Inside Intuit
By Justin Sondak in Arts & Entertainment on Mar 6, 2006 3:45PM
Our weekend visit to Intuit’s quirky outsider art gallery sure was fun. Maybe not Academy Awards fun or drunken Milwaukee Art Museum party fun, but we did enjoy old timey photos of strangers made ghostly by double exposures and other such manipulation. Sixty-five of these photos comprise Intuit’s “Accidental Mysteries” exhibit, a peek into the John and Teenuh Foster collection of ‘vernacular photography.’ These found snapshots by anonymous photographers of unknown subjects range from poetically proletariat to just plain weird. Along the lines of Found Magazine (showcased in the same space last year), the Fosters’ collection hooks us by forcing us to fill in the details, to imagine everyday life in a pre-digital, pre-internet age and to speculate how our random artifacts will look to our children’s children.
A small flyer on the front table altered us to a very big collection in the back room: “In the Eyes of Mr. Dawson.” Folk artist William Dawson spent much of his life in Chicago working as a fruit vendor and security guard, carving and painting wooden figures of people and rural scenes in his spare time. Working through the mid to late 20th century, Dawson was right on time to ride the wave of the outsider and self-taught artist movement to much acclaim. Art lovers and scholars loved assessing his ‘totems’ but he was too busy producing colonies of little wide-eyed characters to concern himself with such talk. By the 1980s he was nationwide, winning accolades from the art world and meetings with Nancy Reagan and other Washington dignitaries. Dawson passed away in 1990, just a few months after a retrospective celebration at the Chicago Cultural Center. Intuit’s exhibit is the first comprehensive look at Dawson’s work since then, a stroll through the rec room of an unusual life.
"In the Eyes of Mr. Dawson" closes March 18, "Accidental Mysteries" closes April 29. Both exhibits are at the Intuit Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, 756 N Milwaukee Ave, open Tuesdays through Sundays. More information at outsider.art.org.
Photos via Accidental Mysteries and Intuit.