AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM, NEW YORK
I went to town to see the traveling exhibit from the American Folk Art Museum in New York City which has been there all summer while I was away and then sick and about to move on. I have a membership to the Asheville Art Museum and so avoided the $15 entrance fee to the museum and paid the $7 fee to see the exhibit. Once in I realized that I wanted to be able to look at the exhibit again later and to wonder about it. So I photographed every piece in the exhibit and as I was doing so realized that the stories accompanying each piece were extremely interesting. So what I am going to do here is to put a number of the art works in the exhibit and then, probably tomorrow, wonder about them.
Today I am going to wonder a little bit about how an exhibit of untaught artists who struggled just to get through life and then were driven to make art against all odds end up in an exhibit in an spacious building where no one local who is struggling to make ends meet can afford to visit, a museum that is supported by fund raisers, often high society special events, from the well to do of the city who are proud to be able to support the arts whether they visit the exhibit or not. I know I sound snotty, but there seems to be an uncomfortable irony here, an irony in which I am complicit and so have no right to be snotty about.
These artists and I have almost nothing in common and yet, as the stories describe, they are driven by some inner drive, often something over which they have no control to make art including Henry Darger who lives a solitary life doing menial jobs in a one room apartment where after his death are discovered a room full of art connected to a 15,145 page novel that he has written about an unknown realm of the Vivian Girls.
So here is this example plus others.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 