4/14/22. Greetings all. We have decided to make this blog. more current column of ideas, observations and a place to find commentaries on current issues, adventures, and notes on collecting in our field. We will do some catching up on older entries as well.
We are pleased and proud to have the important artworks by Simone Pelligrini on our walls this Spring in his first showing in the United States. Though he is not Art Brut his work taps into that timeless stream of images that so attracts us to the non-mainstream arts of the world. You can feel cave walls and honey colored sun in these drawings. Pelligrini has invented a language and iconography that avoids specificity. You can view the entire exhibition online at http://www.cavinmorris.com/turning-point-simone-pellegrini
I, of course, can’t speak for everyone but I feel that we are emerging from an uneasy strange two year dream. We are getting used to new selves. It’s truly a Spring of some kind of rebirth. I find myself looking at this art differently. Being sequestered with it took us deeper into it. More personally drawn in. I want to use this blog as a way to communicate these thoughts and observations on a more immediate level. I hope to make at least two or three entries a week with articles from the past and present. I look forward to this.
We moved from 210 11th Avenue to 529 W 20th in the throes of a pandemic. Our old building turned into a nightmare. We were the only gallery left in the building and even though sometimes we couldn’t access our space the rent was still charged and the negotiations were inhuman. It was ghostly. We closed for a long time to keep ourselves and the staff safe. When Frank Maresca told us of the vacancy on his floor we leaped at the chance of a more trafficked space and a lower rent. We had been considering going private but our artists need walls. We have always shown our ceramics in a gallery setting rather than merely a list of artists names on a webpage. We wanted to see the artworks play off each other and revel in their dimensionality. Going private would take a lot of joy out of the ceremony of presentation. It is the same with our Art Brut, Singulier and Contemporary and /indigenous artists. The work needs to be seen in its full scale, peered at up close, even touched sometimes. Ideas cohere on walls. We love the curatorial aspects of what we do and the new gallery provides a perfect arena for it. We are very happy and hope that feeling extends out to our clients and visitors. We have a serious line up of powerful artists planned in our future shows and are excited to share it.
There is a very positive warm vibe in this field right now and to me this opens opportunities for expansion of the field that has been a long time time coming. America needs to learn more about the Art Brut in Europe and the non-Western countries and to that end I will be announcing a zoom course online soon called Art Brut for Americans to familiarize people with the differences and similarities in the histories. Europe needs also to expand its familiarity with American work from Canada to the tip of South America. It is all so rich. Before the class begins there will be 2 or three single zoom presentations: the first being an updated version of Hoodoo in the Homeground on the lesser explained possible Conjure imagery in Bill Traylor drawings. This lecture was first presented at the symposium at the Smithsonian accompanying Leslie Umberger’s brilliant exhibition: Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor
I will keep this first entry brief. I hope you enjoy this and come to see it as a sort of active journal of our field that one comes back to again and again. I look forward to sharing our addiction to this art with you……
Randall Morris 4/12/22