Ted Diamond (1938-1986)
b. Boston, MA

Ted Diamond’s gouache works on paper are intense portraits, dense crowd scenes, and patients in the psych ward. Exceptionally raw, emitting crackling energy and deeply affecting – Diamond, through keen draughtsmanship and superb color sensibility – evokes James Ensor and Francis Bacon with reverberating power beyond the intimate scale of his work.

In 1966, art dealer Stuart Denenberg was sitting in his Boston gallery on Newbury Street at the age of 22 – and Ted Diamond who was 27, elusive, a bit “pixelated”, walked in with his drawings. Denenberg knew what his eyes told him – the gouache paintings were special – he immediately purchased two self-portraits that to this day he lives with and admires.

Diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar, Diamond spent most of his adult life under care in the psychiatric ward of the Charles River Hospital in Boston, where he made work in a fecund twenty-year period between 1966 and 1986. Obsessed with death, he eventually took his own life on May 8, 1986 at forty-eight years of age. Although he studied off and on at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Diamond did not graduate and never developed a professional career. After his suicide a few hundred works that had been mounted in notebooks and kept in his room at the hospital were taken by his only heir, a dear friend of Denenberg’s who kept them safe. These arresting works have until now been seen only once, in prepandemic California in 2018. Some have never before been exhibited out of the notebooks in which they had been carefully preserved for over 50 years.

Rose deSmith Greenman (1898-1983)

b. Boston, MA

Orphaned at a young age, Greenman was severely hearing impaired and lived her life in Boston and Newton, MA. Greenman married a pharmacist and had one daughter, Betty, and was a home-maker until her husband died suddenly in 1956. To make ends meet, she became a clerk at the Mass. Division of Banking and Insurance until her retirement in 1970. Seemingly out of nowhere, Greenman began drawing at age 72, the same time she began struggling with Alzheimer’s disease. Over a period of the next seven years, Greenman drew obsessively, making work with increasing intensity as a struggle with Alzheimer’s disease progressed.

Spending most hours alone, Greenman used pencils, pens, crayons, and markers on scavenged scraps of paper saved from family members to interpret her world virtuosically – creating demure, mesmerizing, constrained drawings — alongside others that capture a tongue-in-cheek wit — of her home, garden, and family life in Boston as well as transformative and invented scenes from her imagination. Greenman’s drawings embody a mark-making which is woven as tightly and expressively as it possesses an all-encompassing reverence of observation and boundlessness. Her inquiry into memory and deep sense of imagined, anchored and often times idealized home, place, family, an observer in oneself, is charged with longing and wonder.

Greenman never thought of herself as an artist or reflected on her work though she silently tucked away carefully stacked bundles of drawings upon completion deep in her closet and under her bedskirt. When asked about her work she would often dismissively respond, “What? Those are just my doodles.”

Sixteen years after Greenman’s death in 1983, Frank and Betty Avruch discovered a trove of Greenman’s drawings in their attic and together set about creating an archive of Greenman’s works. Greenman’s daughter Betty, now 92 years old and herself an artist and photographer, has since made it her life’s work to preserve her mother’s legacy. This effort began after Betty saw a revelatory museum exhibition of James Castle’s work for the first time, and recognized striking parallels with her mother’s work.

Selby Warren (1887–1979)

b. Lambing Flat (Young), NSW, Australia

Warren was a bushman and larrikin who after traveling through Australia settled in Trunkey Creek, New South Wales, leaving home young to be a sheep shearer, stockman, bullocky, miner, fencer, rabbit trapper, to pan for gold in the Abercrombie River and led a life of manual labor.

Warren took up painting when he retired in 1963 at 74 years old to record his lived experiences, explaining that he had wanted to paint all of his life. Used materials with ingenuity and anything he could lay his hands on — he added mud, sand, grass clippings, and mica for effect, using brushes he made with his and his wife’s hair, and repurposed furniture and building materials that he cut into constructions for frames.

Near illiterate, Warren wanted to visually chronicle his recollections in his pictures surging with a magnitude of memory and feeling in an astonishingly modern voice. He captured subjects from his time as an itinerant laborer to stories of rural folklore and political figures, iconic Australian scenes and landmarks, wildlife, and authors of poems and ballads he liked to recall with an innately incisive, full expression using experimental wit and abstract intuitive form.

Charles Callins (1887-1982)
b. Hughenden, Queensland, Australia

Callins spent his life working as a compositor in the printing rooms of newspapers and began painting upon retiring in his 60s. Born in a railway camp, his father worked on the Great Northern Railway before disappearing, when his mother relocated the family to Cairns. At 12 years old he became an office boy for the Cairns Times. He also worked as a foreman and constructed a yacht 'Thelma' which he sailed and won races in. Enlisted in the Australian Imperial Forces he was injured in an accident and after collapsing was deemed unfit to serve on the frontline in France and sent back to Australia in 1918. After marrying, he returned to work at the Cairns Times and was commissioned to write articles on sea rescues and the history of sailing ships. Moving to Brisbane, he mounted photo-zinc plates for The Telegraph, joining a mouth organ band which played on the radio.

Callins was injured by a flying piece of lead equipment and subsequently suffered from headaches for four years afterwards. Told to retire by a doctor he took up swimming and became an instructor. Inspired by an incident in which he saved a woman who fell off a boat, he began making drawings and paintings of coastlines telling his wife "If I don't paint Green Island and the Barrier Reef I will die and take the story with me."  A bird lover and naturalist, his lush paintings are often accompanied by painstaking notes of each location. Callins always painted his skies first and his curvilinear compositions and distortions of perspective and multiple perspectives show a fascination with land, topography, and lived experience. Offered his first solo show in 1957, Callins' exhibitions have been held in numerous art museums such as Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (1976) and are in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Australia and the Queensland Art Gallery. John Olsen praised Callins for his "wild eyed innocence" and his "wonderful sensibility of being Australian".

Betty Tyson, 1930s-1940s

b. Sydney, Australia

Pencil and watercolor illustrations in notebooks by Betty Tyson provide a rare insight into the inner world and imaginings of an Australian teenage girl. They include drawings and comments depicting her friends and classmates; illustrations to short stories on “the pupils of class 1A, St Elizabeth’s, Sydney [fictitious school]” and the “prefects of 1942.” The notebooks include scenes of coteries of girls in school; musical scores; a page entitled “the wedding group” detailing fashions worn by each person; diary entries and short stories on fictitious women; plans for a house; examples of interiors and decorated rooms; and portraits of friends’ future families such as “Ada’s child, 1972” and “Jemima’s child, 1984.”

Self-taught Collection, Philadelphia (1960s-1990s)

Beginning in the early 1990s, Michael Guerin collected art throughout Philadelphia's West side where he worked as a general contractor. Guerrin and his partner Kate began to amass portraits painted within this African American community by mostly self-taught and unknown artists.  

Through kismet Guerrin also formed lifelong friendships with many of the artists he collected including Lobo – who spent many years in prison where he made paintings and reliefs each with its own story synthesizing and sublimating redemptive narratives, as well as Esther Johnson, who painted watercolors of prominent African-American figures after retiring from working in the cafeteria of a steel mill, relearning how to paint with her non-dominant left hand after suffering a stroke in her 70s.