| The James Castle retrospective, now at the Berkeley Art Museum (through April 25, 2010) really got me thinking. He was an outsider artist (i.e., not formally trained), who was profoundly deaf and made hundreds of sketches, drawings and books over the course of his life. His only schooling was as a child when he attended the Idaho School for the Deaf and Blind, Castle did not learn to read, write, speak, sign, or lip-read. He worked mostly with soot and his saliva, so the exhibition is primarily in black and white. Particularly striking are his crafted books from found materials, filled with thumbnail size images. Much of the work brings artists like Joseph Cornell to mind, who is typically not characterized as an outsider artist despite working outside of the mainstream art world and his lack of formal art education. |
James Castle: A Retrospective was organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and made possible by The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, through the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative. Additional funding was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts as part of American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius.
The Berkeley presentation has been made possible in part by the Karen Lennox Gallery, the Fields Family Foundation, Luba Mosionzhnik, Betsy Aubrey and E. Steve Lichtenberg, M.D., and anonymous donors, and by the generous support of the BAM/PFA Trustees.
