Art: William H. Johnson
This beautiful interpretation of the traditional spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” was created by “outsider” artist William Johnson around 1944. Owned by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., it is traveling with an exhibition to Atlanta and Los Angeles.
Do you know the traditional African American spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”? I love the simple and inspiring visualization of it that artist William H. Johnson painted in 1944 or thereabout. I love the humble dresses and the darling shoes and socks of the angels coming in a chariot to carry him to heaven. I love how the first angel has her hand raised in welcome and how you can see the Jordan River in the background.
I looked over Jordan, and what did I see?
(Coming for to carry me home)
A band of angels coming after me
(Coming for to carry me home)
This painting is provided as an example of “outsider art” in the New York Review of Books.
Sanford Schwartz writes, “In recent decades, a tale unfolding within the larger story of contemporary art has been our gradually learning more about, and our trying to place, outsider artists.
“Problems begin at once, with the label. It is a description that many remain ambivalent about, and often believe should be put in quotation marks, to indicate its tentativeness. The situation somewhat echoes the moment, beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, when folk art was first being taken out of attics and looked at anew, and commentators were not sure whether that term — or the labels ‘self-taught,’ ‘naive,’ or ‘primitive,’ among others — was the appropriate one or would merely suffice.
“ ‘Self-taught,’ though imprecise in its way — it has been said, for example, that most of the significant painters of the nineteenth century were essentially self-trained — has remained interchangeable with ‘folk art’ for many commentators. It is sometimes used interchangeably with ‘outsider,’ too. It strikes far less the note of a judgment from above.
“Yet ‘outsider’ catches better the quality often evident in the work of such creators of being a surprising, or possibly strange, one-of-a-kind accomplishment. Put roughly, an outsider artist is a figure who makes a body of work while operating in relative isolation, unaware of, or indifferent to, developments in the work of professional artists — though this isn’t always the case and it doesn’t mean that such a person is unaware of being an artist. Nor should it suggest that an outsider artist is a sporadic creator. Many are mightily prolific.
“An outsider artist might be someone who resolutely, and perhaps eccentrically, wants to live and work only on her or his terms. An outsider artist might be someone who has been institutionalized, or who suffers some physical impairment, which keeps the person at a remove from others. …
“Simply to give a sense of the range of such figures I would mention Bill Traylor, who was born a slave and was discovered in 1939 working out of a booth on a street in Montgomery, Alabama. His gift was for finding the most precise and elegant way to place his silhouette-flat human and animal figures on otherwise empty pages. Twisting, running, growling, and gesticulating, his characters, although not part of some larger atmosphere, seem nevertheless to conjure a vast rural universe.
“The Czech Miroslav Tichý, on the other hand, who made some of his cameras out of wood, tape, and cardboard, gave photography, in shots made mostly in the 1960s and 1970s of the women of his town — going swimming, waiting for a bus, walking away — a new dimension. He showed how offhand and blurry a photograph can be and still be evocative.”
Lots more here. The exhibition “Outliers and American Vanguard Art” can be seen at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, until September 30, after which it will visit the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from November 18, 2018 to March 18, 2019. If you see it, could you let me know?
Thanks for introducing this wonderful artist, there’s so much atmosphere in this painting and the taste of its time! 🙏🏼
Yes, it just makes me happy to look at this painting and see the song through his eyes.
That’s a great painting! The differing skin tones and hair and expressions of the angels makes them seem like individuals and the sort of “shock and awe” posture of the male figure–amazing. I struggle with the labels but whatever we call it, I really love this sort of artwork.
Yes, the label is condescending. What we know is that this piece is from the heart.
Outsider art is my favorite genre, both to create and to collect. I actually kind of like the term “outsider”, I never was crazy about all the elite art snobbery of the industry.
Good to hear from someone comfortable with having that term applied to her art. Thanks!