Raw Vision 29

Founded in 1989, Raw Vision is the world's only international magazine on Outsider Art, folk art, and visionary art. Ignored and marginalized for many years, Outsider Art can now be seen as a vital creative force that expresses the true potentiality of human creativity. With spectacular subject matter from around the world, Raw Vision was recently awarded a prize by U.N.E.S.C.O. as the world's best art magazine of the year. Each edition contains essential reference and historical material that will be invaluable to researchers, scholars, and enthusiasts for years to come. Produced in full color, Raw Vision brings the works of little known and self-taught masters to a wide public for the first time.

My Soul Has Grown Deep considers the art-historical significance of contemporary Black artists and quilters working throughout the southeastern United States and Alabama in particular. Their paintings, drawings, mixed-media compositions, sculptures, and textiles include pieces ranging from the profoundly moving assemblages of Thornton Dial to the renowned quilts of Gee’s Bend. Nearly sixty remarkable examples—originally collected by the Souls Grown Deep Foundation and donated to The Metropolitan Museum of Art—are illustrated alongside insightful texts that situate them in the history of modernism and the context of the African American experience in the twentieth-century South. This remarkable study simultaneously considers these works on their own merits while making connections to mainstream contemporary art. Art historians Cheryl Finley, Randall R. Griffey, and Amelia Peck illuminate shared artistic practices, including the novel use of found or salvaged materials and the artists’ interest in improvisational approaches across media. Novelist and essayist Darryl Pinckney provides a thoughtful consideration of the cultural and political history of the American South, during and after the Civil Rights era. These diverse works, described and beautifully illustrated, tell the compelling stories of artists who overcame enormous obstacles to create distinctive and culturally resonant art. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana}

Raw Vision magazine was first published in 1989 at a time when Outsider Art was almost a clandestine, secret area of art, only just a few people around the world knew about. The first editions of Raw Vision magazine presented works that have since become world famous but which, at the time, were shown to a wide audience for the first time. The early editions of Raw Vision soon sold out and over the years became expensive and sought-after collectors' items. Features include: The Art of Entrancement: the mediumistic and spiritual in Outsider Art; Word and Image in American Folk Art: a survey of Southern folk artists; Nek Chand's Rock Garden of Chandigarh: the world's largest sculpture park and visionary environment. Autour de l'Art Brut: an exploration of Dubuffet's theories of Art Brut. The work of SPACES, the Los Angeles based conservation organisation who were instrumental in saving the famous Watts Towers. Schroder-Sonnenstern: the demented erotic vision of this German draughtsman. Haiti and the school of Saint Soleil - contemporary works form the vibrant artistic world of Haiti. Willem van Genk: powerful Dutch visionary. Gustav Mesmer: Outsider and his flying machines, a latter day lcarus. Billy Morey - creating against all the odds - how art rescued him from a cycle of crime and punishment.

Florida was the first region of the United States to be discovered, explored, and, after a fashion, settled by Euroamericans. Its population in the early 21st century is approaching 17 million. Within years the number of people living in the state will surpass those living in New York, and the Sunshine State will become the most populous area east of the Mississippi. The first book in English about Florida was written by Jean Ribault. A French adventurer, Ribault established a colony of Huguenots near present-day Jacksonville. He was captured by the very able Spanish commander Pedro Menendez, who ordered his French rival and all his minions killed. The state’s long and colorful past is matched by its equally long and colorful literary production. Strangely, critical assessment of Florida literature has lagged far behind. With this volume, the Florida College English Association has formally begun an effort to correct this lamentable oversight. Included are papers on every aspect of Florida literature and history by scholars from every part of the state who are employed in every kind of institution of higher learning. Of special interest are the studies of Florida literature in the 19th century and in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, areas that are generally ignored in national journals. The papers on the contributions of African-American literary figures, such as Zora Hurston and James Weldon Johnson, are noteworthy. Of particular interest are the suggestions for teaching Florida studies in the classroom, which can be adapted for high school as well as college students.

Tilling Sacred Grounds examines Black women’s interiority and negotiation of race, gender, and sexuality in religious spaces and religious practices. Phillis Isabella Sheppard argues for the importance of the exchange between interiority and public spaces, and examines religion in cyberspace, art, ritual, and street ministry. She refigures the location of religious experience by retrieving Black women’s interiority as religious space. Often excluded from Black religious studies, interiority is necessary for understanding Black women’s complex and even unconscious relationship with religion. The book weaves a thread by stressing that interiority has subjective, intersubjective, conscious, unconscious, and relational dimensions formed in historical, and social contexts.

An innovative study of artists balancing tradition with creativity

Folk art is as varied as it is indicative of person and place, informed by innovation and grounded in cultural context. The variety and versatility of 300 American folk artists is captured in this collection of informative and thoroughly engaging essays. American Folk Art: A Regional Reference offers a collection of fascinating essays on the life and work of 300 individual artists. Some of the men and women profiled in these two volumes are well known, while others are important practitioners who have yet to receive the notice they merit. Because many of the artists in both categories have a clear identity with their land and culture, the work is organized by geographical region and includes an essay on each region to help make connections visible. There is also an introductory essay on U.S. folk art as a whole. Those writing about folk art to date tend to view each artist as either traditional or innovative. One of the major contributions of this work is that it demonstrates that folk artists more often exhibit both traits; they are grounded in their cultural context and creative in the way they make work their own. Such insights expand the study of folk art even as they readjust readers' understanding of who folk artists are.