The ambiguity surrounding Perley Meyer Wentworth’s life adds to the mystique that surrounds his work. Wentworth lived in California for the majority of his life, working as a night watchman. He spent time as a patient at Dewitt State Hospital in Auburn, California, where Martín Ramírez lived from 1948 until his death. Both artists were discovered and collected by Dr. Tarmo Pasto, a visiting professor of psychology and art at Sacramento State College in the early 1950s. We know of approximately forty works created by Wentworth. He used crayon, pencil, gouache, pastel, and charcoal on paper, which he would rub and blur to enhance the forms’ celestial nature. Otherworldly and ethereal, his works allude to Christianity without featuring overt traditional iconography. It is believed that Wentworth thought of himself as a medium between Earth and alien worlds, with his images being a response to “visions of the cosmos and of a quasi-Christian heaven.” He would inscribe many of his works with the word “imagination,” letting us presume that he was conscious of what was and was not reality.

Valérie Rousseau, exhibition label for Memory Palaces: Inside the Collection of Audrey B. Heckler. New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2020.