The Nasher Museum Presents Outsider Art From its Collection

Written by Tina Masterson Thursday, 08 December 2011 21:51

Durham, North Carolina.- The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University is pleased to present "Angels, Devils and the Electric Slide: Outsider Art from the Permanent Collection" on view from December 10th through July 8th 2012. This installation of works from the permanent collection will complement the upcoming exhibition "Alexander Calder and Contemporary Art: Form, Balance, Joy". Both Calder and the artists in this exhibition share the practice of incorporating found objects and unusual materials in their work. Outsider Art demonstrates the innovative strategies and imaginative visual languages that result when Outsider artists follow their irrepressible artistic impulses. It includes gifts and promised gifts from Bruce Lineker, New York, and the Rubell Family Collection, Miami.

"Angels, Devils and the Electric Slide: Outsider Art from the Permanent Collection" includes Outsider artists Minnie Black, the Rev. Howard Finster, Jimmy Lee Sudduth, Mose Tolliver and Purvis Young. Outsider art refers to the visionary work of contemporary artists who have never had formal training. The artists in the exhibition hail from across the Southeastern United States, and their art ranges from painting to ceramics to sculpture in wood or metal. All of their works give voice to an interior world—those personal fantasies, meditations on everyday life and unspoken fears—that most people cannot put into words or images. In every case, the artists used unique materials and creative processes to make their art. Whereas Jimmy Lee Sudduth finger-painted with pigment-tinted mud, Hubert Walters fashioned his Passenger Ship out of discarded furniture pieces and Bondo—an industrial putty that is a staple of auto body shops and carpenter tool sheds. The artists on view in Outsider Art also share something beyond their often improvisational methods of art-making: Their works are woven together by common threads such as religion, the mystical world of animals, pop culture and icons of American history. While Howard Finster and Fred Webster give us folksy depictions of the Angel Gabriel, Mose Tolliver delivers an unprecedented interpretation of George Washington. Artists Jimmy Lee Sudduth, Charles Kinney and Annie Lucas, meanwhile, capture the magic of crowing roosters, wild cats and fantastic beasts native only to the mind’s eye.


The Nasher Museum was founded in 1966 as the Duke University Museum of Art with the acquisition of 200 medieval works from the Ernest Brummer Collection. In 2005, the museum opened a new 65,000-square-foot facility designed by Rafael Viñoly and was renamed the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, in honor of the late Raymond D. Nasher, Duke alumnus, collector and benefactor. The museum (designed by Rafael Viñoly) promotes engagement with the visual arts among a broad community including Duke students, faculty, and staff, the greater Durham community, the Triangle region, and the national and international art community. The museum presents an ambitious schedule of exhibitions that travel to major institutions around the world, and has a growing collection of international contemporary art. The museum  contains more than 13,000 works of art in its collection, including works by Ai Weiwei, Romare Bearden, Christian Boltanski, William Cordova, Petah Coyne, Noah Davis, Rineke Dijkstra, Marlene Dumas, Sam Durant, Olafur Eliasson, Darío Escobar, Francois Gerard, David Hammons, Barkley L. Hendricks, Sean Landers, Hong Lei, David Levinthal, Sol LeWitt, Glenn Ligon, Christian Marclay, Dan Perjovschi, Paul Pfeiffer, Robert A. Pruitt, Robin Rhode, Dario Robleto, Ed Ruscha, John Singer Sargent, Cindy Sherman, Gary Simmons, Xaviera Simmons, Lorna Simpson, Jeff Sonhouse, Eve Sussman, Alma Thomas, Hank Willis Thomas, Mickalene Thomas, Bob Thompson, Kara Walker, Nari Ward, Andy Warhol, Carrie Mae Weems, Kehinde Wiley, Fred Wilson and Lynette Yiadom Boakye. The museum is dedicated to presenting under-recognized contemporary art from around the world as seen in the exhibition Street Level: Mark Bradford, William Cordova and Robin Rhode, as well as the first career retrospectives of Barkley L. Hendricks and Dan and Lia Perjovschi. Visit the museum's website at ... http://nasher.duke.edu

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