Exhibition

Self-Made: A Century of Inventing Artists provides an innovative focus on artistic self-representations of the twentieth century as well as contemporary works, addressing for the first time how formally untrained artists have identified, imagined, and depicted themselves as “capital-A Artists.” Examining methods of artistic self-fashioning, including self-portraiture, signature pieces, and depictions of alter egos, the exhibition takes a critical approach to the historical formulation of the “self-taught artist” in the United States, from the first half of the twentieth century to present time. A tightly curated selection of 90 artworks, primarily drawn from the American Folk Art Museum collection, the exhibition includes photographs, artists’ notebooks and videos, as well as prime examples of drawings, paintings, and sculptures—many of them recent or rarely seen acquisitions.

Works by John Kane, Morris Hirshfield, Martín Ramírez, Henry Darger, Sister Gertrude Morgan, Thornton Dial Sr., Joe Coleman, and Nicole Appel are placed in dialogue with pieces by seminal international artists such as Aloïse Corbaz, Madge Gill, Augustin Lesage, Adolf Wölfli, and Marcel Bascoulard. This presentation offers a rich survey of key figures and contributions against a backdrop of the most recent scholarship in this artistic area, with persuasive insights into artistic status, creative aspirations, intentions, and agency from this field defining period.

Self-Made is curated by Valérie Rousseau, PhD, Curatorial Chair and Senior Curator of 20th-Century & Contemporary Art, with the assistance of Suzie Oppenheimer, Ponsold-Motherwell Curatorial Fellow.