A work by Mary T. Smith at the Amercian Folk Art Museum
Marvels of My Own Inventiveness will feature an immersive viewing of approximately 22 paintings by five contemporary artists in the American Folk Art Museum collection: Leonard Daley, Claude Lawrence, J.B. Murray, Mary T. Smith, and Purvis Young. By positioning these artists in conversation with one another, the exhibition will explore the artistic self-expression of Black makers working in and around abstraction.
The exhibition’s title is drawn from a passage by literary critic and Black feminist scholar Hortense Spillers, whose groundbreaking 1987 essay Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book includes the statement: “in order for me to speak a truer word concerning myself, I must strip down through layers of attenuated meanings, made an excess in time, over time, assigned by a particular historical order, and there await whatever marvels of my own inventiveness.”
Reflecting on this sentiment, the exhibition interprets “inventiveness” as a metaphor for the creative process and painterly decision-making. Through this interpretive lens, the exhibition will respond to works by each of the five artists by prioritizing a unique experiential encounter of close looking and contemplation. The show will feature paintings on view for the first time at AFAM, and include both large-scale and smaller works on paper, canvas, wood, and metal.
The exhibition is curated by Brooke Wyatt, Luce Assistant Curator at the American Folk Art Museum (AFAM), and Sadé Ayorinde, Warren Family Assistant Curator.
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.