Home | Artists	Updated December 14, 2006
A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z

View Images USA South

Egypt Hill, MS Luster Willis 1913-1990 Paintings

Information: Many African American artists have similar memories of school days in the rural South. Luster Willis recalled attending the Egypt Hill Elementary School near Crystal Springs, Mississippi. "The teacher would be talking and I'd be drawing. I mainly liked to draw flowers and outdoor things, and pictures of the other children. Teacher would catch me and fuss.... There was a lot of stuff that I wanted to learn in school but what they was teaching wasn't it." He quit school after the eighth grade. Later, he entered the military, traveling through France and Austria, where he saw 'high' art for the first time. He returned home after three years abroad, became a barber for a while, and started a new life near Terry, Mississippi, with a wife and foster daughter. He continued making art, using whatever material was available to him, as long as it was free. He painted on fabric scraps, old pieces of embroidery, plywood, cardboard, and school tablets, and he made collages ("set-ins") from his own drawings. He once identified all the types of pigments he had employed, "watercolors, cheap little paints from the hardware store and the drugstore, some oil paint people give me that I didn't like using, fingerpaint, shoe polish I used to use, and I reckon anything I could get my hands on." Many of Willis's first ideas for art came from visual media sources-commercial art that he found in print, newspaper comic strips, television, and billboards, and mass-produced reproductions of paintings. The act of mimicking the original allowed him to express differences from the views provided by the mass media. Willis's penchant for copying and tracing, seen in much of his early work, becomes a modus operandi later. In the early eighties, he started receiving numerous requests for certain of his subjects that had been reproduced in books and exhibition catalogs and seen by collectors. Bored with replicating his own drawings and paintings but needing to fill the orders for economic reasons, Willis developed the idea of Plexiglas templates from which he could trace his stock images. The two most frequently requested subjects were portraits-of the artist himself or of black luminaries. Willis was extremely sensitive to racial issues, particularly black-on-black prejudices, and he disguised his sly commentary as glitter-covered, cartoonlike paintings on poster board. The artist spent most of the last decade of his life in a wheelchair, having suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. The subject of death was never far from his attention. "We all think about death:' he noted. "We all going to die. I like to show it coming." The Mary Brogan Museum of Art and Science

	Reference / Links:
	The Mary Brogan Museum of Art and Science University of Mississippi Slotin Folk Art
	(Detour Art is not responsible for the content of external web sites.)

Bibliography: "Black Folk Art in America 1930-1980" by Jane Livingston and John Beardsley, published for the Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1982. "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. "Self Taught, Outsider, and Folk Art—A guide to American Artists, Locations and Resources" by Betty-Carol Sellen with Cynthia J. Johnson, 2000. "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

Credit:

	Credit:
**If you discover credit omissions or have additional information to add, please let us know at
(back to listing)	(top)
Home | Artists A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z