
Featuring Bernard Gilardi, Rosemary Ollison, Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, Della Wells, M. Winston
Featuring Ralph Albert Blakelock, Emile Branchard, Earl, Ella Jones, Edwin Lawson, Richard Nisbett, L.C. Spooner, James Son Ford Thomas, R.E Treubel,
Steven Powers is a leading dealer in American Folk and Outsider Art, and the country's top specialist in Woodlands Indian sculpture, treen and choice antiques.
Steven S. Powers and Joshua Lowenfels have a shared gallery on the Lower East Side at 53 Stanton Street. We exhibit a Venn diagram of Outsider, Self-Taught & Contemporary Works of Art. We are three minutes from The New Museum, and 70 other galleries on the Lower East Side.
Phone: 917-518-0809
Ralph Albert Blakelock (1847-1919)
The OG American Outsider artist!! Self taught and later institutionalized, Ralph Albert Blakelock in the early 20thC was the most popular (and most faked artist) of his day (though he was penniless). Blakelock was institutionalized from 1900-1919. His paintings from this period, are typically small, brighter and looser from his earlier works - there is a real liveliness to them. In this work he uses the unprimed wood panel as a color and texture of the trees and ground. The feel here reminds me of the Festival of Colors in India.
Authentication and Provenance: Walter & Syril Frank Collection. Authenticated by Norman Geske as NBI category II (#750).
A Group of Nine Visionary / Spiritualist Drawings (c. 1952-1953)
We recently acquired an exciting body of spiritualist work that combines Christianity, transcendentalism, sci-fi, and cosmology. The series consists of nine drawings, each 12" x 18", dated from December 21, 1952, to March 14, 1953. Found in upstate New York.
Drawn and annotated in colored pencil (one with a blue pastel ground), the narrative throughout is compelling and addressed to someone named "Earl," who is tasked with bringing light and love to Earth.
Several drawings illustrate light rays from the cosmos converging on a single point on Earth with notations, e.g., "Heart of the cosmic Emmanuel with its Christ placenta & water of the fountain of life it IS the Fountain."
And others with tracery-like flowers, noted, e.g., "Pipe-cable from god. Bearing the water of the fountain of life. Christ aorta with life in full for the obedient of those who love God."
One drawing with a blue pastel ground and a yellow six-pointed star (like David) is entitled on the back, "Flag of The City of God. The One True Theocracy."
The ninth drawing, spread over two pages, illustrates a graduating overflowing fountain from the heavens onto Earth and is annotated, "Look inside our column, Earl, Heaven...Bosom of God. The wings of perfect love. The electric diamond eye of god. The sword of truth. The key to life, to the kingdom of god - all these are yours, Earl, & the fountain of life!
Read the full transcription here
Edwin Lawson (1911-1980)
Edwin Lawson, a professor of architecture who died in 1980, left behind a cache of drawings he created in the 1970s that revealed a fantasy world his wife was unaware of. The large-scale pencil and crayon drawings illustrate Lawson cross-dressed as a woman in historic fashions from the 1880s to the 1960s.
The works were likely personal fantasies versus actualized events. Lawson heavily worked the drawings and struggled to correct certain details that he dreamed about, like his made up eyes, lips, jewelry, and bosom.
In the 1960s and 70s drag culture was becoming less underground. In the alternative arts and fashion scenes, figures like Divine, music by Bowie and Bolan, and movies like The Rocky Horror Picture Show brought gender-bending more into the zeitgeist.
However, that does not mean it was mainstream and culturally safe. Lawson probably felt inspired by the drag scene but still too uncomfortable to fully manifest his sexual identity at a time when it would likely threaten his relationships and his career.
In 2017, The Museum of Sex featured Lawson's work in Known/Unknown: Private Obsession and Hidden Desire in Outsider Art, and currently Lawson is shown at The Smithsonian in, We Are Made of Stories: Self-Taught Artists in the Robson Family Collection.
Ida Ella Jones (1874-1959)
Ida Ella Jones, the daughter of a former slave, had ten children and at the age of seventy-two began painting. Self-taught, her work focuses on local (Chester County, PA) landscapes, still-lifes and Biblical stories. Mockorange, (Philadelphus), is a shrub with a citrus scent and has white blossoms that bloom in the late spring to early summer.
Literature: Starting Anew After Seventy: The Story of Ida Ella Jones, Primitive Artist, by Ida J. Williams, 1980. To Everything a Season: The Art and Life of Ida Jones, by Beverly Sheppard and Roberta Townsend, 1995.
Richard Nisbett (1753-1823)
This remarkable watercolor from 1822 is one of the earliest American asylum works extant and likely the earliest in private hands. Further, it is attributed to Richard Nisbett (1753-1823), a published author and poet of note, and a patient at Philadelphia Hospital's asylum ward.
The painting is inscribed on the lower left, "1822. Painted by a maniac confined in the cells of the Alms House—the design his own." It is initialed "J.P.H" for John Pennington Hopkinson (1801-1836). Dr. John P. Hopkinson was a Philadelphia physician, author, and professor and was the son of Congressman Joseph Hopkinson, and Francis Hopkinson's grandchild, signer of the Declaration of Independence.
Richard Nisbett (1753-1823) is an obscure figure who, like many obscure figures, led a remarkable life. In 1773, he was a member of the West Indian plantocracy, engaged in a pamphlet war over slavery with Benjamin Rush. By 1800, he was a Quaker convert confined as a psychiatric patient in Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Hospital, where Rush was a physician. This stunning transition, from being a champion of the enslavement of others to being himself the subject of perpetual confinement, is recorded in a variety of disparate and discontinuous sources, including manuscripts and paintings that Nisbett himself produced while he was a patient. It’s possible that Nisbett created his watercolors, including this map of the world, to illustrate or accompany the epic poem, The Notioniad, that he also wrote while in confinement. (Never published, the original bound manuscript of The Notioniad is in the collection of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.)
Bourgeois remarked of Branchard's work at the Independent Show, "those two small paintings appeared as the best proof, that art is not a question of colouristic or formalistic ability or brush-acrobatics, but primarily a question of vision."
Emile Branchard (1881-1938)
Branchard was born (1881) and raised on the streets of New York City and lived in a large rooming house that his mother ran on Washington Square South. At the age of thirty-seven, Emile Branchard, a former truck driver, longshoreman, and policeman, found himself with tuberculosis and was forced to retire. He set up a painting studio in the basement and created imagined landscapes. A border of the house who recognized Branchard's talent entered a few paintings, without his knowledge, to the Society of Independent Artists show of 1919. His works were accepted and influential gallerist, Stephen Bourgeois offered him a solo show later that same year (Bourgeois would then regularly exhibit his work until 1932).
Bourgeois remarked of Branchard's work at the Independent Show, "those two small paintings appeared as the best proof, that art is not a question of colouristic or formalistic ability or brush-acrobatics, but primarily a question of vision."
L.C. Spooner (1863-1955)
Lee Cordova Spooner was a visionary inventor of self-propulsion and self-defense contraptions.
From the WLD Foundation’s website: Little is known about the life of this highly original artist. L.C. Spooner's work, created between 1911 and 1935, is comprised entirely of plans of machines or everyday-life objects based on the principle of self-propulsion (self-propelled motors, self-propelled trash cans, self-propelled scales, self-propelled finger-lifter, etc.)
Most of Spooner’s work is held in the William Louis Dreyfus-Foundation’s Collection and The Centre Pompidou by way of the ABCD / Art Brut Foundation.
James 'Son Ford' Thomas (b. 1926-1993)
“…Busts of George Washington… speak to the history of slavery and its residual oppressive policies, which Thomas faced throughout his lifetime. The cotton wigs that he created for each Washington bust reflect Thomas’s own history with cotton, which he picked with his grandfather to earn a living as a young man. As an adult, Thomas grew cotton as a sharecropper, requiring that he rent the land and buy overpriced supplies from its white owner, incurring tremendous debt that made earning a living impossible.” — Jonathan Berger & Jessica Iannuzzi Garcia
James 'Son Ford' Thomas (1926-1993)
“…Busts of George Washington… speak to the history of slavery and its residual oppressive policies, which Thomas faced throughout his lifetime. The cotton wigs that he created for each Washington bust reflect Thomas’s own history with cotton, which he picked with his grandfather to earn a living as a young man. As an adult, Thomas grew cotton as a sharecropper, requiring that he rent the land and buy overpriced supplies from its white owner, incurring tremendous debt that made earning a living impossible.” — Jonathan Berger & Jessica Iannuzzi Garcia
Exhibited: James ‘Son Ford’ Thomas: The Devil and His Blues at 80WSE Gallery, 2015
Published: James ‘Son Ford’ Thomas: The Devil and His Blues, 2015, p. 68.
Published: Art Forum, December, 2015.
Provenance: Ron & June Shelp Collection
Steven S. Powers
53 Stanton Street
New York, NY 10002
917-518-0809
steve@stevenspowers.com
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