When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South
August 3 – October 12, 2014
When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South
considers the category of “outsider” art in relation to contemporary
art and black life. Situating itself within current art historical and
political debates, the exhibition features work by self-taught,
spiritually inspired and incarcerated artists, alongside other projects
based in performance and social-engagement, as well as painting,
drawing, sculpture and assemblage, that make insistent reference to
place. With the majority of work created between 1964 and 2014, the
exhibition brings together a group of thirty-five intergenerational
American artists who share an interest in the American South as a
location both real and imagined. Moving between a graphic sensibility,
an interest in creation myths and the use of found materials and
detritus, the artists reference various classical tropes of blackness as
sites of origin—fantastical and performed, important yet perhaps
illusory.
Artists in the exhibition include: Benny Andrews, Kevin Beasley,
McArthur Binion, Beverly Buchanan, Henry Ray Clark, Courtesy the
Artists, Thornton Dial, Minnie Evans, Theaster Gates, Deborah Grant,
Trenton Doyle Hancock, Bessie Harvey, David Hammons, Lonnie Holley,
Frank Albert Jones, Lauren Kelley, Ralph Lemon, Kerry James Marshall,
Rodney McMillian, Joe Minter, J.B. Murray, John Outterbridge, Noah
Purifoy, Marie “Big Mama” Roseman, Jacolby Satterwhite, Patricia
Satterwhite, Rudy Shepherd, Xaviera Simmons, Georgia Speller, Henry
Speller, James “Son” Thomas, Stacy Lynn Waddell, Kara Walker, Carrie Mae
Weems and Geo Wyeth.
When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South is
organized by The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. The exhibition is
curated by Thomas J. Lax.
The catalogue includes entries by the exhibition's organizer, Assistant
Curator Thomas J. Lax, along with leading scholars Horace Ballard,
Katherine Jentleson, Scott Romine and Lowery Stokes Sims, who write on
notions of spirituality, the ethics of self-taught art and the idea of
the South in the American consciousness.
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