Also in the early forties, Philome Obin paints a series of oil paintings, sometimes populated with hundreds of detailed figures in which he questions the brutality of the southern U.S. Marines sent to occupy Haiti in the 1920s. His inspiration is political and Protestant. Through the medium of paint he seeks to impose order on the world and question the need for brute military power in his dreams for continued freedom in the first self-liberating black country in the Western Hemisphere. With the exceptions of several one-person exhibitions and the seminal but flawed exhibition "Black Folk Art in America, 1930-1980," presented at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., in 1982, there have been all too few well-curated exhibitions of self-taught African American artists in this country. The same can be said for Anglo and non-Anglo self-taught artists as well. The reasons are not mysterious, the lack of methodology is.
THE LOVERS Hector Hyppolite Haiti 1946 Oil on cardboard 2 29" / 211 Collection of Amr Shaker
Perhaps this strange lack is made more explainable by looking at the history of the "field." The lack of theoretical coherence is probably one of the reasons that there is sometimes such hostility to the field from the artworld at large. Thus far, curating and writing has been so general, so paternalistic, so empty of recognition of the concerns of history, anthropology, art history, sociology, and the like that each show appears and presents a catalog in which the viewpoints of the collectors are offered up as expertise, bolstered by well-meaning but misguided essays on African roots, coincidental African formalism, and a few anecdotes about primitive (folksy) working conditions supported by yet more (folksy) quotes and homilies. The catalog leaps Onto the shelf with all the other catalogs of the same ilk. But beyond the simplest birth and death information, one never uses these catalogs for information because the facts
come from previous similar catalogs that come from previous catalogs. The rate at which new information is introduced is very slow. How has such an incredibly rich and deep part of our culture come to be presented in such a limp and constricted fashion? True, the presentation of African American artists, trained and untrained, is a mine field in this era of political correctness, but the lack of approach is more than just a desire not to offend. Despite lack of funding, despite certain strange reactions against art itself, people still manage to collect and curators manage to present less than "safe" shows in other contemporary art venues. There is an unfortunate tendency to "pasteurize" African American art, to confine it in such a way that the anger, the cultural resistance, the essential issues of culture are hidden in the myths of previous views of"folk art." We don't say "primitive" or "naive" anymore (do we?), but nothing else in the curatorial attitude has really changed. There have been a few exceptions. One was the exhibition of the work of Thornton Dial, Sr., "Thornton Dial: Image of the Tiger," presented by the Museum of American Folk Art and The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, in 1993. The catalog did nothing to hide the African American issues in the work. Though incomplete, the Corcoran "Black Folk Art" show at least attempted to introduce and make a sweep of a field that had never been focused on before. Another exhibition, "Black History and Artistry," mounted at the Sidney Mishkin Gallery at Baruch College in New York City and featuring parts of the Blanchard-Hill Collection, made a statement about a grouping curated by Sandra Kraskin with the collectors' strong aesthetic viewpoint in mind. These and other, too few exceptions prove the rule. There are ways out of the rut. Though an entire book could be made on the problems of specifically presenting African American self-taught artists, this introductory essay will focus primarily on a very few in order to show the fascinating and wonderful possibilities of expanding perspectives. This has to do with a concept I ran across when I began to research the selftaught artists of Jamaica. A friend said, "Please don't neglect Haiti." The conunent excited me in ways I didn't fully understand at first. In fact, the more I understood what had happened to art history in the Caribbean, the more about the African American Diaspora I read and saw, the more I understood about the incredible and important historical underpinnings of the art made in the southern United States and Haiti—and by extension the other islands as well. My concept of America was forever changed by these realizations. Though I live in North America, the origins of many of the people around me are Caribbean. We are taught to see African Americans from the United States
WINTER 1997/98 FOLK ART 43