After World War I, artists without formal training “crashed the gates” of major museums in the United States, diversifying the art world across lines of race, ethnicity, class, ability, and gender. At the center of this fundamental reevaluation of who could be an artist in America were John Kane, Horace Pippin, and Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses. The stories of these three artists not only intertwine with the major critical debates of their period but also prefigure the call for inclusion in representations of American art today. In Gatecrashers, Katherine Jentleson offers a valuable corrective to the history of twentieth-century art by expanding narratives of interwar American modernism and providing an origin story for contemporary fascination with self-taught artists.
Katherine Jentleson, PhD, is the Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.
“Interweaving histories of art-world power brokers with portraits of three exceptionally driven artists, Gatecrashers offers a refreshingly expansive view of twentieth-century folk art. From this archivally rich, story-packed, and highly ethical study, the self-taught artist emerges—not at the margins, but at the very heart of modern American culture.”—Jennifer Jane Marshall, author of Machine Art, 1934
“Gatecrashers is a compulsively readable book. Katherine Jentleson brilliantly argues for the agency of her subjects both individually as makers negotiating the institutions of art and collectively as catalysts for pluralism, effectively democratizing American artistic identity in the interwar period.”—Suzanne Hudson, Associate Professor of Art History and Fine Arts, University of Southern California
264 pp.8 x 10Illus: 53 color photographs, 18 b/w illustrations, 1 line illustration
9780520303423$50.00|£42.00Hardcover
Apr 2020