They are called ‘outsider’ artists because their art is made without formal training, and sold, if at all, outside mainstream art venues. Their work has an emotional power and veracity that has fascinated people for decades. The featured artists in this exhibit are: Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Mary Proctor, Jimmy Lee Sudduth, Mose Tolliver and Purvis Young.

Thornton Dial, born in Alabama in 1928, worked as a welder, carpenter, bricklayer, house painter and a factory worker building Pullman boxcars. He made his art in his off hours and showed it to almost no one. After meeting collector William Arnett he began to create art full time in the late 1980’s. His large assemblage paintings feature animal, human and plant images that depict real events, often historical situations affecting the black experience in the southern U.S. With his works on paper offering a whimsical view of these themes. Dial’s work is in the permanent collection of several museums including The High Museum, The Smithsonian and The American Folk Art Museum in New York City.

Lonnie Holley of Birmingham, AL, was born in 1950 and raised by a succession of foster parents and relatives. A 1979 tragedy started his artistic career: after his sister’s children were killed in a house fire, Holley carved grave markers from local industrial sandstone. He brought some carvings to the director of the Birmingham Museum of Art, which led to inclusion of his work in a 1981 exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of American Art. Holley’s use of mediums progressed to found objects and paint. His work often refers to his ancestral heritage and themes of spirituality. Lonnie’s work is in the collection of several major museums including the American Folk Art Museum.

Missionary Mary Proctor is a 46-year-old Florida artist who began painting only in 1995 after her several of her close relatives including her grandmother died in a house fire. After this tragedy she began to fill her five-acre property with her paintings, which are given dimension with pieces of household objects and infused wisdom of her grandmother and the bible.

Jimmy Lee Sudduth, during his long lifetime the most famous resident of Fayette, Alabama, at one time painted exclusively with local mud, sometimes mixed with house paint, sugar or other handy materials. While his people, animals and plants are rendered in a primitive, often flat style. Since the 1970’s, Sudduth’s work has reached a wide audience through among other venues, an exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution, an appearance on the “Today” Show on NBC-TV and his 1995 receipt of the Alabama Arts Award.

Mose Tolliver, one of 12 children and father of 11, came to painting after a work accident crushed his legs. In his bedroom ‘studio’ he could sit on the edge of his bed and, a board on his lap, create fanciful animals, portraits of his wife Willie Mae and self-portraits with crutches, using cans of leftover house paint. For some years he hung the finished paintings from a tree in his Montgomery, AL yard. Among his admirers were the curator and director of the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, who gave him a one-person show in 1981. Tolliver was next invited to participate in a major exhibition of Black American art at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, and in the decades since has become one of the best known and widely collected of the self-taught southern artists.

Purvis Young is not just a self-taught artist: he is self-educated in art history and fluent in the idioms of artistic movements of the late-19th and 20th century. Young, born 1943 in Miami, first read art books during the 1960s after completing a three-year prison sentence. His paintings on wood reflect the concerns of everyday life in his Miami neighborhood, but can be interpreted more broadly as expressions of the common African American experience. He has exhibited in museums and galleries since 1972, when he was recognized by the Miami Museum of Modern Art after installing large panel paintings on building exteriors in Overtown, the city’s most impoverished community. His work is in many museums including the American Folk Art Museum, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art and the Studio Museum of Harlem.