We asked five curators at major institutions: How are you installing and considering folk and outsider art in the coming years?
High Museum of Art, Atlanta
Katherine Jentleson, Senior curator of American art and Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art
The High Museum of Art acquired its first artwork by a living self-taught artist, Mattie Lou O’Kelley, in 1975; made major acquisitions by such artists as Bill Traylor and William Edmondson in the 1980s; and established a department for American folk and self-taught art in 1994. When the museum expanded its campus in 2005, galleries dedicated to this art became a hallmark of the permanent collection. During a reinstallation in 2018, we greatly expanded the square footage in the folk and self-taught art galleries and began experimenting with cross-collection integration: Thornton Dial’s Crossing Waters (2006–2011) now hangs adjacent to Julie Mehretu’s Mogamma (A Painting in Four
Parts): Part 2 (2012) in the modern and contemporary art galleries; while in the sculpture court that’s the central artery of the folk and self-taught art galleries, contemporary sculpture by Nancy Graves, Mark di Suvero, and Ed Love are seen in conversation with works by Dial, his son Richard, cousin Ronald Lockett, friend Lonnie Holley, and predecessor Henry Church.
These kinds of cross-collection installations will increase significantly in 2026, as we reinstall the museum’s third-floor American art galleries. Those galleries, which showcase painting, sculpture, and decorative arts mostly from the nineteenth century through the postwar period, have never included works from the folk and self-taught collection. As a result, our visitors have been offered two radically different—and I would venture quite dissonant—stories of American art, just a floor apart. I am still in the planning stages of this reinstallation, with my colleagues Anni Pullagura, Margaret and Terry Stent Associate Curator of American Art, and Monica Obniski, Curator of decorative arts and design, but our collaboration will definitely result in more installations bridging trained and untrained American artists.
Emphasis will be placed on the extent to which that binary has always been misleading, especially in the history of art in the United States, where degree and types of training have existed on a spectrum and who counts as “American” has always been in flux. The High has also been directing significant resources toward better representation of Black quilts—one of the most important American traditions in whatever larger category of art they are put. Whereas the museum only had eight quilts attributed to Black artists before 2017, by the end of this year it will hold more than one hundred. This is still a small number compared to, say, the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Film Archives’ thousands of quilts from the Eli Leon Collection, but it is more than enough to make sure that Black quilts are seen perpetually at the museum.
In 2023 we launched the Black Quilts and Contemporary Art Centennial Initiative, which, in advance of our centennial year of 2026, directs special funds toward purchasing work by African American quilters like Carolyn Mazloomi and O. V. Brantley as well as by contemporary artists inspired by the aesthetic legacies of Black quilters such as Bisa Butler, Dawn Williams Boyd, and Hank Willis Thomas.
All to say that collecting and exhibiting work by self-taught artists within larger historical and contemporary contexts will flourish at the High in the years ahead.
