{"object":[{"sourceId":{"label":"Source ID","value":"1674"},"copyright":{"label":"Copyright","value":"Copyright for this work is under review."},"creditline":{"label":"Credit Line","value":"Gift of Chuck and Jan Rosenak"},"endDate":{"label":"End Date","value":"1976"},"sortNumber":{"label":"Sort Number","value":"1980     3   10"},"invno":{"label":"Accession number","value":"1980.3.10"},"medium":{"label":"Medium","value":"Paint on wood with metal frame"},"geographyPlaceregion":{"label":"Place/Region","value":"Fulton"},"media":{"label":"Media","value":{"mediaURL":"https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/4725/full","mediaDepartment":"Object Photographs","mediaType":"Image","mediaId":"4725"}},"title":{"label":"Title","value":"Free Thought and Free Speech"},"geographyCity":{"value":"Fulton"},"textEntriesWebsitedisplaytext":{"value":["Jesse Howard filled up his house, his land, and the surrounding fence with hand-lettered painted panels. Words became his artistic medium\u2014black lettering patterned with red highlights and punctuated with incriminating pointing fingers. Signs of protest and free speech relevant to his own life experiences and personal torments, they stand as accusations to his vandals, commentaries on politicians, and lessons from various biblical verses. Similar in terms of communication strategy and physical structuring to the environments of Sam Doyle and Mary T. Smith, this self-referential site, private in content, intervened nevertheless in the public sphere, as if the creator was speaking out loud. Opinionated and vocal, Howard was engaging passersby with his radical ideas and views.Valérie Rousseau, \u201cFree Thought and Free Speech,\u201d exhibition label for Self-Taught Genius: Treasures from the American Folk Art Museum. Stacy C. Hollander and Valérie Rousseau, curators. New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2014.","Jesse Howard was a slight man, standing five feet four inches and weighing only 120 lbs. according to his 1942 draft registration card, but his voice was heard, loud and clear, by all those who crossed his path. Howard was born in Shamrock, Missouri, one of twins with his sister Myrtle. He left home at a young age, receiving only a sixth-grade education, and led a peripatetic life of odd jobs, migrant labor, and freight train hopping. In 1905, he returned home, where he remained for a number of years until he married in 1916 and started his own family. By the early 1940s, Howard purchased a house and twenty acres of farmland in Fulton, Missouri, and also started to use the vernacular idiom of sign painting as a potent means of expressing his commentary on the state of the country, the world, and his own life. If Howard were alive today, he would be an inveterate tweeter. As it is, his words\u2014painted all-cap in black house paint on white board, and sometimes punctuated in red\u2014have probably reached a far wider universe than he ever anticipated. Free Thought and Free Speech! was constructed in bitterness toward the end of Howard\u2019s life. For almost forty years, he had been venting his religious injunctions and diatribes against government, authority, and personal slights on hundreds of hand-painted signs that he posted on his property in plain sight to the dismay of his neighbors, leading him to dub his property in a moment of ironic self-awareness as \"Sorehead Hill\" or \"Hell\u2019s 20 Acres.\" His signs were repeatedly vandalized, and he was harassed to the point of an unsuccessful campaign to have him institutionalized. In this work, he stubbornly asserts his right to free speech and to having his own thoughts, whether or not they were considered acceptable by local or mainstream society, not unlike Hosea Hayden a generation earlier. There is a note of pain in his declamations on this panel; his sense of abandonment by those upon whose support he depended is made implicit through the sacred verses that he has chosen to reference. He uses the medieval calligraphic device of a manicule, an icon of a pointing finger, to emphasize certain words and phrases that betray his deep hurt: \"Truth; forgotten me; [they whom I] loved have turned against me.\" The work positions Howard, a man of \"Signs and Wonders,\" as a modern-day Job, capriciously tested by God and persevering despite his trials and rejection by the community in which he resided. Stacy C. Hollander, \"Free Thought and Free Speech!, 1976\" exhibition copy for American Perspectives: Stories from the American Folk Art Museum Collection. Stacy C. Hollander, curator. New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2020.","Object information is a work in progress and may be updated with new research. Records are reviewed and revised, and the American Folk Art Museum welcomes additional information.　To help improve this record, please email photoservices@folkartmuseum.org"]},"collections":{"label":"Collections","value":"Paintings"},"geography":{"label":"Geography","value":"Fulton"},"id":{"label":"Id","value":"153307"},"geographyState":{"value":"Missouri"},"geographyCountry":{"value":"United States"},"onview":{"label":"On View","value":"0"},"people":{"label":"Artist / Maker","value":{"displayOrder":"1","personRole":"Artist","personID":"581","content":"Jesse Howard"}},"classifications":{"label":"Classification(s)","value":"Paintings"},"textEntries":{"label":"Text Entries","value":["Jesse Howard filled up his house, his land, and the surrounding fence with hand-lettered painted panels. Words became his artistic medium\u2014black lettering patterned with red highlights and punctuated with incriminating pointing fingers. Signs of protest and free speech relevant to his own life experiences and personal torments, they stand as accusations to his vandals, commentaries on politicians, and lessons from various biblical verses. Similar in terms of communication strategy and physical structuring to the environments of Sam Doyle and Mary T. Smith, this self-referential site, private in content, intervened nevertheless in the public sphere, as if the creator was speaking out loud. Opinionated and vocal, Howard was engaging passersby with his radical ideas and views.Valérie Rousseau, \u201cFree Thought and Free Speech,\u201d exhibition label for Self-Taught Genius: Treasures from the American Folk Art Museum. Stacy C. Hollander and Valérie Rousseau, curators. New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2014.","Jesse Howard was a slight man, standing five feet four inches and weighing only 120 lbs. according to his 1942 draft registration card, but his voice was heard, loud and clear, by all those who crossed his path. Howard was born in Shamrock, Missouri, one of twins with his sister Myrtle. He left home at a young age, receiving only a sixth-grade education, and led a peripatetic life of odd jobs, migrant labor, and freight train hopping. In 1905, he returned home, where he remained for a number of years until he married in 1916 and started his own family. By the early 1940s, Howard purchased a house and twenty acres of farmland in Fulton, Missouri, and also started to use the vernacular idiom of sign painting as a potent means of expressing his commentary on the state of the country, the world, and his own life. If Howard were alive today, he would be an inveterate tweeter. As it is, his words\u2014painted all-cap in black house paint on white board, and sometimes punctuated in red\u2014have probably reached a far wider universe than he ever anticipated. Free Thought and Free Speech! was constructed in bitterness toward the end of Howard\u2019s life. For almost forty years, he had been venting his religious injunctions and diatribes against government, authority, and personal slights on hundreds of hand-painted signs that he posted on his property in plain sight to the dismay of his neighbors, leading him to dub his property in a moment of ironic self-awareness as \"Sorehead Hill\" or \"Hell\u2019s 20 Acres.\" His signs were repeatedly vandalized, and he was harassed to the point of an unsuccessful campaign to have him institutionalized. In this work, he stubbornly asserts his right to free speech and to having his own thoughts, whether or not they were considered acceptable by local or mainstream society, not unlike Hosea Hayden a generation earlier. There is a note of pain in his declamations on this panel; his sense of abandonment by those upon whose support he depended is made implicit through the sacred verses that he has chosen to reference. He uses the medieval calligraphic device of a manicule, an icon of a pointing finger, to emphasize certain words and phrases that betray his deep hurt: \"Truth; forgotten me; [they whom I] loved have turned against me.\" The work positions Howard, a man of \"Signs and Wonders,\" as a modern-day Job, capriciously tested by God and persevering despite his trials and rejection by the community in which he resided. Stacy C. Hollander, \"Free Thought and Free Speech!, 1976\" exhibition copy for American Perspectives: Stories from the American Folk Art Museum Collection. Stacy C. Hollander, curator. New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2020.","Object information is a work in progress and may be updated with new research. Records are reviewed and revised, and the American Folk Art Museum welcomes additional information.　To help improve this record, please email photoservices@folkartmuseum.org"]},"beginDate":{"label":"Begin Date","value":"1976"},"displayDate":{"label":"Date","value":"1976"},"exhibitions":{"label":"Exhibitions","value":[{"exhibitionDisplayDate":"Tuesday, February 11, 2020 - Sunday, January 3, 2021","exhibitionEndISODate":"2021-01-03","exhibitionID":"239","exhibitionISOBeginDate":"2020-02-11","exhibitionBeginDate":"2020","exhibitionTitle":"American Perspectives","exhibitionEndDate":"2021"},{"exhibitionDisplayDate":"Saturday, May 22, 2021 - Sunday, October 8, 2023","exhibitionEndISODate":"2023-10-08","exhibitionID":"245","exhibitionISOBeginDate":"2021-05-22","exhibitionBeginDate":"2021","exhibitionTitle":"American Perspectives (Travel)","exhibitionEndDate":"2023"},{"exhibitionDisplayDate":"Tuesday, May 13, 2014 - Sunday, August 17, 2014","exhibitionEndISODate":"2014-08-17","exhibitionID":"171","exhibitionISOBeginDate":"2014-05-13","exhibitionBeginDate":"2014","exhibitionTitle":"Self-Taught Genius","exhibitionEndDate":"2014"}]},"dimensions":{"label":"Dimensions","value":"45 1/4 × 29 1/4\""}}]}