COLLAGE ON VIEW
Charlie Lucas: Talking to the Ancestors
at the Paul R. Jones Museum in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, USA
2 October 2020-26 February 2021
The iconic, self-taught artist, Charlie Lucas is the youngest of a pantheon of outsider artists who rose to public attention in the latter part of the twentieth century. Lucas bridges a couple of generations of artists, said museum director Daniel White, “Starting with Bill Traylor, then Jimmie Lee Sudduth and Mose T, Charlie is the last in a long lineage of black folk artists in Alabama that began over 100 years ago.” In his own family, Lucas is the descendent of several generations of artisans and craftspeople, including his grandfather and great grandfather who were blacksmiths. He traces his work directly from them.
Lucas’ work has been included in early, transformative exhibitions of self-taught, outsider artists including the High Museum of Art’s groundbreaking 1988 exhibition, “Outside the Mainstream: Folk Art in Our Time”. His work was part of “Passionate Visions of the American South: Self-Taught Artists from 1940 to the Present”, 1993; “Pictured in My Mind: Contemporary American Self-Taught Art”, Birmingham Museum of Art, 1995, and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art’s group show “Ogun Meets Vulcan: Iron Sculpture of Alabama with Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Ronald Lockett and Joe Minter” in 2007. Lucas’ work has appeared in numerous solo and group exhibitions over the last four decades including the New Orleans Museum of Art, Birmingham Museum of Art, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and Rosa Parks Museum and Library at Troy University-Montgomery.
(text adapted from the museum’s press materials)
INFORMATION
Paul R. Jones Museum
2308 Sixth Street
Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35401 USA
(205) 345-3038
Hours:
Monday-Friday, 9AM-5PM
First Fridays, Noon-8PM