Curator Chat

We Ask Leading Museum Curators About What’s Going On In Their World

Brandywine River Museum of Art

Audrey Lewis

Associate Curator
Brandywine River Museum of Art
Chadds Ford, PA • www.brandywine.org

What event (gallery show, museum exhibit, etc.) in the next few months are you looking forward to, and why?
I am very much looking forward to our upcoming exhibition Gatecrashers: The Rise of the Self-Taught Artist in America (May 28 to September 5). Gatecrashers examines how, after World War I, artists without formal training “crashed the gates” of major museums in the United States, diversifying the art world across lines of race, ethnicity, class, ability and gender. Organized by the High Museum of Art and featuring more than 60 works, the exhibition investigates how self-taught artists including Horace Pippin, Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma Moses” and John Kane overcame class, race and gender-based obstacles to enter the inner sanctums of the mainstream art world. It’s exhibiting widely and for the first time taking their place alongside the 20th century’s most celebrated academically trained modernist artists...By building upon prior scholarship and reevaluating these artists in the larger context of American art, the exhibition enriches the narrative in which Brandywine can present the works in the future.

What are you reading?
In relation to the Gatecrashers exhibit, I am reading They Taught Themselves: American Primitive Painter of the 20th century by Sidney Janis (1942). This was a significant exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that included many of the artists who are in Gatecrashers. Each artist in They Taught Themselves is given a chapter that includes a biography and the story of how they were discovered by the art establishment. It is fascinating because many of these artists were popular only for a short time, so this is essentially the only record of their artistic lives. Also interesting is that these artists are discussed as being artists “of the people,” suggesting that because they are self-taught and come from backgrounds working in other fields (like the steel industry or textiles, for example), they are very relatable to the ordinary person.

Interesting exhibit, gallery opening or work of art you’ve seen recently?
Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe at the High Museum of Art (closed January 9, 2022) was beautiful and moving. Curated by Katherine Jentleson, it is an-depth look at the career of this self-taught, visionary artist, who in her lifetime, displayed hundreds of drawings, handmade dolls and found object installations in her Georgia home known as “The Playhouse.” It was an eye opener for me as I only had a cursory knowledge of Rowe’s work. While I always found Rowe’s work pleasurable and lovely, Jentleson revealed the artist’s work to be “a radical act of self-expression and liberation in the post-civil rights-era South.”

What are you researching at the moment?
I have been doing research on Joseph Stella (1877-1946), an early-20th-century modernist artist who is best known for his futurist inspired paintings of the Brooklyn Bridge. He also had a huge body of work related to nature-based subjects that we are highlighting in an upcoming exhibition titled Joseph Stella: Visionary Nature, that will be presented at the Norton Museum of Art (October 15-January 8, 2023), continue to the High (February 23, 2023-May 21, 2023) and conclude at the Brandywine (June 17, 2023-September 24, 2023). Stella was born in Italy and came to the United States as a young man. Although based in New York, he traveled widely and often, and his work reflects that in many ways. I am most interested in the impact of his visits to Africa and Barbados in the 1930s.

What is your dream exhibit to curate? Or see someone else curate?
I would like to curate an exhibition about Social Realism in American art during the 1920s through the mid-1940s when it went out of fashion. Artists like William Gropper, Moses Soyer, Raphael Soyer, Ben Shahn and Aaron Douglas created art that either represented social issues or critiqued society directly. Although written about frequently, there has not been a focused exhibition on the subject in years. This topic seems especially relevant today.—