Five Essential Books About Self-Taught Artists

Impassioned collector William Arnett was the force behind the exhibition “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend” and its accompanying catalog, filled with lavish illustrations, informative social history, and detailed biographies. Defying tradition, the textiles’ spare compositions feature blocks of bold colors in rhythmic interplay. In 2002, when the show debuted at the Whitney Museum of American Art, it became an overnight sensation, heralding a transformative shift. Critics acclaimed the functional artifacts, designed and sewn by poor Black women living in rural Alabama, as among the finest abstract art created in the United States.

Starting in her mid-40s, Judith Scott produced abstract sculpture for more than a decade by binding, tying, and knotting woolen yarn around improvised armatures of ready-to-hand materials. In the 2014–15 Brooklyn Museum exhibition that occasioned this publication, cocurators Catherine Morris and Matthew Higgs resisted the well-entrenched tendency to interpret symptomatically the practices of creators like Scott, with mental, physical, and/or developmental disabilities. That game-changing strategy, which effectively positioned her sculpture in the context of contemporary art, also informs the illuminating essays and extensive documentation in the catalog (to which I contributed).

Published in 2012, this revelatory monograph offers a redemptive, compassionate portrait of Henry Darger, an obsessive creator as often pathologized as he is mythologized. Drawing on queer studies and literary archives, cultural historian Michael Moon situates Darger’s visionary tales starring the Vivian Girls—whose pastoral idylls are constantly interrupted by horrific sexual predation—in relation to the efflorescence of working-class print culture in the interwar years. As Moon brilliantly shows, Darger’s fictional narratives, conceived as allegories of slavery, were vested in children’s books, biblical tracts, comics, pulp fiction, and American history.

Although Horace Pippin (1888–1946) was the most successful African American artist of his day, he is currently deemed an outsider. Through close study of key subjects in his work, many centered on Black life and history, art historian Anne Monahan reinstates his now-forgotten professional stature. Disabled in World War I, Pippin taught himself to paint in the 1930s and mastered not just his craft but the protocols necessary to a successful artistic career. Published in 2020, Monahan’s fascinating revisionist account tracks his ascent, followed by the eclipse of his reputation due to the rise of postwar abstraction. More troubling is the delegitimation Pippin subsequently suffered by way of his marginalization as a “folk” artist.

Based in rigorous archival research and scientific studies of materials and techniques, the essays in James Castle: A Retrospective, including those by curator Ann Percy and conservators Nancy Ash and Scott Homolka, meet the highest standards of art historical scholarship. That such a richly illustrated catalog was devoted to a reclusive unknown artist lacking a substantial exhibition history was noteworthy when this book was published in 2008—and remains so today. Even more significant is that, by documenting and bringing classificatory order to thousands of undated works on paper, this seminal publication established Castle among the giants of 20th-century American art.