You're So Thoughtful

 

 

A couple weeks back I got invited to give a talk to a group of social-work students at Indiana University/Purdue University in Indianapolis (IUPUI).  A friend of mine is in the MSW program there, and she asked her professor to invite me to speak about what I've done in my line of work as a sort of social-worker (I'm not a licensed anything, but I guess what I do both as a vocation and a practice beyond vocation could be characterized as "social-work.").  I also got my undergrad degree there in English back in 1991.  It was totally weird to walk the space-age hallways at IUPUI again.  The whole campus has the feel of a 1970s futuristic movie like Logan's Run.   I took along a Powerpoint Bill and I put together that commemorates the 10th anniversary of Visionaries + Voices (we started V+V in 2003), as well as the beginning of Thunder-Sky, Inc. in 2009.  The pictures are self-evident:  the reason I do what I do arts-wise is because of the people I met back in the late 90s and early 2000s, mainly artists like Raymond Thunder-Sky, Antonio Adams, Paul Rowland, and several others that were in photos from little gigs we did back in 2000, 2001, 2002, art-shows in public libraries and in coffee-shops and anywhere else that would have us, finally ending up with a studio in Essex Studios in Walnut Hills.  The V+V journey Bill and I took that started in 2003 and kind of ended in 2009 was totally a joy but also filled with little pockets of terror, frustration and shock.  I know that sounds melodramatic, but it's embarrassingly true.  We really dedicated our lives to it there for a while, to the point we couldn't pull who we were away from what it was, and more importantly what it was becoming.  I bet that happens to a lot with "founders" of anything.  We just kept at it so hard and so fervently that somehow it became a nightmare toward the end:  lots of creepy meetings and off-kilter emails and finally the feeling that everything we tried to do was kind of lost in the non-profit-professional shuffle. 

 

You can't really say that stuff to a roomful of MSW students, so of course I kept the whole thing inspirational (and truly many aspects of the V+V Experience were), but I kind of let them know that the main thing I learned from helping to start and sustain a non-profit organization for "artists with disabilities" was that you have to figure out the limits of believing in something before, during and after you start doing something about it.  If you don't understand those limits you start confusing yourself and others with your own heart-felt bullshit.  You can lose yourself in the "vision and mission" as it concretizes into something people can be paid for. 

 

You almost have to have a secret, strict resolve to remove yourself from "growth" and "outcomes" and "friend-raising."  I never went into the whole thing thinking it was about helping people with disabilities, to be honest.  I never considered the endeavor "social-work" or even charity.  I always saw all the people we were working with as peers and partners not in need of a lot of help outside of art supplies and opportunities to show and be seen.  I never thought the whole endeavor would morph into HR or Executive Committees or Elevator Speeches, even while I worked very hard to make those things happen.    

 

Anyway, during the little talk I gave, as I clicked from slide to slide, and year to year, I got a feeling that it was worth it in the end.  Because it has to be.  And Bill and I did Thunder-Sky, Inc. in 2009 to kind of recover what we felt we lost:  a simplicity of message, a graceful allegiance to one small idea.  I guess the main idea we're after is that art has a reason to exist in everybody's lives, and that the whole point for organizing around that idea is to have total equality from the get go.  Unfortunately when you organize things conventionally, order and control kind of take over (it's a people business after all), and you lose things, including your purpose.  And after awhile I didn't want to lose things anymore. 

 

Thunder-Sky, Inc. has always been about not losing things:  keeping Raymond's drawings safe, all the other stuff he left behind too, but also that initial idea of art helping us all transcend what we do to each other not getting coopted and redefined as a new tagline or mission statement.  I couldn't explain to the social-work students that I've always wanted Thunder-Sky, Inc. to be a DISorganization, a place without a lot of structure or meetings or committees.  A place where things don't get lost, but they don't get found either.

 

Four years into Thunder-Sky, Inc., it feels kind of like we're floating into and out of what it means to be established.  And I think that's the way Raymond would work it too.  Constantly out of the periphery, wryly smiling, walking through the world kind of bemused and kind of pissed, making art without much fuss, and finding a way to live without losing what it means to be alive.

 

Last night we hosted a poetry and fiction reading.  It was a packed house, and the two writers, Lisa Ampleman and Tessa Mellas, were great, reading Courtney Love poems and a short story about an alien from Jupiter taking advantage of Affirmative Action.  The words combined with the art on the walls, and it was a trippy little session.  It made me feel like we know what we're doing sometimes, and it doesn't have anything to do with anything, except that it's a moment in time when people get together and stop the crap long enough to appreciate each other.  I love this photo from last night.  It sums up a lot of things:

 

 

 

   

Candy Store

Bill did a great job installing "Words and Pictures by Eric Deller, Dale Jackson and Michael Weber" at semantics gallery in Brighton on Wednesday.  The concept for the show came from talking about how Dale and Michael make pictures from the opposite ends of the spectrum of picture-making.  Then Eric came into the gallery one day with his pictures culled from storybook tropes.  We got to talking:  Dale uses words, Michael uses no words, just paint and patience, and Eric merges words and pictures into iconography.  All three make visual art that kind of delves into a place where memory coalesces into dream, Dale's words and phrases dissolving into moments that don't make sense at least unilaterally, Mike's colors and shapes blending into gorgeous gobs of nothing, and Eric riffing on what you see right after the story ends and you're about to go to sleep. 

Then we came across what Krista Gregory (who oversees exhibitions at Visionaries and Voices) did with Dale's work back in March at the Contemporary Arts Center:  she stacks Dale's non-sequitur posters into volumes of information that reveal and conceal simultaneously as you unveil them, or as Krista writes about the project, "A rectangular volume of layered colored paper, like candy, exposing only the top layer of writing." 

The candy thing stuck in my head, until I finally had a tiny epiphany.  It goes something like this:

Dale Jackson

 

Michael Weber

 



 

 

 

Eric Deller

 

Necco, the original candy wafer, is a direct touchstone for me for what Krista and Dale did in the stacked poster piece.  Wafers melt on your tongue in a religious sort of way of course, and Neccos are concealed in beautiful see-though wax-paper.  And my dad used to bring them home sometimes from work because they had them in the vending machine at the Indiana Gas Company.  I remember loving them very much until I tasted them, and all you could taste was a sort of slate-like nothingness concealed in sugary dust.  Dale's writings conceal a lot of desire and thought and feeling, using mundane nomenclature and non-sequitur to get at a brilliance beyond thought.  He wants to write a diary that exposes every single second of his life.  When his musings are written on colorful poster-board and stacked the whole thing becomes a repository of thought, innocent and clever at the same time, and all of Dale's poetry ascends to a place you can't name:  it's a metaphysical candy-store.  Everyone welcome.

And when I wrote about Michael's work for the show, I wrote about "jelly beans melting into a sky."  Which is pretty close to what Michael seems to want to happen.  He wants something solid to blend into something spiritual.  He's tasting things with paint somehow, like all really good abstract-expressionists seem to want to do, but he doesn't let style get in the way.  His pictures transcend that neat little need to be "good," and go off somewhere to have fun.  You could stare at the incidental images for days, and find an assortment of messy, wonderful associations.  Like staring into a bowl of jell beans or finding shapes and meaning in clouds.

The background in Eric's pictures of storybook tropes resonate in that same way:  smeared color swirling into nostalgia, with stark shadows of the memory superimposed.  It's like stained-glass made out of tissue-paper, delicate and translucent, but then a sort of Germanic side-swipe, an iron-clad illustration of a whispered bedtime story, little words that form big images.  A wolf dressed like a grandma and a little girl with an ax making sure all is well, and so on...

Let's end this with Proust, the master of aestheticizing memory:  "We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison."

Love Letters

 

 

Krista Gregory, the Visionaries + Voices Exhibitions Director, writes about Dale Jackson's work:

 

Accumulation of ideas and thoughts and paper:  Dale Jackson's commentary falls across the page with a non-sequitur/poetic beauty as an accumulating collection of ideas and thoughts reflective of his everyday: TV, the bus ride, automobiles he sees, songs which move him and people who've touched him: exercises in kindness and rudeness.  Documented on page after page of poster board in an expressive script akin to Cy Twombly, collected (here for a year), and stored for the eyes of no one.  semantics will present one year of Dale's writings, in collaboration with V+V Exhibitions Director Krista Gregory, in a large stack. Formally, it presents a sculpture in the vein of Felix Gonzales-Torres: A rectangular volume of layered colored paper, like candy, exposing only the top layer of writing.  The exposed top piece will be for sale, if it is sold, the next layer will be exposed and for sale, and so on and so on and so on...to slowly reveal Dale's tranquil daily reflections as one would mindfully reflect back thru a stack of love letters, painstakingly one at a time.

We're pulling together an exhibit at Semantics Gallery in Brighton that opens on Saturday called "Words and Pictures:  New Works by Eric Deller, Dale Jackson, and Mike Weber."  Reception 7 to 11 pm:  more info semantics gallery.  Please stop by if you can.  And thanks to Krista for her lovely love letter to Dale's art.

About Last Night

Last night we had an opening at Thunder-Sky, Inc. for a show Bill curated called, "Glory Be!  (a Historical Romance):  Works by Britni Bicknaver, Paul McGurl and Matthew Waldeck."  It felt like old times somehow.  Like 12 years ago in fact.  Bill and I first curated a show of "outsider" art back in 2001, at a place called Base Gallery.  That show featured Antonio Adams, Raymond Thunder-Sky, Paul Rowland and Richard Brown, all artists we had met doing our regular jobs helping people with developmental disabilities.  That gig was titled "Art Thing," and it truly was a groundbreaking moment for me because I realized how art can allow you intense moments of grace and happiness that can sometimes push you forward to do bigger things.  Without "Art Thing," we would not have started Visionaries and Voices, and without Visionaries and Voices we would not have opened Thunder-Sky, Inc. 

 

What has changed in the last 12 years for me, though, is an evolution of trying to figure out how to do shows and projects and events featuring great art by artists often consigned to the background without having to frame their work with their diagnostic biographies:  without having to say what they've accomplished is a product of what a doctor says they have, or has happened "in spite of" this or that diagnosis.  So in "Glory Be" and in every show we do now, the idea of "disability" and "outsider" gets critiqued through stone-cold silence.  That stuff just does not get mentioned because you don't need to know how "outsider" the artist is in order to enjoy the beauty and peculiarity of the art.  Major case in point is "Glory Be," a show featuring three artists whose works have a lot of things in common, but whose demographics aren't really in sync.  Matthew's intimate, playful drawings of famous presidents, Paul's text-infused drawings of the names of presidents and other historical figures, and Britni's sly, sleek, blithe sculptural inventions cracking the code of historical gloss and pomp -- all these works belong together, and we can relish the way they fit and knock into each other, creating both mystery and meaning.  And we don't need to know who went to art school and who didn't, and we don't need to know IQ numbers or socioeconomic indicators.  We just need the work to be here, pulled together succinctly, given room to expand.

 

Last night, too, I felt a weird, beautiful reconnection with the idea of congregating around art.  I have a major fear of groups of people, but at the opening reception last night the groups of people felt organically okay somehow, as if they had come together to feel better about being people, not so they could feel charitable or sympathetic.  Matthew's family brought enough food for a huge family reunion.  Britni had a sweet soulful crowd of her own.  It all just came together.   And I got it:  this is what we're supposed to do, what Thunder-Sky, Inc. is.  Gatherings of people with lots of food and art and that's enough. 

 

Like "Art Thing" back in the day.  We did a full-color catalog for that show, back in 2001, and below is the back-cover, our mission statement at that time.  I wish I would have known then what I know now:  I would have taken out "disability" and "outsider" from the get-go.   As in:  "The Art Thing Project Is...  ART and helping artists gain access and credibility and success on their own terms."  Why do you need "outsider" or "disability" slapped onto any of these concepts and ideas?  Is it the idea that first you need to assess/label/diagnose people prior to helping them?  Like a doctor?  Bill and I are not doctors.  I don't really know what we are.  But I truly understand, I think, what we're supposed to do here on out, and it has nothing to do with systems or charity, and it has everything to do with what happened last night, and what happened 12 years ago:  finding ways to allow everyone to leave all the bull-shit behind, and proceed accordingly...

 

 

 

 

Below are photos of last night's opening of "Glory Be! (a Historical Romance):  Work by Britni Bicknaver, Paul McGurl and Matthew Waldeck," and from March, 2001's opening night of "Art Thing:  Drawings, Objects, Paintings and Words by Antonio Adams, Paul Rowland, Raymond Thunder-Sky and Richard Brown." 

 

 

"Glory Be!"



 

 

 

 

 

 "Art Thing"

 

 

Alive + Well = Collaboration

Bill Ross and Becky Iker:  Over the years Bill and Becky have created close to 50 paintings together.  Becky does the drawings and Bill does the painting.  Above:  one of their pieces...



Collaboration Is alive and well via V&V’s “Double Vision II” and Thunder-Sky Inc’s “2 + 2 = 5”

It is great to see Visionaries & Voices (V&V) continues to embrace and celebrate ‘collaboration” as a way to make art with their one night exhibit and fundraiser called “Double Vision II”. For me, making art is probably the only real form of magic that exists in the world. Artwork that emerges from collaboration can be more powerful than a solo project. In fact, collaborating can change your life.

I know this because in my early art school days, my painting instructor, Sue Johnson, randomly assigned me to collaborate with another art student. That student was Keith Banner. We became great friends and continued to collaborate from that point forward. In fact this May will mark our 21st year together as a couple.

So when it came to developing V&V back in 2002/2003, one of the cornerstones of the enterprise had to be, you guessed it, “COLLABORATION”. Bringing artists together with and without disabilities was a way to move things forward. Shows like “We Come in Peace” and “Same Difference” at Artworks and even “Pop Life” at the former UC Gallery on Sycamore were all vehicles showcasing the power of collaboration. Our training as artists and our jobs as social workers helped us to synthesize into “Culture workers”. Collaborating became a way to see results more quickly.

In those days and still now, collaborating can do a lot of “culture” work. When two artists come together to create regardless of backgrounds or history or issues, perceptions can change. The community can be made richer, more colorful, more, alive. Artists who may otherwise go unnoticed can be more quickly woven into the fabric of a larger conversation, a larger art world. Artists who may feel they are accomplished or established can be challenged or inspired in a new way. New techniques, imagery or ideas can develop, barriers can be eliminated.

What I have grown to appreciate over the years is that collaborating can be extremely difficult, but when it works it is great. A truly brand new piece can emerge that would not be possible without the other artist’s involvement… a new vision, experience or clarity can be derived. It can be exciting stuff. It can be more than the sum of its parts.

At our new gallery "Thunder-Sky Inc” we have not forgotten about the power and importance of collaboration. Stop by any Saturday and you may find a collaborative piece being made. In fact at the end of April running through mid June, Thunder-Sky Inc’s ninth exhibit will feature “2+2=5”. This show includes a number of collaborations, both new and old by such artists as Brian Joiner, DJ Maes, Donald Henry, and even Raymond Thunder-Sky himself. Artists who are no longer with us but are very much alive in the works they left behind or inspired.

Seance with Art Supplies

Antonio Adams working on one of the large-scale "reinventions" of a large print of one of  Raymond Thunder-Sky's unfinished drawings.  Raymond, when walking around the city drawing deconstruction sites, would often not finish some of the drawings -- possibly because of the volume of pieces he did.  There are approximately 400 unfinished drawings in the archive. 

We're pulling together the "2 + 2 = 5: Collaborations" exhibit, opening April 29, 2011 at Thunder-Sky, Inc.  The show will feature variations on the theme of "collaboration," and how getting rid of "one author" can open up new vistas and territories to investigate.  We'll have the "Guernica" pieces Antonio Adams and the late Brian Joiner did together in 2008, a triptych of large golden panels reenacting Picasso's famous grand-guignol masterpiece, re-configuring and re-conjuring that visual feast using superhero and urban imagery.  Amazing work.  As well, Antonio is working on pieces, utilizing remnants donated  from Brian's studio.  Pamela Rhodes Myricks has written a beautiful elegy about Brian, and we'll be publishing it along with a brochure about the Antonio/Brian collaborations.  We've had large prints made of some of Raymond Thunder-Sky's unfinished works (thanks to Dan Leesman from United Electric), and David Mack, Antonio, and a few other artists are working on "finishing" them.  Thunder-Sky, Inc. co-founder Bill Ross has some collabs he did with the late Donald Henry.  The exhibit is shaping up to be about how collaboration is not just about people working on art together, but about how collaboration can be a sort of a continuation of a conversation, a seance with art supplies...

We're also going to publish a book of writings inspired by Dale Jackson's text-driven works.  Titled I Was Dreaming When I Wrote This, the book will feature color reproductions of Dale's works, side by side with the writings done by local poets and writers, including Patricia Murphy, Matt McBride and Micah Freeman.  We'll be sponsoring a reading of these works along with the opening in late April.  Matt Morris and Eric Ruschman are also going to contribute a sculptural piece.

Dale Jackson beside his work in January 2011's "Mechanics of Joy" exhibit at U-Turn Alternative Space in Brighton.

April 2011 is going to be a great month for collabs.  We're doing the "2 + 2 = 5" show, and Visionaries & Voices has a fundraiser called "Double Vision" at Memorial Hall April 22, 2011, featuring collaborative works by "established artists and V&V artists."  Which begs the question:  what is the different between Thunder-Sky, Inc. & V&V?  They were both established because of Raymond and Antonio basically.  Bill and I started supporting both Raymond and Antonio and many other self-taught artists back in 1999, and from that initial support grew V&V, a studio for artists with disabilities.  Bill and I left V&V in 2009 because it was a project we no longer needed to be a part of.  We cofounded Thunder-Sky, Inc. to underline the importance of collaboration and also to problematize/reenvision the notion of "outsider art" and programs for artists with disabilities... 

Can't wait for April!

Donald Henry and Bill Ross, "Dreamhouse," acrylic and marker on canvas, 2009.

This Is Not My Beautiful Wife

There's a show of works by Visionaries & Voices (V&V) artists at the Cincinnati Art Museum up through the end of January, 2011.  Here's the way it's marketed:  "Love is an important part of the lives of the artists at V&V and continually influences their decisions and their futures. Bride & Groom Collide provides an opportunity for artists with disabilities to express their honest opinions, their ideas, and their dreams about forging a loving relationship.   More than 40 V&V artists have revealed their personal beliefs on the subject for the exhibit, and have created new paintings, sculptures, and drawings that are insightful and emotionally powerful. The artwork in the exhibit, as does most work by self-taught artists, has noticeable influences by the American folk art and the abstract expressionism movements."

Some of the works are lovely, some are beautifully weird, and some are not that good.  That's probably a taboo thing to say, but I've earned my status as taboo-breaker.  I helped start this whole V&V thing, and participated in curating many shows like this one at the Art Museum.  Every time I did this, I told myself that it's a chance for "self-taught" or "outsider" or "visionary" artists with disabilities to have their work shown in a space that usually would exclude them, as they don't have access to networking opportunities and art-school, etc.  But each time I curated shows like "Bride and Groom Collide," I always heard this voice inside my head, a doubting, whiny one, whispering little asides about how I was helping to ghettoize the art and artists even while I was helping to show their works in a great venue (and by great venue I mean, like this show, in the back stairwell at the Cincinnati Art Museum, not the main gallery, but still it's close). 

This voice was telling me that "grouping" artists because they have a disability somehow makes "disability" the focus of the way we perceive the works, and therefore diminishes the juice and excitement of viewing the art.  There's no mystery here, no cacophony, just harmony.  The marketing notes hammer that home:  it's about "artists with disabilities expressing their honest opinions, their ideas, and their dreams about forging loving relationships" through "paintings, sculptures, and drawings that are insightful and emotionally powerful."

The literal "expressing" about marriage and love and brides and grooms though comes through mostly in quoted text next to the works, attributed to the artists who made each piece, sort of like a documentary of what love and marriage mean to "people with disabilities."  The quotes are great and funny and insightful, as advertised, but again the point is underlined so thickly as to eliminate any other possibilities.  The trials and tribulations of love are complicated by the disability in everyone's lives of course, and the universality of that issue is duly noted, but this is not an art show as much as a show of artists with disabilities using art to exemplify an issue:  love is an important part of people's existences.

Any group show with a "big" theme like that can get on your nerves, of course:  themes notoriously undermine the strangeness and richness of art, taking something huge and odd and gorgeous and often shrinking it to fit into a neat little category.  But a group show featuring "artists with disabilities" as the main categorization has two big albatrosses around its neck:  trying to break free from the way most people view "disability" and also trying to deconstruct the way we lazily consume art by assigning it into categories we can check off and then leave behind in the first place.

"Bride and Groom Collide" has blissful moments, but not because of the pedantic subject matter; it's more because some of the chosen pieces break free of the theme and allow us a moment of respite from the heavyhandedness.

The two pieces below do this for me.  The top is by Holly Ebel, and the bottom by Marci Rosen.  Joyous, a little cynical, kind of weird.  Ebel's piece is a merging of Finster and Chagall with Saturday morning cartoons back when they were really cool.  Rosen's has a jittery, unnerving graveness, a dark little laugh inside each eye.

Yet to Be Born

This decade has been a strange experience in loss for me. This Friday 10-22-10 marks the 8th anniversary of my mother’s death. I found out she had cancer in June of 2002. That same day I found out Raymond Thunder-Sky had cancer as well. He passed away 10-29-04. The 6th anniversary of his passing will mark the first year anniversary of the opening of Thunder-Sky Inc.

In January of 2008 I lost my father and in Sept 2009 an artist Keith and I championed, Donald Henry, passed away suddenly. The recent passing of Brian Joiner shook me more than I thought it would. I thought knowing this was likely based on his condition would have lessened the effect.

I ran across a piece I wrote about “Vision and Mission” which I shared with all the staff at Visionaries & Voices on 10-22-08. In it, I tried to address how the death of my Mother and loss of Raymond Thunder-Sky shaped the urgency of what we (Keith and I) were trying to accomplish.

Here is a little bit of it:

I consider art as a great equalizer. When artists collaborate, it is one of the best ways I know of to step outside yourself and become a part of a larger conversation and a larger art world. The “Guernica Project” Antonio Adams and Brian Joiner are currently finishing up is a great example of what I am trying to say. Using one of Picasso’s most famous works as a spring board into a new work, Antonio and Brian are creating a work neither of them would be able to accomplish on their own.


As a co-founder of V&V, I appreciate your struggles and am proud of your accomplishments. It is my hope, my dream, my vision to someday see V&V serving the Raymond Thunder-Sky’s, the Antonio Adams and the Brian Joiners yet to be born.

I closed with this:

Today 10-22-08 my Mom would be 76 years old and Raymond would have been 58. Let’s make it a point to live our lives no matter how long or short with a sense of “Vision and Purpose”. Helping artists achieve a greater sense of their worth in this life is mine.

Top:  Donald Henry and Bill Ross
Bottom:  Becky Iker and Bill Ross

Barely Discernible Moments of Utopia

Donald Henry passed away last year.  There's a retrospective of his work at the Northern Kentucky University Main Art Gallery in Highland Heights, Kentucky, up until October 29, 2010.  We went there last night and got to see his work, and this reminded me of the first one-man show he had at Semantics Gallery in Cincinnati in 2007.  I wrote a poem about it.  In the picture above, Donald is hugging David Dillon, who I think helps run the Semantics Gallery.  Folks from Visionaries and Voices sewed a painted-cloth version of one of his paintings on the back of his suitcoat.  I will never forget that night.  A total 2+2=5 moment.  Here's the poem:

Barely Discernible Moments of Utopia


The art gallery was cold as hell
Maybe about ten people were there
Some guy was trying to fix the furnace
And everybody else was standing around.

Donald’s art was up on the walls
Wood panels were lined up like
Targets on a shooting range

Mean-looking beautiful things
Those robots he does
Some with gigantic genitals
Some without.

Donald had on a shiny necktie
And a ski-mask
Drawing robot versions
Of the characters on Gilligan’s Island
While a few of us tried to remember the theme song
To that show.

Smoked sausage links
Bubbled in a crock-pot of barbecue sauce
Next to a ripped-open bag of potato chips
And some of those miniature Three Musketeers bars.

The one painting Donald did not want
To sell was the robot
With his grandmother’s name

Pink and lavender
With those match-stick lines
And a number across her chest.

He ended up selling
About $1,000.00 worth.

Donald was totally comfortable
In his ski-mask
That staccato singsong voice of his
Echoing in the art gallery like the voice of
The god of all robots

The expressionlessness
That is total expression.

That night
He went from person to person
Hugging us all like
There was no tomorrow
Letting us know

He was what he was
And this is what
He does.

Letting us know
He was capable of hugging us
It was that easy.

And then Monday came
He lives in a group-home
And he wanted to wear the same clothes he wore to the art gallery
He wanted to keep on being that way
Shiny neck-tie

I guess the ski-mask too

But the worker in the group-home was new
And she hid those clothes
Thinking they were his dress clothes
And that they should be kept clean for special occasions
Only.

Donald flipped out
Ran out into traffic
Got hit by a car

He was not killed thank God
Just bruised.

Andrew Vansickle on Kevin White

Above: One of Kevin White's pieces in the "Out of Order" exhibit at Thunder-Sky, Inc.

In 1987, Andrew Vansickle spent the summer working under the guidance of Rev. Howard Finster. The relationship and education lasted until Finster’s passing in 2001. He considers Howard Finster his mentor. At the time, when Outsider Art was exploding in interest, Andrew also befriended many of the “Outsider Art legends,” including Mose Tolliver, RA Miller, Billie Lemming, and Rev. BF Perkins. He has helped coordinate a number of art exhibitions in the past 20 years, including one of the first Outsider Art exhibits in Ohio, “Howard Finster: Man of Visions” at the University of Cincinnati Gallery. He is currently the board president of Visionaries & Voices, as well as a working artist, and has known Kevin White for several years. Below are some things he had to say upon seeing Kevin White's work for the "Out of Order" exhibit opening at Thunder-Sky, Inc. February
26, 2010.

When I first saw Kevin's work back in 2003/2004 at Essex Studios in Walnut Hills, I was really taken aback by how much it seemed to have in common with traditional outsider artists like Howard Finster and William Hawkins. I recognized right off that he was going to be one of the greats. He has a raw painterly confidence that totally made me flachback to the late 80s when outsider art began to explode with interest. His work has simplicity, but also sophistication. It's a grand-slam. And I was excited, and still am, at what Kevin's next aesthetic move might be.

Kevin's work can also be easily compared and contrasted with "insider artists" like Franz Klein, Miro, and the constructions of Louise Nevelson. He visually flattens Nevelson's architecture. He does not reference modern art; he kind of uses it without knowing it, which makes for an even more interesting reinvention.

If you ask me what might be Kevin's biggest influence it would his dad. His father was an airport designer and engineer, and Kevin's work truly has a spatial and architectural overlay. You can see that also in the way he lays out all his drawings once he is finished and tries to create a sort of city out of them. Like he is a city-planner conducting business on another planet.

He wants to create a world, in other words. He is truly into organizing and categorizing and at the end of the day his paintings and sculptures have that rare quality of someone totally in charge of their gifts. It's been a pleasure getting to know him, and also collaborating with him when I curated his last exhibit (Summer 2008 at AVS Gallery in Cincinnati). He is a star, and I really look forward to the new show.

The Story of the Pop Cans

In 2007, when we were curating a Visionaries & Voices (V&V) exhibit at the University of Cincinnati Gallery at Sycamore (a now defunct space that was completely beautiful) called "Pop Life: Outsider Artists and the Pop Ideal," Victor Strunk, who was the director at V&V then, came up with an idea: to see if Kevin White, one of the first artists V&V tried to help, would like to paint some pop cans for this show. He did, and he still does. Right after the exhibit came down, Bill got the idea to build some shelving units for the cans, so they could be displayed and sold this way (see photo above). In other words, "Pop Cans" by Kevin White is a wonderful example of 2 + 2 = 5. Someone thought up the idea (Victor), someone executed the idea beautifully (Kevin), and someone else embellished both the idea and the execution (Bill). This one piece, as well, is "co-authored" by Andy Warhol, who originated "Pop Art" and opened up avenues for artists often not cannonized or even exhibited.

(Keith Banner, 2010)