Exhibitions

Almost There: A Portrait of Peter Anton

July 9 - December 30, 2010

Co-Curated by Daniel Rybicky and Aaron Wickenden.

Peter Anton, The Talent Club in 1952. Collection of Dan Rybicky

Peter Anton, a 78 year-old resident of East Chicago, Indiana, creates paintings that illuminate moments of significance from his personal history. Many of them are based on photographs he has obsessively compiled into a massive autobiography titled “Almost There.”

Through the whole of twelve scrapbooks, Peter details his “life on a rollercoaster” – from his near death experience in 1934 at the age of three to his happy “movie star years” in the 1950′s organizing and performing in hundreds of talent shows, all the way through his ruminations on mortality in 2005 after losing his beloved cats and being taken from his severely deteriorating home by a social service agency. Despite his declining health, Peter perseveres. This exhibit – the first retrospective of his work – is testament to how art and the impetus to create it still thrives in even more dire circumstances.

Co-curators Dan Rybicky and Aaron Wickenden have spent the past four years documenting Peter’s environment and day-to-day life of creating art under brutal conditions. Inspired by the story of perhaps the most famous outsider artist, Henry Darger – whose artwork was discovered posthumously and only after three dumpsters of waste were removed from his apartment – the curators of Almost There will present an unvarnished view of an artist before his process has been altered or sanitized. Their photographs and videos will be exhibited alongside Peter’s paintings, scrapbooks and ephemera as a way to further contextualize his work. Visitors will have the added pleasure of experiencing this exhibit alongside the Henry Darger Room Collection, Intuit’s innovative permanent installation that evokes the obsessive artist’s original environment.

Poised at the intersection of biography and autobiography, Almost There: A Portrait of Peter Anton explores the curatorial complexities surrounding the discovery and stewardship of one man’s work, as well as the definitions of so-called “high art” and “outsider art.” By showing the decaying textures of Peter’s house, paintings and scrapbooks – of Peter himself – this exhibit asks audiences to contextualize his art and ultimately, their own aesthetic concepts of and emotional responses to memory, aging and pain.

Intuit’s Teacher Fellowship Program Exhibition

June 5 - 26, 2010

Intuit’s annual Teacher Fellowship Program Exhibition showcases student projects inspired by the work of intuitive and outsider artists. Student projects are based on curricula created by Chicago Public School educators from Intuit’s Teacher Fellowship Program 2009-2010.

Schools represented in the exhibition are ACT Charter School, George Armstrong International Studies, Bronzeville Scholastic Institute, Farragut Career Academy, Mary Lyon Elementary School, Orozco Fine Arts & Sciences Elementary School, Louis Pasteur Elementary School, Ryder Elementary Math & Science Special School, Thomas J. Waters Elementary School, and Wells Community Academy High School.

The Teacher Fellowship Program is sponsored in part by generous grants from the Lloyd A. Fry Foundation and the Polk Bros. Foundation.

Life Lines: The Drawings of Charles Steffen

June 4 - August 28, 2010

Curated by Eugenie Johnson

Life Lines: The Drawings of Charles Steffen

Left: Charles Steffen, The White Rose Garden (detail), 1994. Mixed media on brown paper, 17" x 23". Collection of Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art; gift of Jan Petry. Right: Sacred Heart of Jesus, 1994, Mixed media on paper, 23" x 17". Collection of Tim and Stacy Bruce.

This retrospective features 30 pieces of Charles Steffen’s work, covering a variety of imagery he knew in his limited sphere: neighbors, his mother, flowers and plants from the yard, a woman he once loved, and scenes from the Elgin State Hospital. More fantastical drawings show his experimentation in creating human forms merged with plants and distorting or combining male and female features.

Born into a family of eight children, Charles Steffen (1927-1995) studied art at the Illinois Institute of Technology in the late 1940s. While still in school, he suffered a mental breakdown and spent the next 15 years at the Elgin State Hospital where he began to make art. Upon his release, Steffen lived with his sister and spent most of his time creating, usually producing two or more drawings a day.

Shortly before his death, Steffen went to live in a small room in a men’s retirement home on the north side of the city. Instead of throwing away the remainder of his drawings and photographs, Steffen decided instead to place them with his nephew, Christopher Preissing. Preissing had shown an interest in his uncle’s work and received over two thousand works. Intuit is proud to present Life Lines: The Drawings of Charles Steffen, a collection that could possibly have been lost forever.

The Treasure of Ulysses Davis

February 12 - May 15, 2010

Curated by Susan Crawley

Right: Ulysses Davis, Frederick Douglas, 1940-1985, wood and paint, 12 3/8 x 7 3/8 x 5 5/8 inches, King-Tisdell Cottage Foundation. Photo © Peter Harholdt. Left: Ulysses Davis, Lost Tribes in the Swamp with Alligators, assembled in mid-1980s, wood and paint, 16 1/4 x 5 1/4 x 5 1/4 inches, King-Tisdell Cottage Foundation. Photo © Peter Harholdt.

The Treasure of Ulysses Davis debuted at the High Museum in Atlanta and traveled to the American Folk Art Museum in New York and the Menello Museum of Art in Florida, before arriving in Chicago. Organized by Susan Crawley of the High Museum of Art in collaboration with the King-Tisdell Cottage Foundation of Savannah, Georgia, this retrospective features about 109 pieces, including 78 from the King-Tisdell Cottage Foundation, which acquired most of Davis’s work after he died, fulfilling his desire to keep his corpus intact. The title comes from Davis’s explanation of why he disliked parting with his work: “They’re my treasure. If I sold these, I’d be really poor.” The exhibition will increase public knowledge of and appreciation for the work of this much admired but rarely seen sculptor.

Davis (1914–1990) was a Savannah barber who created a diverse but unified body of highly refined sculpture that reflects his deep faith, humor, and dignity. His carvings were featured in the seminal exhibition, Black Folk Art: 1930–1980 at the Corcoran Gallery, since which time his reputation has increased. Because he wanted his work to stay together after he died, Davis rarely sold his sculptures. As a result, they have had little exposure outside Savannah, particularly since his death, and he is little known outside folk art circles. One notable exception was the curator J. Carter Brown’s inclusion of Davis’s portrait bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Rings: Five Passions in World Art, an exhibition at the High Museum of Art during the 1996 Summer Olympic Games; Davis was the only Georgia artist whose work was included in the show.

Davis’s sculptures, which range in height from six to over forty inches, can be divided into major categories: portraits of U.S. and African leaders; religious images; patriotism; works influenced by African forms; fantasy; flora and fauna; love; humor; and abstract decorative objects. Davis also carved utilitarian objects such as canes and furniture. Among the pieces owned by the King-Tisdell Cottage Foundation is a group regarded as Davis’s masterwork: a series of 40 carved busts of all the U.S. presidents through George H. W. Bush. In addition to a large number from the King-Tisdell Cottage Foundation, the exhibition will also include works by Davis from the High Museum of Art’s permanent collection, plus a selection of pieces owned by other museums and by collectors in Atlanta and other locations.

The exhibition is accompanied by the first significant Davis catalogue, a 120-page critical reassessment of the artist, which contains 75 color plates; an introduction by High Museum of Art Director Michael Shapiro; and an essay on Davis’s life and work by Susan Crawley, Curator of Folk Art. A Davis monograph, long overdue, represents a significant contribution to self-taught art scholarship. Both the exhibition and the catalogue will serve as the definitive introduction to and analysis of Davis’s work.

Click here to view this exhibition on Flickr

This Chicago exhibition is made possible by the generous support of the Terra Foundation for American Art with additional support provided by the Polk Bros Foundation in celebration of Nikki Will Stein’s 20th Anniversary with the Foundation.

Organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta in association with King-Tisdell Cottage Foundation of Savannah Georgia. The exhibition is made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts as part of American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius. Generous support is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation with additional support from The Judith Rothschild Foundation.

Freaks & Flash

September 11, 2009 - January 9, 2010

Co-curated Jan Petry and Anna Friedman-Herlihy

Intuit is pleased to present Freaks & Flash, featuring artwork from the heyday of tattooing as a Western folk art. Tattoo flash (the design drawings for tattoos) will be combined with sideshow banners depicting tattooed performers and acetate stencils used for transferring tattoo designs on to the skin. From the early days of tattoo shops at the turn of the twentieth century until the beginnings of the tattoo “Renaissance” in the late 1960s and early 1970s, tattooing reflected a wide range of styles and motifs from the mundane to the extraordinary. From the work of “scratchers” to those who bridged the boundary between folk and fine art, the exhibit will offer a glimpse into the multi-faceted history of inscriptions on human skin through the artifacts left behind.

Although the focus will be on Midwestern collections and collectors, the works displayed will reflect an international perspective. The flash and acetate portion of the exhibit will feature a wide range of artists. Many of the pieces have not been on public display since they were taken down from the walls of the shops in which they originally resided. Artists with long Chicago or Midwestern careers will be prominently featured including Amund Dietzel, Cliff Raven, Milton Zeis,Tatts Thomas, Stoney St. Clair, W R King, Doc King, Ralph Johnstone, Sailor Bill Rogers, Buddy McFall, and Bert Grimm. Rare early pieces include some by Samuel O’Reilly, George Burchett, Gus Wagner, and Henry Biehler. The exhibit will be rounded out with a variety of other artists working across America and beyond including Sailor Jerry, Leroy Minugh, Ole Hansen, Joe Lieber, Rosie Camanga, Dominic Chance, Joseph Darpel, Jimmy Grecco, Dainty Dotty, Jack Tryon, Ed Smith, Cap Coleman, and J F Barber.