Expressions Unbound: American Outsider Art from the Andrew and Linda Safran Collection

A hundred years ago, the first modernists fetishized folk artists, sneaking into mental health institutions in search of artists working “outside culture”—as if that were possible. Thankfully, Expressions Unbound, currently on view at the Tufts University Art Gallery, doesn’t make that mistake. With 38 works by nearly 20 artists—all from the 20th century and most from the rural South—the Safran collection includes both big names and unknown figures in outsider art. Its diversity reflects what chief curator and director Dina Deitsch described as an effort to “open the canon by going regional.” In the vibrantly tactile assemblage A Hippo Got a Right to the Tree of Life (1989), Thornton Dial mounts a metal hippopotamus on a lushly colorful painted background. Two sculptures that Howard Finster called “sermons in paint” will be familiar to fans of R.E.M. and Talking Heads. (Both featured the Georgia artist on their album covers in the 1980s.) By allowing us to experience the ecstatic clutter of his constructions, we also share Finster’s religious commitments.

Benjamin (B.F.) Perkins, Statue of Liberty, 1989, oil on canvas. Tufts University Permanent Collection: Gift of Andrew and Linda Safran, 2017.024. Photo: Steve Briggs.

“The raw materiality of the work” that drew Deitsch to these artists comes through in creations crafted with materials found at hand: dime-store glitter and Alabama soil in the paintings of Jimmy Lee Sudduth, Justin McCarthy’s sketches on ordinary cardboard or the elusive “baby doll” sculptures that Raymond Coins carved into stone already smoothed by centuries in North Carolina riverbeds. The noticeable proliferation of national and patriotic images—including three different artists’ takes on the Statue of Liberty—suggest that Expressions Unbound aims to write this art into American history. Even more striking is its documentation of art’s consoling power. It is impossible to overlook the financial, physical and psychological pain that many of these artists brought to their practice: David Butler, Jack Savitsky and Mose Tolliver took up art after career-ending on-the-job injuries; Charles Benefiel to get a handle on obsessive-compulsive disorder; Mary T. Smith to communicate with a world made distant by hearing loss. Ray Hamilton sketched with ballpoint pens inside a group home; Purvis Young mastered drawing in prison. The list goes on, as the artists’ unbounded expressions break the barriers between inside and outside.