All in one day: Phila Museum of Art: Outsider Art - June Fete for Lobster

This special exhibit is from one of the largest private collectors of 'outsider art,' which simply means that the artist had no formal training.

47 different artists are represented. Many had mental illness. Bill Traylor was a former slave whose paintings reveal the violence inherent in a slave's life.

Few of the artists used real canvases. Rather they used 'found objects' such as corrugated steel, cardboard or tin to use for their work.

First we see the work of William L Hawkins (1895-1990)







He put his name and birthdate on every single painting.

***

Rev. Howard Finster (1916-2001) was three years old when he had his first vision. He saw his recently deceased sister Abbie Rose walking down out of the sky wearing a white gown. She told him, "Howard, you're gonna be a man of visions." (Wiki)

Famous within his lifetime unlike most of the other artists in the exhibition, Finster gave up preaching to become a fulltime artist. He oeuvre consists of 46,000 works of mostly "sacred art" as he called it due to a vision. He lived in GA.


I don't rightly know if this is the same clock at the Museum, but one of his clocks had a quotation from the Book of Jeremiah "Come with me and I will show you great and mighty things."

And that is the name of the show.


Self-portrait 



Here's a YouTube Video about Howard Finster. There's another one when he was on the Johnny Carson Show.

***

Joe Serl was a vaudevillian.







***

Sam Doyle (1906-1985) was a Gullah folk artist born on Saint Helena Island, South Carolina. He painted on scraps of wood and metal, documenting both St. Helena firsts and prominent members of the island community.





***
William Edmondson (1870 - 1951) of Tennessee was an African-American folk art sculptor. In 1937 Edmondson was the first African-American artist to be given a one-person show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Wiki, of course.

And the Lord came calling one morning and said, carve things out of stone, so who was he to refuse?



***

Bill Traylor, former slave from Alabama





***

We were exhausted! But we visited a couple other rooms on the same floor.

 Shhh! Don't wake the sleepers. They live their lives behind the glass and can't be seen.

 Shaker furniture.

 Wouldn't you love to put your hand inside and pop some of the artifax into your pocketbook?

 Or sleep on this comfy Shaker bed?

 Utopian communities like the Shakers flourished in the mid-1700s and afterward. The torch of freedom was strong after 1776 in the US and 1779 in France after storming the Bastille.

Diana the Huntress.

Ruth the Hunted showing her scant tan from Ocean City.

Our hero.

Onward to the June Fete, the largest fundraiser for Abington Memorial Hospital.

 Delicious lobster for $15 apiece. It was broiled by Moonstruck restaurant on Oxford Ave. How do I know? I saw the truck.

 I was watching for my friend Felicia Kelly but never saw her. We used to work together at the Intell.

 I liked that she had her own parking space.

My neighbor Bill Adams works for WM. I sent him this foto.

Skelly's produced a wonderful colorful lights-flashing carny. 

Read the 1999 obit of the founder of Skelly's, dead at only 68 of cancer. 

But the carny lives on.