Ogden Museum of Southern Art

A poor child of Mississippi condemned to the hardest work, this African-American woman began, at the dawn of her life, a work that resembles a real graphic blues. Mary T. Smith gave shape to her personal cosmology by painting on sheets of corrugated iron and wooden panels
arranged around her house. Her “solar aesthetic”—says Daniel Soutif—and her powerfully elementary modes of representation made a strong impression on Jean‑Michel Basquiat. Now considered an emblematic figure of American art brut, her works have been added to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Smithsonian Museum of American Art (Washington) and the High Museum of Art (Atlanta) collections.

Born in Caines Ridge, Alabama in 1910, Jim Sudduth began painting at the age of 3. He is best known for his paintings made from dirt and mixtures of berries, grasses, and leaves. Sudduth claimed to be able to obtain 23 colors from the dirt and rocks around his house. The artist would use his forefinger and thumb to smear his concoctions on plywood panels, old boards, doors, and anything else he could paint on. His subjects ranged from Southern mansions to self-portraits, his dog (Toto) and postcard views of New York City.

Hawkins Bolden, half Creole and partially Native American, went blind at the age of 8 after a baseball accident. The small house he lived in in the city was stuck between a car wash and a high brick wall. In the shade of this wall, there was a small garden that Bolden loved and protected from external aggression with “scarecrows” that he made with found objects. These sculptures were embedded in the ground and had faces made of car wheel covers, metal pots and metal plate ends. Each surface was pierced with holes and decorated with rubber hose ends and pieces of carpet.