Minneapolis Institute of Art

“Prophet” Royal Robertson spent most of his life in Louisiana with his wife and eleven children. Trained as a sign painter, his paranoid schizophrenia triggers his a prodigious creative fever. Ethereal ascents, portraits of deities, futuristic architectures alike “show houses” of a world to come, it is as if he had descended from his planet, carrying his own Tablets of Stone. Featured in countless international collections, such as the Smithsonian Museum of American Art (USA) or the Musée national d’Art moderne (Pompidou), his work was presented in 2018-19 in the travelling exhibition Into The Unknown, produced by the Barbican (London) and curated by Patrick Gyger.

Henry Speller was born in the settlement of Panther Bum in the Delta country of Central Mississippi. He grew up working on Delta where he often drew pictures during his lunch breaks. In 1939, he left Mississippi for Memphis, Tennessee. Speller moved to a house located a few blocks from Beale Street, the musical heart of Memphis. He was an accomplished blues musician who played guitar with Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters. The imagery and insistent rhythms of the Delta blues flow through Speller’s work, but his iconography is an explicit commentary of the social, economic, and racial exclusions he observed throughout his life.

Thornton Dial, Sr. was born in Emmel, Alabama in 1928. Over a period of thirty years, he worked onand-off for the Pullman Standard Company, a company known for manufacturing metal railroad cars. Dial lives in Bessemer, Alabama where he is the patriarch of a clan of artists and an accomplished painter and sculptor. All of Dial’s work emerges from a tireless mining of his own experience and of the events of our time. His use of materials – fencing, cow bones, corn stalks, scrap metal, pottery shards, birdbaths, clothing, stuffed animals, rope, carpet, and unusual combinations of paints and stains – renders his work by turns raw and lyrical.

Mose Tolliver grew up in the Pike Road Community in Alabama, born to a family of sharecropper’s. In the late 1960’s, a load of marble crushed his legs and almost killed him. The accident left him unable to work. In 1970, at the encouragement of his former employer, he began to paint. Developing a signature wet-on-wet technique, Tolliver began painting animals, people, plants, fruits and vegetables, all in flat perspective, stylistically refined as elementary shapes and symbols.