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USA
South
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Alcoa, TN
Bessie Ruth White Harvey
1929-1994
Sculptures, spiritual and protective messages
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Information:
"Bessie Harvey is one of East Tennessee's most highly regarded self-taught artists. She achieved artistic accomplishment despite a life of poverty, a fourth grade education and the constant grueling efforts to support her eleven children. She was born in Dallas, Georgia, the seventh of thirteen children. At age twenty, she left her husband and moved to Alcoa, Tennessee, where she worked as a domestic around Knoxville from 1950 through the late 1970s. From the late 1960s until her retirement in 1983, she was a housekeeper's aide at a hospital in Maryville."
"It wasn't until she was in her forties that she began making art, with no formal art training to bolster her, based on visions inspired by God. Her first attempts were spiritually driven and therapeutic, as she tried to cope with her teenage sons' drug use and petty thievery and her fear for their safety."
"Harvey believed that God had shown her visions of faces on the wall of her house to soothe her. She construed that nature was alive and she had the ability to talk to the souls that inhabited its natural materials that she found. She felt God had shown her how to locate the spiritual presence in these gnarled tree roots, branches, and stumps, and to draw figures and faces out of them, so she could talk to them and be comforted. She used their natural forms as springboards for her work."
"Though often highly abstracted, Harvey's figures, animals, and masks became truly animate when splotched with paint and adorned with found objects such as feathers, jewels, beads, hair, cowrie shells, and bits of glass for eyes. Her carvings tell of Biblical tales, the continuous struggle faced by African-Americans, and a righteous way of living that was often impeded by bigotry, racism, and stupidity. She also experimented with other media and produced paintings, drawings, ceramics, and other compositions made of objects others had discarded. But she seemed to have a special affinity for wood."
"Because mixed media is such a prominent characteristic in traditional West African figural sculpture, some who saw Harvey's early root sculptures equated them with manifestations of voodoo. Some of her neighbors reacted adversely too. This charge wounded her deeply, as she was a devout Christian. The power of some of her early creations frightened her as well and she began to doubt her gift, so she burned many of them in her yard."
"But Harvey received a vision of Ezekiel from God and interpreted the message to mean that she should continue with her work. So she made more pieces and had the courage to enter one of them in an employees' art show at the hospital where she worked. After that, one of her sculptures was shown to some New York art dealers, and for the first time she received praise and attention for her art. After hearing so much about the comparison between elements of African sculpture and her work, Harvey began to study African art and ritual on her own, and developed a deep pride in her African heritage."
"Harvey has said, "I am not the artist. Nature shapes my work. And God gives me a vision to see what nature has done, and then my job is to bring it out so man can see it. And it's not really me. It's Him. He reached out to me at my lowest point in life and He gave me what He had put within me where that I can see it, and then He let me let the whole world see it, and so I know that it's a spiritual gift and I do enjoy it and it has changed my life completely.""
Excerpted text and images are from Outsider Art of the South by Kathy Moses
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Bibliography:
Raw Vision Magazine
"Baking in the Sun, Visionary Images from the South" Nasisse, Andy/M S Wahlman, 1987.(exhibit catalog)
"Museum of American Folk Art Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century American Folk Art and Artists" by Chuck and Jan Rosenak, Abbeville Press, New York, 1990.
"20th Century American Folk, Self Taught, and Outsider Art" by Betty-Carol Sellen, Cynthia J. Johnson, Neal-Schuman Publishers, New York, 1993.
"Souls Grown Deep: African American vernacular Art of the South", Vol 1, Arnett, et al, 1995.
"Contemporary American Folk Art - A Collector's Guide" Chuck and Jan Rosenak, Abbeville Press, 1996.
"Flying Free: Twentieth-Century Self-Taught Art from the Collection of Ellin and Baron Gordon" by Ellin Gordon, Barbara L. Luck and Tom Patterson, exhibit catalog for The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center, 1997.
"Outsider Art of the South" by Kathy Moses, 1999.
"Testimony: Vernacular Art of the African-American South: the Ronald and June Shelp Collection", Cronwill, Danto, Gaither, Gundaker and McWillie, 2001.
"Let it Shine: Self-Taught Art from the T. Marshall Hahn Collection" by Lynne E. Spriggs, Joanne Cubbs, Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, Susan Mitchell Crawley, Michael E. Shapiro and Peter Harholdt, organized by the High Museum of Art, 2001.
"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.
Slotin Folk Art Auction Catalog, Masterpiece Sale, November 4, 2006 |
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