Date of Submission
Spring 2024
Academic Program
Art History and Visual Culture
Project Advisor 1
Heeryoon Shin
Abstract/Artist's Statement
This project argues for the urgency of scholarship, inherent artistic sensibility, and legitimacy of modern, religious, spiritual, visionary, untrained, and self-taught art from the American South which challenges conventions of materials and exhibition. The research focuses on two specific African-American visionary outsider artists named James Hampton (1909-1964) from South Carolina and Washington, D.C., and Purvis Young (1943-2010) from Miami, Florida, both of whom defied white and classical standards of beauty and value. The subject of education will shape my argument, comparing how the differences in artistic opportunities, training, and support systems in the South versus the North impact Southern, self-taught, outsider artists. Another overarching theme of this paper is the concept of Black Modernism in the context of the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance. This project also connects the appropriation of Africanism by white artists to the exploitation of self-taught, Southern outsider artists by art dealers, collectors, and scholars who distort and re-write the art's narratives.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Joerger, Griffin J., "Innovation, Liberation, and Agency in the Outsider Visionary Art of James Hampton and Purvis Young" (2024). Senior Projects Spring 2024. 141.
https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2024/141
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