Outside In: The Makers of Self, Made

The artists in attendance through their work—14 unique creators, the majority of whom operated outside the established art world—were first invited to come together in the Chicago apartment of collectors Richard and Ellen Sandor. Proud contrarians, Ellen, an artist, and Richard, an economist, have always felt at home among so-called outsiders. In 1978 they moved into a spacious, historic apartment in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood and, through assiduous and open-minded research, spent several decades assembling a collection that emphasizes mind-opening juxtapositions: contemporary and historical, celebrated and overlooked, exalted and humble. Throughout the apartment and particularly in a room they referred to fondly as the “Outsider Café,” the Sandors placed works in photography, drawing, and sculpture by self-taught artists who shared qualities the couple themselves most prized: innovation, individuality, and a strong sense of self.  

I want to introduce you here to a few highlights from the upcoming exhibition Self, Made: Fourteen Modern Artists from the Richard and Ellen Sandor Family Collection, composed largely of gifts the Sandors have generously given to this museum.

The Sandors particularly appreciated the challenges overcome by artists such as William Edmondson, the Nashville sculptor who took up stone carving only in retirement. In 1931, Edmondson started making headstones for Black cemeteries in the city. To attract clients he turned his front yard into an open-air showroom, filling the lawn with sculptures of animals, angels, and figures of importance in Black America, such as boxer Jack Johnson and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. This public display soon attracted notice beyond Nashville. Riding a crest of national interest in what was termed “folk art,” Edmondson saw his works enter prominent homes elsewhere, and in 1937 he became the first Black artist to have a one-person exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Such attention had already faded before his death in 1951, however, and would return with consistency only three decades later—just as the Sandors were beginning their art collection.

Edmondson positioned some of the many eagles and other solitary birds he carved atop tombstones that had themselves frequently been sited on the rising slope of a hill. Edmondson’s grandniece said of this frequent motif, “The birds remind us we’ll not always be on earth—there’ll come a day when we fly away, like the ‘fly away’ poem of the old spiritual song.” While still in this world, however, one could choose flight or fight. This dual possibility is strongly suggested by the Edmondson eagle on view in the show, which spreads its wings yet firmly stands its ground. As it happens, the sculptor adopted a similar pose for the white photographer Edward Weston. Seated amiably, Edmondson nevertheless holds his arms akimbo in what has been likened to a central African gesture of confrontation known in Kikongo and related languages as ntantani evo mpaka (conflict or dispute), looking like a man who truly knows himself.

Lee Godie, who likewise took up art full-time only at age 60, pursued a hyperlocal Chicago career; from 1968 until the late 1980s she lived and worked entirely within a one-and-a-half-square-mile area between the Art Institute and the Drake Hotel. Despite selling her art well and regularly enough to afford conventional housing, she chose to live outdoors, and she could often be found hawking her paintings to customers on the steps of this museum. 

The Sandors came to works by Godie and a number of the show’s artists in consultation with faculty and former students at the School of the Art Institute, where Ellen Sandor obtained her own art degree. Though Godie did not attend the School, she frequented the museum’s galleries and commented on our Impressionist holdings with rivalrous admiration: “Renoir was the greatest artist of all time. He always said he painted beauty. Now I always try to paint beauty, but some people say my paintings aren’t beautiful. Well, I have beauty in my mind, but it isn’t always easy to make paintings beautiful.”

Godie’s first and fullest invention was her “self,” or more accurately, her several, interconnected selves. Godie changed her birth name for a nom d’artiste; refused prior family connections; dressed in character; and frequently drew, photographed, or painted herself as a star or icon, taking inspiration from onscreen celebrities such as Joan Crawford and Katharine Hepburn. She addressed herself as well, most evidently in captions to photo booth images that she would sometimes attach to her canvases in place of or in addition to her signature. “Lee—I Kept Saying Left Side …” begins the inscription for one image, as if she had had to coerce herself into an artistically worthy pose. Meanwhile, an entry from her long-running journal penned on a frigid winter day reads with the concision of a line by the poet Emily Dickinson: “Lee to Lee—When I warm my knee-caps well—then I rise up and down with simplicity.”

The Sandors acknowledge and appreciate that artists face highly uneven circumstances as they chase their ambitions. To level the playing field at least in their own home, they intentionally pursued the work of both academically trained and self-taught makers, or “mainstream” and “outsider” artists—designations that can be imprecise as well as controversial. Annette Messager, a widely celebrated artist who is a touchstone of contemporary creation in her native France, came to prominence as a recent art school graduate in the early 1970s when she shaped groups of found photographs into hanging wall sculptures. Messager liked clipping small-size illustrations from magazines and framing them in simple black tape, an activity she smilingly recalled as “worthless”: “I was interested in the worthless arts,” she said. “As a female artist at that time I was a worthless artist, a minority artist.”

In a way comparable to Godie’s self-splitting into various “celebrity” personas, Messager claimed authority for her Album-Collections—reassembled clippings from books, newspapers, and magazines—through a range of calling cards: “Annette Messager, collector; Annette Messager, artist; Annette Messager, practical woman; Annette Messager, trickster; Annette Messager, peddler.” Dissatisfied with the marginalization of women and so-called “female subject matter,” through these self-assigned monikers she gave a kind of imprimatur to her activities that lent them art-world standing while also outfoxing standard judgments of the art world. In the case of Voluntary Tortures, Messager clipped images of women covered by masks, creams, massage devices, “and a thousand other tortures” surprisingly akin to oil paints or tools for sculpture. The resulting work, which the artist specifies can be arranged vertically or horizontally, forms a mural shape in which miniaturized bodies and faces, akin to mosaic tiles, combine to suggest a panorama of fantasy and personal transformation. 

The strength of will demonstrated by Edmondson, Godie, Messager, and all of the artists in Self, Made is perhaps most evident in the work of Missouri-born Jesse Howard, who resettled near his birthplace in 1944 and began hand-painting phrases and exhortations on planks of salvaged wood. Over the next 40 years Howard turned parts of his 20-acre homestead into a landscape bristling with capsule sermons, which passersby regularly vandalized and Howard just as regularly reinstalled. With transparent conviction, Howard quoted biblical passages and news sources in turn like a hectoring preacher caught up in current events, as seen in Untitled (Corruption. Did You Ever See A Ball Of Maggots …), below. 

Howard likely believed that independence of thought applied to him alone. His all-caps declamations, with phrases on the order of “BRAIN WASHED YESSER” or “TEMPER CAUSES BOY TO LOOSE LIFE” seem addressed to a world generally beyond any hope of enlightenment. But his assured, steady lettering gives a captivating cadence to his stream-of-consciousness harangues—the more so for being painted edge to edge and marked throughout with inventive, off-kilter punctuation. Howard extended a rich history of vernacular biblical signage across the American South. He also made language sculptural and worthy of facing the world in an outdoor, built environment. In this sense, his work, even though he made it for himself, was—like all the art in Self, Made—always ready for dialogue and for public exhibition. 

I invite you to join the conversation when Self, Made: Fourteen Modern Artists from the Richard and Ellen Sandor Family Collection opens on June 25.

—Matthew S. Witkovsky, vice president for strategic art initiatives and Sandor Chair of Photography and Media

Topics

• Exhibitions
• From the Curator
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