Self-Taught Genius Gallery at Long Island
March 5 – July 5, 2018 "Holding Space: The Museum Collects", an exhibition of recent acquisitions by the American Folk Art Museum, will open on March 5 at the Self-Taught Genius Gallery in Long Island City, Queens. The exhibition brings together artists and visionaries – singular artists sharing formal and conceptual concerns that cut across cultural and generational divides. It explores ways in which self-taught artists expand the traditional artistic toolkit, cultivating unique forms of creativity that offer new paradigms of understanding the world and our place within it. Self-Taught Genius Gallery
47-29 32nd Place, Long Island City, Queens, NY 11101
folkartmuseum.org/resources/selftaughtgeniusgallery/
The Anton Haardt Gallery in New Orleans
through April 1, 2018 "Outsiders in Mexico” at The Anton Haardt Gallery features dramatic peyote-induced visions of yarn shields and beaded masks made by the indigenous Huichol Indians of Mexico’s remote Sierra Madre mountains, alongside a collection of intriguing contemporary retablos by Mexican artist David Mecalco and Mar Coria's wildly colourful paintings of tattooed people inspired from her life in Mexican sideshows as a child. The Anton Haardt Gallery
2858 Magazine Street, New Orleans, LA 70115
www.antonhaardtgallery.com
Andrew Edlin Gallery, NYuntil March 25, 2018 "Melvin Way: The Cocaine Files Dossier (1989-2017)", curated by Andrew Castrucci, presents Way's ballpoint pen drawings on found pieces of paper, inspired by mathematical equations, chemical formulas and mechanical diagrams. Way has also developed his own formula for cocaine that appears throughout his drawings. Andrew Edlin Gallery
212 Bowery, New York, NY 10012
www.edlingallery.com
Museum im Lagerhausuntil March 4, 2018 From 1919 to 1922, psychiatric hospitals in Switzerland sent works to Hans Prinzhorn for his planned museum of pathological art at the psychiatric clinic in Heidelberg. Now these works return home for the first-ever presentation of Swiss works from the Prinzhorn Collection, in "Prinzhorn’s Swiss Gems". Last few days to see this exhibition! Museum im Lagerhaus
Davidstrasse 44, CH-9000 St. Gallen, Switzerland
www.museumimlagerhaus.ch
Raw Vision 96 Article Preview:
Finster's Secret Language
America’s foremost folk artist claimed to have his own secret language that not even he could understand
By Norman Giradot and John Turner
Our involvement with the extraordinary Southern Baptist preacher, visionary artist and self-styled “Stranger from Another World”, the Reverend Howard Finster (1916–2001), comprises more than 40 years of personal acquaintance, multiple publications, curated exhibitions, and an ongoing and often-puzzled fascination with the mystery of the man. As Finster quite accurately indicated when he declared himself to be a “Stranger from Another World”, no one (including his family as well as inquisitive journalists and professor-types) had “realy never figured” [sic] him out.
Finster often said that all of his works, in terms of their imagery, biblical words and personal homiletics, were fundamentally “signs”, “messages from God” or “painted sermons” delivered to him as visionary communications from the Holy Ghost. But the deeper truth was always that these signs, whether found as words in the Bible itself or in Finster’s artworks as images and words, were not always very clear or understandable. And, as we shall see, there were sometimes hidden signs and messages written in a strange language that is a striking example of extreme unintelligibility. A kind of unknown from, as Finster would say, outer space.
We refer to what is a relatively rare kind of “known unknown” displayed on a select number of Finster’s paintings and visionary writings such as his “thought cards” and his self-published Vision of 1982. The known unknown in question is what Finster called the “Unknown Language”, or an undecipherable script made up of semi-abstract glyphs or pictographs.
One of us, John Turner, was the pioneering explorer of these unknown mysteries. He notes that the surface of Finster’s artworks, especially the paintings from the late 1970s until Finster’s death in 2001, were often completely covered with both images and words. The hand-painted words that, Finster claimed, floated through him from God could be anything, from his own personal advice to quotations from the Bible that reinforced the subject matter of his work. Turner says that he saw a large body of Howard's work over the years, and of special interest were the relatively few pieces that contained – tightly hidden in the margins, or lost in the sea of words – a script or a succession of strange markings. Resembling hieroglyphics, the markings remained a total mystery,
until one day when Turner had the opportunity to ask Finster about them... Read the rest of this article in Raw Vision 96, out now!
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