Exhibition

Self-Made: A Century of Inventing Artists takes a critical look at the historical definition of the “self-taught artist” in the United States from the early twentieth century to today. The exhibition examines how artists without academic training have depicted, conceptualized, and identified themselves on their own terms. In doing so, it aims at challenging reductive, long-standing narratives that have cast these artmakers as amateurs or isolated geniuses working out of time, without lineage, influence, or artistic networks.

The sixty artists featured here largely worked outside conventional art-school, gallery, museum, and peer-exchange systems. Their practices are rooted in diverse sites of learning, from professional expertise to community-based traditions. Drawn primarily from the American Folk Art Museum’s collection, this selection of artworks brings together outstanding examples of paintings, sculptures, photographs, videos, and artists’ notebooks by key national and international figures—many of them recent or rarely seen acquisitions.

The exhibition is organized around three methods of artistic “self-making” and self-fashioning: self-portraits, alter egos, and autobiographies. Each gallery unfolds chronologically, providing grounding for the artists’ intentions. The works function as primary documents: firsthand accounts of the self, authored by the self. Akin to diaries or other personal statements, they call for close attention, asking viewers to “look at me, in this way, that I have chosen.” By centering the makers’ perspectives and aesthetic choices, Self-Made shifts the focus away from the viewer’s role in completing the creative act and places it squarely on the artist’s agency.

In 2023, the American Folk Art Museum launched a reparative cataloguing project, Rethinking Biography, to strengthen its stewardship of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century art collection. This initiative prompted a broader reassessment of how works are defined, exhibited, and contextualized. Self-Made grows out of that effort, foregrounding artists’ voices and placing their art at the heart of interpretation.

Curated by Valérie Rousseau, PhD, Curatorial Chair and Senior Curator of 20th-Century & Contemporary Art, with Suzie Oppenheimer, Ponsold-Motherwell Curatorial Fellow, City University of New York, Graduate Center, and Research Associate.