Lilion T. Thomas (born October 9, 1904 in Calvert, Texas; died 1995 in Abilene, Texas) [1] [2] was an American pastor and self-taught artist. He began drawing portraits in the 1940s while working as a pastor at Mt. B Zion Baptist Church in Kerens, Texas. He was given the nickname "Thunderbolt" due to his hellfire-preaching sermons. [2] In the 1960s he became pastor at Mt. Pleasant Baptist Church in Abilene, Texas where he continued his artistic practice. His art would feature famous outlaws such as Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. He used different materials to create portraits and figures in profile. [3]
The American Folk Art Museum is an art museum in the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, at 2 Lincoln Square, Columbus Avenue at 66th Street. It is the premier institution devoted to the aesthetic appreciation of folk art and creative expressions of contemporary self-taught artists from the United States and abroad.
Martín Ramírez was a self-taught artist who spent most of his adult life institutionalized in California mental hospitals, diagnosed as a catatonic schizophrenic. He is considered by some to be one of the 20th century's best self-taught masters.
The Amon Carter Museum of American Art (ACMAA) is located in Fort Worth, Texas, in the city's cultural district. The museum's permanent collection features paintings, photography, sculpture, and works on paper by leading artists working in the United States and its North American territories in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The greatest concentration of works falls into the period from the 1820s through the 1940s. Photographs, prints, and other works on paper produced up to the present day are also an area of strength in the museum's holdings.
The Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin is one of the largest university art museums in the U.S. with 189,340 square feet devoted to temporary exhibitions, permanent collection galleries, storage, administrative offices, classrooms, a print study room, an auditorium, shop, and cafe. The Blanton's permanent collection consists of more than 21,000 works, with significant holdings of modern and contemporary art, Latin American art, Old Master paintings, and prints and drawings from Europe, the United States, and Latin America.
Mary Shelley is an American folk artist with no formal visual art training. Her art work has variously been described as naïve, primitive or self-taught. She graduated from Cornell University in 1972 with a degree in English and Creative Writing, and has lived her entire adult life in Ithaca, NY. She began making her painted low relief woodcarvings in 1974, after her father sent her a painted woodcarving that he made of Shelley as a child at the family farm. Shelley worked as a sign painter and carpenter from 1973 to 1990, and learning these trades helped her to develop woodworking and design skills important to her evolution into a visual artist.
Allie May "A.M." Carpenter was a twentieth-century artist and art educator. She worked in a wide variety of media, including oils, pastels, watercolor, printmaking, design, etching, china painting, interior design and decoration, and tapestry. Many of her works are signed "A. M. Carpenter."
Henry Ray Clark was a folk artist born in Bartlett, Texas, and moved to Houston, where he became a criminal with the street name of "The Magnificent Pretty Boy". After a series of drug-dealing convictions he was found guilty of an assault, his third strike in the Texas Three Strikes Law, which sentenced him to 25 years in Huntsville State Prison. While in prison he developed a characteristic drawing style involving detailed patterning and line work, and was discovered at a prison art show by William Steen, who sold Clark's work to national and international buyers. Clark died on July 29, 2006, the victim of a robbery and murder in his home.
Julie Speed is an American artist. After dropping out of Rhode Island School of Design at age 19, Speed spent her twenties moving around the U.S. and Canada working pickup jobs until moving to Texas in 1978, where she settled down and taught herself to paint. She switches back and forth regularly between oil painting, printmaking, collage, gouache and drawing, often combining disciplines. Two large volumes of her work, Julie Speed, Paintings, Constructions and Works on Paper, 2004 and Speed, Art 2003-2009 have been published by the University of Texas. She lives and works in Marfa, Texas. In her words, “I keep hours just like a real job, only longer, and in my spare time I read books, drink tequila, and garden.”
John Bunion (J.B.) Murray was an abstract expressionist painter from Glascock County, GA. His work has been shown among folk art exhibitions and is included at the American Folk Art Museum and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and has been featured in many museum exhibitions, including "Self-Taught Genius" at AFAM and "When the Stars Begin to Fall" at the Studio Museum. His work is best known for its codified use of colors and improvised script, called "spirit script," which could only be translated by the artist.
Willie Young is a 20th-century American artist. Young is mainly self-taught, and his work has been exhibited alongside other prominent outsider artists, such as Bill Traylor, Nellie Mae Rowe and Thornton Dial. The main body of his work consists of delicately rendered graphite drawings.
Inez Nathaniel-Walker (1911-1990) was a self-taught African-American folk artist.
Self-Portrait is a painting executed by artist Leonora Carrington and is currently in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She began the painting in London in 1937 and completed it in Paris in 1938. It is one of her most recognized works and has been called her "first truly Surrealist work." The presence of horses and Hyenas soon became a common feature in her work.
Ruth González Mullen was a Cuban American artist born in Havana, Cuba. She specialized in painting, drawing, and teaching. Mullen was a part of the Cuban Professional Club in New Orleans, and was considered a Latin American Artist. Her paintings face more towards the cross-culturalization that connects to Cuban American artists.
Binford Taylor Carter, Jr., known as Benny Carter or Bennie Carter, was an American contemporary visual artist. His primary focus was as a painter and sculptor within the genres of folk art and outsider art.
Johnnie Swearingen was a self-taught artist from the Brenham, Texas area.
Vernon Burwell (1916–1990) was an African-American sculptor known for his painted cement sculptures of animals and busts of historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Sojourner Truth, and Martin Luther King Jr.
Dilmus Hall (1896–1987) was a modern African American sculptor from Athens, Georgia.
Joe Louis Light (1934–2005) was an American painter from Dyersburg, Tennessee. His work focuses on transcendentalism, attaining spiritual or moral enlightenment, and the balance and order of the universe.
Charlie Lucas is a contemporary sculptor born in Pink Lily, Alabama, who now lives and works in Selma, Alabama. He is owner and operator of the Tin Man Studio, part gallery and part studio, in Selma.
Henry Speller (1900–1997) was an American artist and blues musician working in Memphis, Tennessee. His style of drawing and painting is characterized by ornate, colorful, intimidating figures which he likened to "characters from Dallas".