The Thrones and Chairs Leroy Person Made EVERETT MAYO ADELMAN peculation, intuition, and occasionally productive "fishing-fors" seem to be the best ways for one to assemble some knowledge of contemporary self-taught artists and the material culture of such men and women, especially if they are deceased. In investigating Leroy Person, an African-American artist from eastern North Carolina who died in 1985 at the age of seventy-eight, I soon learned that classifying "outsider," indigenous, and transplanted folk culture was more wishful than it was feasible (or even desirable). When talking with the family and friends of Leroy Person, some of my questions focused on the evident African formalism in his decoration of the objects he created, which ranged from small anthropomorphic statuettes to full-scale (and utilitarian) thrones and chairs. Those closest to Person exhibited a protective affection for him and an appreciation for his art, and attached a spiritual and living significance to work that might otherwise have been considered merely inert artifacts. Leroy Person lived in the rural backwater of Halifax County, near the swift Roanoke River, where lumbering, the manufacture of wood products, and growing cotton had been the main local industries since the eighteenth century. Because Person went to work while he was still a young boy, he never went to school and remained illiterate all his life. In 1970, after several decades of dusty sawmill work, he was forced to retire because of his failing health. Soon after he stopped working, Person came to feel that he had a twofold divine calling: to work as a "messenger" to "celebrate in the joy of the natural order and earth's riches" and "to carve their praise." Woodworking, whittling, and carving have long been acknowledged and respected American pastimes and crafts. With quiet delight and an urgent need to fulfill his visionary work and satisfy some horror vacui, Person carved and painted to embellish his surroundings, starting with his handmade cabin home and all of its furnishings. From window sash, tables, and chairs to countless decorative occasional objects and such outdoor items as the fence, almost everything wooden in or around Person's home was cut by handsaw and carved with a pocketknife or with tools affixed with homemade blades. Person cut poles from young trees in the woods and used all kinds of scrap wood—scavenged planks, plywood, and tongueand-groove boards. Odds and ends of broken and castoff furniture also provided him with materials and possibly
S AFRICAN THRONE Before 1974 Unpainted wood, nails 35 X 26 1/2 x 23 Lynch Collection of Outsider Art, North Carolina Wesleyan College
BROWNISH RED CHAIR c. 1980 Lumber, tubular steel, paint, wax crayon 33 X 16 1/2 X 18" Lynch Collection of Outsider Art, North Carolina Wesleyan College
41I FALL 1994 FOLK ART
with inspiration for his improvised techniques of construction. Furniture was held together with a generous number of nails, and many parts were split and weakened as a result. Leroy Person's chairs and tables have qualities well beyond the quaint charm and simple utility typical of much roughly made wooden folk furniture—they were made to be special, even magical. Viewers of his works can easily become enrapt by the allover patterned surface carving and detailing; it is easy to find oneself seeking hidden meaning or secret order. Through his obsessive and ceremonious personal contact with just about every component of his pieces and every square inch of their surfaces, Person created incised grooves that became both a material record of his unpaid day's work for God and his secret symbolic code, perhaps compensating for his illiteracy. As intimate as Person's detailing may be, much of his furniture demands that we stand back and look at it from a safe distance as its often-attenuated fragility, oddity, and excess can be somewhat awe-inspiring. When his wife would ask him what he was carving, Person would answer,"I'm just doing something to keep myself company."' Although most of his neighbors thought him simply eccentric, he had a few trusted friends who admired and collected his work, which he generously gave away without any explanation of its deeper meaning. East Carolina lawyer Robert Lynch became Person's friend and largest commercial collector, and may have been partly responsible for prying loose some of the esoteric complexity of the artist's calling late in life. Perhaps the most intense, and certainly the most mysterious, dimension of Leroy Person's style is the evident Africanism of his allover patterning. This vigorous improvisational infilling of disk/sun/sawblade, leaf/crab/peacock, lily-bush/God-tree and hand-wrench symbols with crosshatching and other geometric motifs looks uncannily identical to Bambara patterning from Nigeria. Person was using such ornament and symbols in 1970 when he first "retired," heeding his artistic calling, seven years before he had access to television and the inspiration of global media. His granddaughter has related that his family and friends had provided him with picture books for ideas, without specifically saying if she remembered whether any of these books documented African culture. One of Person's friends believed he may have been psychically sensitive to Africanism. No one could recall if Person had ever spoken of any specific childhood introduction