long life, and then gets into the nitty-gritty of who he wants for his pallbearers and who should preach his funeral service. He ends with a plea for “Everybody to accept Jesus Christ.”
Christ is also present in the exhibition in a grouping of crucifixes, two by the esteemed Mose Tolliver (c. 1920-2006) and one by the venerable Clementine Hunter (1886-1988).
God’s creatures, in both paintings and sculptures, abound in the exhibition. The expected hounds, pigs, snakes, peafowl, a possum and a skunk share the spotlight with animals that missed the ark, including a welded metal dragon, an oil painting featuring a centaur and an acrylic on board pair of fantastic “doodle bugs” arrayed in peacock-like finery.
The warm appeal of all of the works in the show is undeniable.
As Williams says, “Folk artists speak as folk to the folk, in other words, to us. We are all the folk.”
