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Philadelphia Museum of Art presents Great and Mighty Things

Philadelphia Museum of Art presents Great and Mighty Things: Outsider Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection an exhibition on view March 3–June 9, 2013, that will present drawings, paintings, sculptures, and other objects by twenty-seven artists who worked outside the boundaries of the mainstream modern and contemporary art world.

Family Band-Seri
Jon Serl, Family Band. Oil paint on fiberboard, 43-3/4 x 104 inches (111.1 x 264.2 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection.

“For over three decades, Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz have assembled this extraordinary collection, and with this exhibition have promised it to the Museum. A collection-transforming gift such as this—which includes more than 200 works of art—is a rare thing and the Bonovitzes’ remarkable generosity will greatly enhance our collection by increasing our holdings in the field, and establishing the Museum as one of the primary centers for the study of outsider art in the country,” said Timothy Rub, The George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “We are delighted to be able now to share with the public the creative achievements of artists who have hitherto rarely found a place in the collections and galleries of American museums.”

Operating without academic training and outside traditional artistic discourse, “outsider” or “self-taught” artists create works which vary remarkably in style, content, and execution. Often produced in remote or rural places with unconventional methods and with materials such as reclaimed wood, sheet metal, house paint, and stove soot, the genre often draws upon the artists’ own experiences, their immediate surroundings, and the abundant imagery of popular culture, resulting in highly personal and intensely compelling works.

Many of these artists, whose works range from the 1930s to 2010, have achieved considerable reputations. Important artists such as William Edmondson, Martín Ramírez, and Bill Traylor are represented in the exhibition. These three practitioners are iconic figures among self-taught artists and have also been recognized as significant figures in the broader field of American twentieth-century art.

William Edmondson (1874–1951) was a retired hospital worker from Nashville, Tennessee, who, using an old railroad spike for a chisel, took up carving tombstones and outdoor stone ornaments from found pieces of limestone. Masterful in their simplification of form and almost geometric in their near abstraction, these works are considered among the finest achievements of this art form in the United States.

Mexican-born Martín Ramírez (1895–1963), who was hospitalized for a good part of his life, worked within the confines of the DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn, California, using rudimentary materials to bind together various used pieces of paper into large drawing surfaces. He employed thick crayon and graphite lines to create remarkable compositions featuring images of trains, tunnels, Madonnas, horsemen, animals, and landscapes, often adding collaged elements from popular books or magazines.

Bill Traylor (about 1853–1949), born a slave on an Alabama plantation, created graphite and poster paint drawings on found pieces of paper or cardboard, and depicted flattened and silhouetted animals, objects, and people—sometimes calm and dignified, but often disorderly and debauched. In his late eighties, while living on the streets of Montgomery, he ingeniously composed scenes of figures running, climbing, shooting, fighting, yelling, drinking, poking, chasing, pointing, or sitting, often within or on top of strange, unidentifiable geometric structures. Storytelling made manifest, these works likely narrate a long-gone African American culture of the deep South.

Dorrance Galleries
Philadelphia Museum of Art
2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway
Philadelphia, PA 19130
www.philamuseum.org

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