Category: Book Review

Elijah Pierce’s America, edited by Nancy Ireson and Zoé Whitley, with contributions by Sampada Aranke, Theaster Gates and Michael D. Hall. The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, in association with Paul Holberton Publishing, London, distributed by the University of Chicago Press, 208 pages, 120 color plates, 2020. ISBN: 9781911300878. Hardcover, $50 To the long list of reasons to resent the pandemic beyond death, sickness and unemployment, of course, we can add missing the opportunity to see Elijah Pierce’s carvings in person at Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation.  The retrospective ran from September 2020 to January 2021 and included more than 100 works. But pandemic

The Power and Fluidity of Girlhood in Henry Darger’s Art, by Leisa Rundquist, Routledge, New York, 126 pages, 13 b/w Illustrations, 2021. ISBN: 9781138314559. Hardcover, $59.95 In this admirably concise volume, Lisa Rundquist works diligently to normalize Henry Darger. That seems like fair play considering how he’s been pathologized. Being a working-class self-taught artist and a loner made him vulnerable to whatever excesses of interpretation anyone wanted to throw at him. The eccentric and sometimes extreme nature of his art was a contributing factor. But, in effect, Darger remained a victim of the same epithet applied to him in his youth:

Loud, Naked, & In Three Colors: The Liberty Boys & The History of Tattooing in Boston, by Margaret Hodges and Derin Bray. Rake House, Portsmouth, N.H., 160 pages, 2020. ISBN: 9780578758404. Hardcover, $70 This volume presents a nicely balanced combination of tattoo art and tattoo lore. The book by its own account “looks beyond the connoisseurship of historical flash art” to tell the story of the tattooers, “an often transient, marginalized group,” which it does effectively, in the form of one family.  The 70 pages devoted to flash art aren’t bad, but the most exceptional part of the book is

Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective, by Elaine Y. Yau, Lawrence Rinder and Horace Ballard. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 175 pages 2020. ISBN: 9780983881384. Paperback, $39.95 Here’s another pandemic art disappointment—the grand exhibition of Rosie Lee Tompkins’ quilts at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). Like Elijah Pierce’s carvings at the Barnes Foundation, these quilts clearly need to be experienced in person to get a true sense of their scale and material impact. Tompkins is widely praised as the greatest quilter of her time, certainly up there with the women of Gees

Gatecrashers: The Rise of the Self-Taught Artist in America, by Katherine Jentleson, University of California Press, 264 pages, 53 color photographs, 18 b/w illustrations, 2020. ISBN: 9780520303423. Hardcover, $50 Gatecrashers might best be described in terms more typical of a page-turner novel than an art book—it’s a story of tragedy and triumph, of drama and historic happenings. The overarching tragedy is the opportunity lost in the 1930s to open up the definition of art to myriad forms of creativity beyond the academy. That process seemed to be gaining momentum until it was precipitously halted in the early 1940s. It only restarted in earnest