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The Presence of Race
John Haberin New York City
Unnamed Figures and Marvels of My Own Inventiveness
Ray Materson and Joe Coleman
Edward Hicks has become an exemplar of American folk art for his visionary landscapes filled with life. His earthy realism is far more sophisticated than his status would suggest. Warm colors and well-rounded figures all but pop out of the canvas, even as faces remain emblematic and the construction in depth more than a little awkward. It is still the country you only wish you knew.
Peaceable Kingdom, his most popular painting, embodies that wish, and more than sixty versions survive. Well-dressed Americans, adults and children, share the scene with wide-eyed animals, with equal claims to nature, culture, and an emerging nation. Still another painting extends its harmony to black and white America as well, but prospects were hardly peaceable, and the Civil War was only fourteen years away. The American Folk Art Museum gives it pride of place in "Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Absence in the Early American North." 
The museum also brings the story up to date with five recent and contemporary African Americans, as "Marvels of My Own Inventiveness." Drawing on its enormous collection, it aims to make presences and absences alike difficult to overlook.
Hicks aimed for much the same. He lived among Quakers and others opposed to slavery, and his painting describes a community in which blacks work the land as autonomous beings. This kingdom was in truth a republic and not a distant utopia, but within reach. Now that outsider art is finding an audience, in galleries and collections, it helps to remember that it had one all along. Folk art always belonged to the community—and quilting or glazing to those who knew and admired craft. For Hicks, that community could still return.
Not every community, though, is supportive, and some outsiders are confined within. Some art arose in an asylum or the inner life of the mentally ill. One could write off Joe Coleman, too, as just plain paranoid, although he would beg to differ, in a show called "100 Seconds to Midnight"—and that means now. Ray Materson, in turn, spent his thirties in confinement, in prison. Yet he found buyers and inspiration in his fellow prisoners. Both artists take getting close, for a good look, to disentangle the freedom their work brought from the pain of living with it day to day.
Outsiders in the kingdom
Not that Edward Hicks was naïve about the future or, for that matter, about art. His community had developed its own rifts, and more than one version of Peaceable Kingdom shows a majestic tree riven as well, as a warning. The Folk Art Museum, too, intends a warning. Slaves and free blacks alike are a presence in American history that many would just as soon overlook, while legal and other restrictions enforced their absence. The same story applies today. Still, "Unnamed Figures" paints a pretty upbeat picture.
It includes black faces, like a fully realized couple by William Matthew Prior in 1843. It includes black presences in landscape. Can you spot them, and just what are they doing? For whom are they doing it at that? Longer, narrower landscapes once hung high above furniture or a door. They served their purpose in the home, but they make anyone, black or white, that much harder to spot.
It includes black artists, like Joshua Johnson, a successful portrait painter. Did you notice that he has white sitters almost every time? His one black sitter was family, painted not for the market, but for their sake and his own. Ammi Phillips is another rarity, a woman in early American art with a white, middle-class following. Did you notice that two of her portraits include a strip of cotton and (lord help us) a watermelon? In each case, you have to supply what is absent and why.
Still, this is not a game of "Where's African American Waldo?" Blackness itself becomes visible. Another black artist, Moses Williams, renders it in profile silhouettes. Early photos turn to blacks as well, and the museum throws in more recent photos of the descendants of slaves as well. They breach the show's limits, but they reinforce that presences still matter. The museum also recovers a well-worn headstone, its name crying out to be read.
The museum makes room for well over a hundred works, on top of the room for "Marvels." (It does not feel crowded.) It has other media as well, such as a powder horn and embroidery. If women could find a voice in textiles, like the Gee's Bend weavers in the Deep South, why not blacks? It has minstrel shows in works on paper and a diorama as surreal as a Joseph Cornell box. But then where would racial tensions be without embarrassing stereotypes?
The show makes a point of the ubiquity of those tensions, by skipping right past the South. It sticks to New England and the mid-Atlantic states, including Joseph Shoemaker Russell with a black storekeeper in Philadelphia and Francis Guy in a Brooklyn winter. It benefits from folk art's near indifference to traditional distinctions like landscape and genre painting. A view of a house by Rufus Hathaway in 1795 opens onto an active port in Massachusetts. Just what is folk art anyway? You never know these days, but this once it speaks for true outsiders in the peaceable kingdom.
My own mark
The museum is out to add color to American art and history, people of color. With "Unnamed Figures," it asks how folk art drew on African Americans as artists and subjects while refusing to name names. It shows how their absence testifies to unseen presences, while its presences testify to exclusions. In fact, it does that so well that one can almost forget what it leaves out. The show passes over conflict, the slave states, life after the Civil War, and a specifically African American art. They appear nonetheless right next door, if only in part, with "Marvels of My Own Inventiveness."
Each of its five artists has only a handful of works, but enough to leave a mark and a name. One can see their determination with the oldest of the five, Mary T. Smith, born in 1905. Working in the 1980s, she applies black in broad strokes, for big outlines, big egos, and big hair. Her figures face front, like the familiar icons of black power, but with colorful, casual compositions that take nothing for granted. The people themselves could just as well be nameless. They do not so much confront the theme of black invisibility as rebel against it.
By the time one reaches the youngest, Claude Lawrence, colliding colors are more than half the point. As a title puts it, Why So Blue? Born in 1944, Lawrence packs them in, not so much layered or intermixed as fighting for space. Faces appear, but an explicit politics is gone. Certainty must have given out anyway after the election of Ronald Reagan, even for Smith. That still leaves presences, if only one could pin them down.
The modest show comes as a postscript to the larger one, but also a counterpoint. The very hallmarks of the older folk art are gone, from its stiff, firm outlines to its narratives. Black artists today have often drawn on the flatness and patterning of African American art in the South or African art itself, but not here. Smith's scrawls suggest street art and defacement, not unlike those of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Yet they avoid his deliberate clichés and aggressive juxtapositions. 
They leave open just what is left of outsider art other than the outsider.
The show's awkward title adapts a line from Hortense Spillers, a literary critic who has sought an "African American grammar." Echoes of William Butler Yeats, with art as "monuments of its own magnificence," may be deliberate as well. The combination points to identity politics, but also shifting perspectives. J. B. Murray has a reputation as an Abstract Expressionist, which accounts for his freely detailed brush, but not much more. The tiny marks could be figures in half a dozen history paintings at once. One could almost treat its divisions as panels in a graphic novel.
Purvis Young is fond of busy marks and crude divisions, too. Wood slats overlay his paintings, like stretchers that have moved to the front or frames that refuse to close. There is a riot going on. It may or may not be race riot, and Leonard Daley depicts both blacks and whites amid a painting's discarded materials. If a white figure looks to a livelier black figure for help, its whiteness has faded to a bright, pure, ghostly white. If the black figure is a tempter, painting has its temptations, too.
Confined outside
One had better get close to Ray Materson, for he works on the scale of miniatures and weaves his art from black and colored thread. Get close, too, because he took his subjects from intimate encounters. They might be the face and signature of Joe DiMaggio on a baseball card, neighbors on a front stoop, or a woman at a typewriter, obliged to find space on a kitchen table. They are not childlike on the one hand or sophisticated on the other, but rather like illustrations. A scene out of a medieval romance might be right out of Classic Comics. Just what, though, is he illustrating?
It might be memories of a life outside that he or another inmate would never see again. (Materson had been a drug addict, on his way to what could easily have become a life of crime.) It might be real or imagined. The wonder is that it is anything but easy to know which. It is, after all, only a step from a group portrait of a softball team to the Yankees he so loved. It might be a literal step from a black woman looking up toward the light to the Lincoln Memorial behind her, and who knows whether they (or they and the artist) ever shared the same space.
Inmates may seem an unlikely audience for outsider art, much less embroideries. Wussy stuff, right? One can almost hear the clash of metal on metal as the knives come out. They loved, though, finding an outlet for their dreams, and Materson loved them for offering up their dreams as he found his voice. Then, too, fabric was a great medium for prison life, where used socks are plentiful and artist studios cannot exist. Still, he realized at some point that he had the freedom to choose his subjects, and he kept at it after release on parole.
His simple style suits a makeshift medium, and both allow him strong colors. Their very strangeness suits that space between memory, reality, and dreams as well. This is an ideal world, but one can feel the harder struggle to maintain his ideals. The sun on the horizon looks way too large, just as it does in real life. Portraits, suburban or African American, look emblematic and individual. Materson's excess of charm itself cannot bury them.
Joe Coleman demands a close look, too, with anything but charm. He puts equal emphasis on every detail, like the fiery colors to the cold light and hard wrinkles on skin. It takes getting close, too, to read the hand-lettered text. Like everything else for him, it just keeps piling up. Still, he wants you to know that he is never less than in command—and definitely not crazy. His face overlooks everything, with the high forehead, white beard, and permanent glare of an aging hippy.
He exaggerates everything, as if threats to democracy and the planet were not bad enough. Still, it takes a fine brush and still finer ingenuity to pack it all into a painting. Coleman constructs a work from several small panels, like an altarpiece. Early Renaissance portraits in Italy would cherish the wrinkles. Naturally he brings the same excess to handmade frames. Laugh all you like or lose patience entirely, but it is long past time that an outsider's fears entered the mainstream.
"Unnamed Figures" and "Marvels of My Own Inventiveness" ran at the American Folk Art Museum through March 24, 2024, Ray Materson and Joe Coleman at Andrew Edlin through March 18, 2023.