Exhibition Details
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 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.
Additional Details
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.
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.
Location
American Folk Art Museum
2 Lincoln Square
New York, NY 10023
Image: John Kane, John Kane and His Wife, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, c. 1928 / courtesy of American Folk Art Museum