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Self-Taught Art

Collection Info
A drawing of stylized and vibrant figures and animals, including a pink fish, a peacock and rod…

Telfair Museums currently holds more than one hundred works by twentieth century and later artists of the American South who, without access to formal visual arts training, created complex works that express intensely personal visions rooted in individual experience, spirituality, or community, and demonstrate inventive use of imagery and materials. This collection is particularly strong in in works created in Georgia and the Savannah area. Telfair acquired its first modern work by a self-taught artist by donation in 1946 and has exhibited works by artists without formal training since 1977, when the museum hosted the seminal exhibition Missing Pieces: Georgia Folk Art 1770-1976. By the 1990s, Telfair began actively acquiring work by living self-taught artists, and the collection now includes drawings, paintings, sculpture, and mixed media works dating from the 1930s to the present, by noted artists including Howard Finster, Thornton Dial, Sr., Nellie Mae Rowe, Bessie Harvey, Eddie Mumma, Ulysses Davis, and William O. Golding. One subset of nineteen works in the collection focuses on the work of African American woodcarvers in the Savannah area who produced symbolic and narrative walking sticks. Another important group within the collection are twenty-three drawings made in Savannah by the mariner and artist William O. Golding.

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An eagle with a human head is flanked by choirs of angels and perched on a fence made of arrows…
Leroy Almon Sr.
1983
A silver assemblage in the shape of an elephant's head.
Butch Anthony
1998
A golden-toned painting of a Christ figure in the center with a tree below him and a supine fig…
Rudolph Valentino Bostic
1994
A painting depicting a yellow boat or ark in an impressionistic landscape in which muddy greens…
Rudolph Valentino Bostic
1991
A circular painting of an angel holding a sword in the center with three yellow jugs on the lef…
Rudolph Valentino Bostic
1993
A painting of the biblical story of Abraham being stopped by an angel from sacrificing his son …
Rudolph Valentino Bostic
n. d.
A painting Jesus Christ flanked by two disciples and a third, recumbent figure lying in slung c…
Rudolph Valentino Bostic
n. d.
A half-length portrait of a woman with a veil over her dark hair in a vertical landscape with s…
Rudolph Valentino Bostic
n. d.
A bust-length painting of the biblical figure Jesus Christ wearing a crown surrounded by horizo…
Rudolph Valentino Bostic
1993
A black and orange bust of a girl with black hair and green eyes with a bow in her hair on the …
Rudolph Valentino Bostic
n. d.
A painting on pressboard of the bust of a woman in profile facing left.
Rudolph Valentino Bostic
1992