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‘Fabulous Histories’ and Mona Hatoum; Tomoko Sawada at the Fogg
BY RANDI HOPKINS
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Self-taught or "outsider" artists and artists trained at art schools have a knotty relationship with each other, a relationship that has grown in complexity and significance over the past decades, when idiosyncratic personal expression, folk craft, and art forms outside the fine arts have been steadily infiltrating contemporary art. From the early 20th century, when fine-artists like Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) tried to emulate the purity and energy found in naive artistic efforts, most notably art by children and the mentally challenged, to the present, when rural quilt makers from Gee’s Bend, Alabama, have their own show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the influence of self-taught artists on contemporary mainstream art practice has continued to be a rich and tangled mess. "Fabulous Histories: Indigenous Anomalies in American Art," which opens at Harvard’s Carpenter Center on October 21, examines the current state of the highly permeable border between insider and outsider art, with great examples of each. The nine artists are grouped into three thematic trios; the one called "Cutting/Collage" features cigar-related collages by self-taught Cuban-American artist Felipe Jesus Consalvos, who manufactured and sold cigars in Miami in the first half of the last century; quirky work by trained San Francisco–based artist Jess, whose dense, poetic collages from the 1950s and ‘60s were originally considered too "raw" for mainstream galleries; and new work by Anthony Campuzano, a recent art-school grad whose compulsive collections and translations of found text and images draw on the work of outsider artists and contemporary pop culture. Rarely seen work by James Castle, Jim Nutt, Christina Ramberg, Martin Ramirez, Luis Romero, and P.M. (Perley) Wentworth is also included. Internationally recognized artist Mona Hatoum first came to public attention in the mid 1980s with performance and video works that focused on the body, often juxtaposing elements of extreme familiarity, like a crib, or the artist’s mother, with images evoking danger and vulnerability. Hatoum, who was born into a Palestinian family in Beirut in 1952 and has lived and worked in London since 1975, comes to speak at Harvard’s Carpenter Center on October 28 at 6 p.m., continuing what has become a tradition of outstanding talks by contemporary artists at the Carpenter. This Monday, Japanese photographer Tomoko Sawada comes to Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum to give a lunch-hour chat about her recent work. Sawada is a kind of Japanese Cindy-Sherman-meets-Andy Warhol-in-a-photo-booth; she’s created hundreds of those unmistakable little images, each appearing to show a different sitter, each actually played by herself. In her new series, she comes out of the photo booth and makes several trips to a commercial photo studio, each time disguised as a different bride-to-be, in an exploration of the Japanese tradition of "omiai," where men and women commission photos of themselves to be passed around by their parents in hopes of a good arranged marriage. Not only do Sawada’s results offer a great twist on this traditional form, they raise questions about the nature of identity. "Fabulous Histories: Indigenous Anomalies in American Art" is at Harvard’s Carpenter Center, 24 Quincy Street in Harvard Square, October 21 through November 19, with an opening reception on October 21 from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. Mona Hatoum gives a free public lecture at the Carpenter Center on October 28 at 6 p.m. that’ll be followed by a reception. Call (617) 495-5666 for information about Carpenter Center events. Tomoko Sawada speaks in the series "Light Conversation: Seminars with Contemporary Photographers" at the Mongan Center in Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum, 32 Quincy Street, on October 18 from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.; call (617) 495-9400.
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