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USA
South
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Fulton, MS
Burgess Dulaney
1914-2001
Sculpture (mud)
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Information:
Burgess Dulaney was born 16 December 1914 just outside Fulton, Mississippi and continued to live on the family property his entire 86 years, dying there 27 June 2001. He spent his life farming simple subsistence crops and had no formal art training, no schooling and never learned to read or write.
He began to fashion clay or "mud" gathered from the local surroundings, into a seemingly unending menagerie of human busts, human-like forms, animals and fantasy creatures ranging in size from about that of a soda can to basketball size and larger. His work bears much resemblance to Pre-Columbian pottery, though Dulaney had never traveled or studied such art forms.
The unfired clay figures were mostly made of solid clay throughout, although he made some vessel-like pieces which were hollow and thin walled. Many of the pieces had marbles added for eyes, and all were dried slowly outdoors or during colder times brought inside to dry near the wood stove. Dulaney attended to the pieces meticulously during the drying period to insure any cracks in the clay would be mended allowing for amazing strong bonds in the clay.
The clay or "mud", as it was referred to by Dulaney, was dug from three separate pits near his home. A high concentration of iron in some of this clay, causes darkening of the clay over time, adding a great patina to the older works.
He experimented briefly with cement and concrete mix, fashioning some much taller human like forms and ghostly concrete face tablets weighing 40 -50 lbs each.
He began giving the sculptures to local merchants and friends around his home in the mid-late 1970's which led to the discovery of his work.
This information, submitted December 2004, is from Terry Nowell, Austin, Texas art collector of self-taught art, especially the mud sculpture of Burgess Dulaney. His sources are family and personal friends of the artist. Nowell also wrote the essay October 2003 in St. Louis for the catalogue for the Retrospective showing of Dulaney's sculptures "Mississippi Mud - The Creative Life of Burgess Dulaney".
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Bibliography:
"Detour Art—Outsider, Folk Art, and Visionary Folk Art Environments Coast to Coast, Art and Photographs from the Collection of Kelly Ludwig" by Kelly Ludwig, Kansas City Star Books, 2007.
"Baking in the Sun, Visionary Images from the South" by Andy Nasisse and Maude Wahlman, University of Washington Press, exhibit catalog, 1987.
"20th Century American Folk, Self Taught, and Outsider Art" by Betty-Carol Sellen, Cynthia J. Johnson, Neal-Schuman Publishers, New York, 1993.
"Light of the Spirit : Portraits of Southern Outsider Artists" by Karekin Goekjian and Robert Peacock, University of Mississippi Press, 1998.
"Self Taught, Outsider, and Folk Art—A guide to American Artists, Locations and Resources" by Betty-Carol Sellen with Cynthia J. Johnson, McFarland & Company, 2000.
"Contemporary American Folk Art - A Collector's Guide" Chuck and Jan Rosenak, Abbeville Press, 1996.
"American Self-Taught Art: An Illustrated Analysis of 20th Century Artists and Trends with 1,319 Capsule Biographies" by Florence Laffal and Julius Laffal, 2003. |
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