SARAH WOLF NEWLANDS' FRESHMAN INQUIRY IN COLLABORATION WITH PROJECT GROW
Martín ramírez
Martín Ramírez, now known as a famous Art-brut, was born in Mexico in 1895. Before he was an artist however, he was known to be an excellent horse rider in Mexico, but due to financial situations, left behind his pregnant wife and three children to find work in California. Ramírez, after six years of living in the states and not knowing any English, became homeless in Northern California in 1931 due to the economic consequences of the Great Depression. He was later on found by California police in a very confused state of mind. The police then took him to a psychiatric hospital, where he was was hospitalized and categorized as a catatonic schizophrenic. He was institutionalized for over 30 years, bouncing from hospital to hospital.
Ramírez soon began to create artwork out of found materials that he had access to within the ward. These materials included things like paper bags, scraps of examining table paper, book pages collaged together with a paste of potatoes and saliva, as well as paint made from spit mixed with crushed crayons and colored pencils. In 1948, some of his artworks began to generate a buzz in the psychoanalytical field, as well as various art circuits. Unfortunately, many of his early works were disposed of or incinerated by the hospital staff because they were deemed unsanitary, and he was unable to preserve them for his portfolio. There are an estimated 300 works of art that remain from Ramírez’s time in the hospitals.
Ramírez is one of many artists who have gained fame after death. In 2007, the American Folk Art Museum in New York City opened “Martín Ramírez,” an exhibit with hundreds of his works. It was moved to the San Jose Art Museum of Art that same year from June to September, and then to the Milwaukee Art Museum from October to January 2008. In 2007, the descendents of Dr. Max Dunievitz, who was the Medical Director of the mental hospital Ramírez stayed at fought for custody of Ramirez’s works. Dr. Dunievitz had collected about 140 pieces of Ramírez’s art before he passed away and his descendents nearly discarded them in 1988. The heirs of Martín Ramírez would later claim ownership of the self-taught master’s work. In 2013, some of Ramírez’s work was sold for up to $270,000, and recently in 2015, 4 stamps were made based off Ramírez’s art to commemorate the late artist’s contribution to the Art Brute genre.
Article by: Deidra McKnight, Calvin Lowe, and Linneah Hanson.
andré robillard
from Trash to Treasure
André Robillard is a self-taught French artist who was born in Loriet in 1931. When he was a child, Robillard was raised by his divorced father, who was a forester and gamekeeper. Before the divorce, Robillard and his father would spend time together hunting and stargazing; however, due to stress from the separation, Robillard and his father’s relationship became strained. Robillard was then sent to a special needs school in a psychiatric hospital in Fleury-les-Aubrais. After spending his adolescence in the hospital and being exempt from military service for his “edgy” state of mind, he was released back into his father’s care to work on the family farm post-World War II. On the farm, Robillard learned how to play the harmonica, and made music with his father (accordion) and his grandfather (cornet).
At the age of 19, Robillard was hospitalized once again for “aggressive behavior.” While at the hospital as an adult, he had a significant amount of independance, and was given his own home on the hospital grounds. He also did many oddball jobs, including working at a wastewater treatment plant and as the clinic’s gardener. Robillard would collect cast off materials he found around the hospital, such as boards of wood, light bulbs, plastic piping and metal bars, among many other items. He would bring these items to his home and create sculptures out of them.
Robillard is most famously known for his “junk” sculptures of guns, animals, and space objects. In addition to three dimensional work, he also draws, often depicting astronomical themes that feature planets, space ships, astronauts, and aliens. Robillard’s deep fascination with space, animals, and guns likely could result from his interest in hunting and stargazing as a child.
Apollo 11 - Neil Armstrong - André Robillard
As of 1989, Robillard has moved into his own apartment and continues to make art and music today (Age 84). He is now considered to be a widely known and famous Art Brut artist, and his sculptures are often featured in the Collection de l’Art Brut in Laussane, Switzerland.
Article by: Ashley Mote, Karl Freitag, and Audrey Bond.
Resources:
http://hyperallergic.com/168681/andre-robillard-takes-aim-at-cast-off-junk-and-the-stars/
http://www.artbrut.ch/en/21004/1025/robillard--andre
http://www.galerie-zander.de/artist.php?lang=en&a=andre_robillard
Pascall tassini
Pascal Tassini was born with Down’s syndrome into a family of three children in Belgium in 1955. He lived with his parents until they died and subsequently, one of Pascal's brothers took responsibility for him, sending him to the Creahm workshops in Liege in the year 1986. Tassini always felt restless with his hands. Before finding art, he satisfied his natural impulses to create with obsessively cleaning and tidying the studio. After his first encounter with art, a reproduction of a sculpture in an African Art exhibition catalog, he began to work with clay. Moving from clay, he developed his skills in drawing and painting as well. At this time, he began stealing chairs and various materials which he used to build his famous hut within the studio. Its’ structure was constantly changing as new items and materials were being added and subtracted. All the objects were bound together with cloth derived from his companions’ work clothes. He welcomes visitors into his “den” if and only if they agree to undergo a “medical check up” by “Doctor Tassini” himself, a process which involves the artist wearing a white lab coat and playfully taking their pulse and curing all illnesses. For the past ten years, Tassini has worked exclusively with textiles ranging from wedding dresses, to headdresses, while expanding his hut, and wrapping items in a similar fashion to that of Judith Scott.
Article by: Natalie Hahn, Kacie Gala, and Morgan Marshall.
bill shannon aka crutchmaster
In 1970, Bill Shannon was born in Nashville, Tennessee with the degenerative hip condition Legg-Calve-Perthes, which forced him to use crutches to move around. His condition didn’t bind him to the side of the playground while his friends ran around having fun; Shannon was the type of kid who always wanted to play and was not one to sit on the side. Shannon took up skateboarding and used his crutches instead of his feet to propel him. In ‘75, Shannon moved to Pittsburg, Pennsylvania to continue his early school work. He went on to graduate from The Art Institute of Chicago in ‘95, earning himself a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA). A year later, Shannon moved to NYC to immerse himself in the art, street performance, and skating culture New York had to offer. Ten years later, he moved back to his hometown and continues to skate and work on other art projects to this day.
His ability to achieve and participate in numerous activities despite his crutches has given him the name “Crutch Master.” Over the past twenty years, Shannon has been able to show off his amazing talent through art installations, choreography, and performances on a global scale. He has done art at many events, like at the Tate Liverpool Museum, the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, the Holland Festival including Temple Bar Dublin and more. Shannon has even choreographed an aerial duet and solo on crutches for the world famous show, Cirque du Soleil. Along with the many events and shows he has contributed to, he has also gained recognition and awards for his outstanding art, like the Newhouse Foundation Award, Foundation for Contemporary Art Award, and the Colbert Award for Excellence amongst many others. Shannon has also starred in RJD2’s “Work it Out” music video and several commercials that continue to show off his amazing skills. Shannon has also been the center of his own documentary titled Crutch, shot for over the course of 14 years. The film consists of 500 hours of footage and depicts Shannon as he is growing up and the events and shows he performs in. In the trailer for Crutch, Shannon says, “what I encourage is to abandon assumptions.” Through his ability to perform and skate on crutches, he is breaking many stereotypes and assumptions surrounding disability.
Article by: Elijah-Cole Tabion, Jessica Newman, and Mackenzie Brown.
Paul Dalio
Paul Dalio is a new film director from New York who made his feature debut on February 12th, 2016 with his film Touched With Fire. Touched With Fire centers around two manic depressive bipolar people who fall in love while they are in a therapy program at the hospital. Their relationship may seem like a match made in heaven, but it is actually very unhealthy as they trigger each other’s manic behaviors. Dalio himself suffers from bipolar disorder where he experiences life with the most hopeless depression, but also with visionary manic highs. He uses his experiences of dealing with his manic depression and puts them into his very personal film. In the film, the character Marco embodies Dalio's experience with the illness though his delusions of the apocalypse and the creativity in his poetry. Dalio's main goal with this film was to diffuse the stigma around bipolar disorder, and instead bring to light the idea that many of the world’s greatest artists suffered from the illness. To show how while the depression could be soul crushing, bipolar disorder does allow him to feel the world with the deepest emotion which allows him to be more creative. One of the prominent motifs in the film is Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night, a piece painted while he was manic and looking at the stars through his sanitarium window. Dalio said in an interview that “[he has] seen a lot of movies about mental health and what upsets [him] the most is when it’s portrayed by someone who doesn’t have it and they don’t understand it. Often they judge it. It adds to a stigma. [He] wanted to do a movie where people can live through the eyes of someone who has it.” Overall, after seeing Touched With Fire, I believe the film is successful in the sense that the it really feels like you are looking through the eyes of two bipolar people, and I hope to see more films that touch on this type of subject in the future.
Article by: Scout Alter
Adolf wölfli
Adolf Wölfli, born on February 29th in Bowli Switzerland, was the youngest of seven children. He had a very rough childhood, being sexually and physically abused by his father and orphaned at the age of 10.
Later in his life, he briefly joined the military in 1890 and attempted to marry the love of his life, only to be denied by her father due to hislow social status. Wölfli was sentenced to two years in prison for attempted molestation of two girls in the same year. He then committed the same offense to a three-and-a-half year old girl five years later, and was then sent to Waldau Psychiatric Clinic.
Wölfli suffered from psychosis, in which his thoughts and emotions were so impaired that he lost contact with his external reality. He also experienced hallucinations that drove him to be violent with other patients, and as a result was placed in isolation during his first decade at the Waldau Clinic.
Four years after he was committed, he began to write, draw, compose, and collage inside his confined cell where he preferred the solitude. Wölfli decorated the walls with his work made from the supplies the guards would give him in exchange for favors. Wölfli was so passionate about his art that he would be given a new pencil and two sheets of paper every morning, only to have his pencil used up in about two days. He had to collect any paper he could find, either from the guards or other patients; otherwise he would run out of paper by the next Sunday. It is evident from his artwork that Wölfli was intrigued by the mandala theory.
Wölfli’s earliest preserved works date from 1904, showing highly restless and symmetrical pencil lines drawn on newsprint. Around the age of 8, he contracted an illness that prevented him from remembering his childhood; however, when placed insolitary confinement, Wölfli created a universe of personal significance, and created many imaginary autobiographies that turned his dramatic and miserable childhood into a magnificent travel log. The narratives were entirely fictional and lushly decorated with drawings of maps, portraits, palaces, cellars, churches, kings & queens, and talking plants amongst other themes. When all 45 volumes of his autobiographies are stacked on top of each other, they measure nearly 6 feet tall totalling 2,970 pages.
Wölfli’s last autobiography was completed a few days before his death, and ended up being a grandiose finale. It contained nearly 3,000 songs and over 8,000 pages titled “Funeral March.” He died November 6th, 1930 in the Waldau Clinic after 35 years of residing there. His work was greatly championed by Jean Dubuffet, and was among the first to be associated with the Art Brut or “raw outsider artist” label.
Article by: Samuel Ortiz and Gavin Rear
judith scott
Judith Scott was an outside artist who became well known for her beautiful fiber sculptures. Scott was born with Down’s syndrome and lived her whole life deaf and mute. She was born May 1st, 1943 and died March 15th, 2015, at age of 42. Scott was sent to an Ohio state institution at the age of 7, and was checked out 35 years later by her sister. She soon became a member of the Creative Growth Art Center in southern California, the first art center focused towards people with developmental disabilities. She began to create sculptures by wrapping strings of fiber around various objects, creating new and unique forms of artistic expression. Judith served as a great and inspiring influence on our society, providing amazing works of art to her community that can be viewed and remembered forever.
Article by Delphine Anton, Rachel Resler, and Ashli Penrose.
Jandek is not officially a person, but the musical project of Corwood Records, an independent record label owned and represented by the believed musician Sterling Smith. A mysterious man not actually identified before live performances starting in 2004, and confirmed to be the man on his albums, Smith is believed to be the name from vague phone calls and fan interviews, though there is no real or tangible evidence suggesting this naming. Jandek (which will be what the musician will be referred to for now) is also believed to be from Houston, Texas; this is where his P.O. box is, filled with letters and gifts from fans. It is also the address from which his albums are shipped (and his albums are only shipped in bulk). If you want Jandek merchandise you’ve got to make it yourself; the only known items to be sold and produced are CDs of his 51 albums (all released over 1978-2009), and 17 live albums. Jandek’s genre is a bit varying depending on the album, but he overall sticks to avant-garde blues and folk. However, songs range from acoustic guitar and American Folk to post-punk and black metal. His shows are never publicized, so if you haven’t listened to his CDS, his live performances can be a little strange. He is known to play to his own tune, and often out of typical normal tune for instruments. However, reviewers and interpreters have referred to him as a neo Ian Curtis or Lou Reed, so he could be an icon in the making. (And yes, he still has albums that are being released!)
Little biographical information about the musician is known, but journalist Katy Vine claims to have interviewed him before one of his live performances. She tells us she has no proof of the interview, in order to respect him, and he never actually confirmed his identity. Vine swears that the man in the live performances is the man she spoke to, and even claims that he left lyrical clues, and sly facial expressions as to hint at who he is.
Due to the lack of biographical information on Jandek, he is not officially listed or known as a musician with a mental or physical disability. At one point, before his music career fully took off, he had written 7 books… but then burned them all after rejection from NYC publishing company. Only one period could be, and has been, possibly described as manic for him (starting where 7 albums came out in less than 3 years; the 21st album ending in a 20 minute long psychedelic craze called “The Electric End” ), however no real evidence proves mania/manic depression.
This is where the theory of “disability aesthetics,” in the pure definitive sense, comes in. Disability aesthetics is used in the art field/community in relation to art that is somewhat inhuman, or non glorification of the human body/form/mind/etc. Existing as an outsider artist, Jandek has refrained from putting himself into the world (separating the person from the artist in the most literal sense). The reference of disability aesthetics, is, of course, problematic and wrong (due to the socio-political association and historical context of the word “disability”), but in the art field helps simplify the mystique of the musician who has inspired countless bands such as Low, Sonic Youth (Jandek has performed side by side with long time fan Thurston Moore), The Mountain Goats, and Bright Eyes.
To put him in the words of Kurt Cobain, “Jandek’s not pretentious, but only pretentious people like his music.”
Article by: Morgan Morrison and Isabella Marenco
Resources:
jandek
Outsider Art, and The Issue with
Disability Aesthetics in The Art
World
yayoi kusama
Yayoi Kusama is a well-renowned Japanese artist who is talented in multiple mediums, such as writing, painting, performing, and sculpting. She was born into a conservative family, and early abuse from her mother caused her to have hallucinations. In these hallucinations, she would see polka dots, which became the inspiration for her trademark: polka dot works of art. Throughout her lifetime, she has won many awards for her wonderful achievements, and is still popular to this day. Currently, she has an art installation in Los Angeles called the Infinity Mirror Room. She has created many of these rooms to portray the self-obliteration that she felt throughout her whole life. After creating these installations, she began to work through these emotions of feeling everything and nothing, and wants other people to feel how the room can wrap up a person’s soul. When inside the room, guests are encouraged to feel like they are everywhere and nowhere all at once. The room in the LA Art Museum is so popular, that some people had to wait in line for eight hours just to go in! Guests are only allowed to be in the room for 45 seconds due to its popularity, but I bet it’s worth the wait!
Article by: Isabel Villarreal and Morgan Raymond.
Howard Finster
In the eyes of the art world, Howard Finster is considered an outsider and
extremely looked down upon. As an artist, Finster was most inspired by gospel topics in his work. Many of his pieces are of similar looking men, and incorporated in his shirts are different illustrations of towns, trees, people, and Holy words. These representations of a god-like character wearing his creation on his shirt allow the viewer to find something higher than themselves to look up to if no ones is there for them. In 1961, Finster built his most prized work: The Paradise Gardens. The Paradise Gardens acted as a canvas for Finster’s artwork. On the property, there were a variety of six different buildings: The Mirror House, Bottle House, Mosaic Garden, Rolling Chair Gallery, Hubcap Tower, and the Five-Story Folk Art Chapel. The buildings gave a different spiritual experience to the viewer, while the decor on the walls and around the property included works like biblical verses, floating angels, satanic flames, and celestial clouds. His goal was to spread God’s word. He had no regard for beautiful art, but more of a souvenir art production style. These pieces did not have much taste, but instead met the demand for art. After taking this approach, his reputation was diminished as an artist. Although his credibility had been lost, Finster was talented nonetheless. He had a strong sense of line and color which lead him into the direction of making cover art for rock bands, R.E.M and Michael Stipe. After Finster's death in 2001, family and looters collected his art from the Paradise Garden. Over time, his land turned to marsh and buildings rotted and collapsed. In 2010, a man named Jordan Poole organized a nonprofit called the Paradise Garden Foundation to rebuild Finster’s legacy. Today, The Garden is Finster’s most well know piece and a popular tourist location.
Article by: Dean Rank and Emily Sofich
Work Cited:
Calhoun, Carroll. Howard Finster. Alabama: Encyclopedia of Alabama, 2007. Web.