11551515432668Jesse J. Aaron(1887–1979)Using a chisel, hatchet, and chainsaw, Jesse J. Aaron transformed roots, trunks, and branches of the cypress and cedar trees that grew in his native Florida into rough carvings suggesting human and animal figures. Sometimes he added details such as eyes—made with nails set in resin in egg cartons—but usually these works were left bare and unfinished. Aaron said that he was guided to reveal what he already perceived in the wood’s knots and grains: “God put the faces in the wood. Don’t bring me a piece of wood and then ask me to carve something out of it. ’Cause I won’t. Don’t tell me what you want, it might not be there, you understand?” Aaron, born in Lake City, Florida, in 1887, stated that his ancestors included both enslaved African Americans and Seminoles. At a young age, he worked on a farm, and he later was a cook on a railroad and in Florida hotels. He did some cabinetmaking but didn’t devote himself to sculpture until he was in his eighties, reportedly in a moment of financial crisis as his wife needed a cataract operation. By his account, it was a divine calling, as one night in 1968 “the Spirit woke me up and said, ‘Carve Wood.’” Working at his home in Gainesville, he was immersed in turning wood that he found in nearby forests into both towering totems and small assemblages incorporating discarded objects. He put up a sign reading “Jesse J. Aaron—Sculptor” that attracted the notice of Stuart Purser, an art professor at the University of Florida who became an early supporter of Aaron’s work by arranging local exhibitions. A few years after Aaron died, in 1979, his art came to national attention when it was included in the pivotal exhibition <em>Black Folk Art in America: 1930–1980</em>, which opened in 1982 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Now held in major museum collections, Aaron’s work, with its hewn faces and expressive forms, conveys his appreciation for the natural material that was his muse. “I like to leave the print of my tools on the wood,” he once said. “I don’t mean to change the wood into something it isn’t.” Allison C. Meier, 2025 Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).A0009_Rosenak_ArtistPhoto_Aaron_001src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/27296/full150676133Frank Adams(1871–1944)1985.17.15iisrc: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/27345/full1514512304Addie2012.13.3src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/7454/full1515462672Minnie Adkins(b. 1934)2021.6.14isrc: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/25283/full1512441195William Adkins(b. 1932)1996.17.1asrc: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/7377/full1514402286A. Hoen & Co.(active c. 1835–1981)2015.1.43src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/4995/full1678353502Virginia Ahrens(194–1978)2025_18_006asrc: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/31259/full151064837Mitsuyo Aiba(active 20th century)150778306Donna Albert(active late 20th century)1991_9_2src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/28128/full150803349Elizabeth Alford(active 19th century)1978.30.2src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/688/full151128946A.L. Jewell & Co.(active c. 1852–1867)2005.8.54src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/3004/full1514862427Jean-Daniel Allanche(1940–2015)For the forty years that Jean-Daniel Allanche lived in his apartment in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood of Paris, he was constantly reimagining it as an evolving experiment in visual harmony, repainting its walls, floors, ceilings, kitchen cabinets, doors, and even the windows with murals of phantasmagoric creatures and abstract motifs such as galaxies of repeating colorful dots. Sculptures from Africa and India that he collected while traveling further adorned the space. His flowing gouache and oil paintings contrasted with the more rigid mathematical sequences and systems with which he filled numerous notebooks. All of this was unseen by the public until after Allanche’s death in 2015, when his daughter decided to share it with gallery owner Hervé Perdriolle. Allanche was instead known as a theoretical physics researcher and professor; between 1970 and 2001, he taught at the Université des Sciences Paris VII and at universities in Africa. Born in 1940 into a family of shopkeepers in the Jewish community of Sfax, Tunisia, he moved to France in 1958. He completed and defended two doctoral dissertations in the following years, one in 1965 and another in 1970. Although his professional work was mostly concentrated on science, in his personal time he explored connections between music and color, languages, and the mathematics of gambling. He was particularly interested in understanding the chance and chaos of casino games, and densely annotated roulette wheels appeared in many of his notebooks. He wrote in 1976, “Life is a game that is exciting only if the stakes are high. It is our work (action) that makes the stakes important. They are our wishes for success in the form of elevations of matter or the possibilities of human beings. Solution: trying to become a musician, a scholar, a writer . . . is hard but necessary.” The American Folk Art Museum has one of the major holdings of Allanche’s work, including several of his notebooks and a door from his Paris apartment—a fragment of his decades-long attempt to join science and art in one place. As he once wrote of his creation of this private world, “Loneliness is your palace where no one can come to settle there. This should strengthen you and not weaken you. . . . Always alone: no intermediary between me and me and between me and things.” Allison C. Meier, 2025 Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).2017.9.1dsrc: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/18970/full1511651019Ross Allen(active late 20th century)1991_14_21vsrc: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/28388/full150995704Leroy Almon Sr.(1938–1997)2000.9.2src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/3199/full150842418Fred Alten(1871–1945)The child of German immigrants, Fred Alten lived the first part of his life in Ohio, where he worked in his father’s foundry. In 1912, he moved to Michigan and worked at a variety of occupations, including laborer, piano mover, and carpenter. Alten was an introverted man who spent all his spare time in a woodshed carving his animals in solitude. In 1975, Alten’s entire life’s work was found in a garage where it had remained unnoticed for thirty years. Also in the garage was a copy of Johnson’s Household Book of Nature, the inspiration for Alten’s carvings of modern and prehistoric animals. Elizabeth V. Warren and Stacy C. Hollander, "Dinosaur," Expressions of a New Spirit: Highlights from the Permanent Collection of the Museum of American Folk Art (New York: American Folk Art Museum, 1989), 1131977.2.1src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/613/full150762287David Alvarez(1953–2010)1985.20.1src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/1636/full151021750Max Alvarez(b. 1952)1985.20.9src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/4760/full16733353American Powder Mills(1883–1929)2000-3-3isrc: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/27485/full1515622697American Tea Tray Works(1850–1878)63.6src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/18860/full150673127Asa Ames(1824–1851)1981.24.1src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/1291/full150770296Dawn E. Amos(b. 1957)1990.19.1src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/2111/full151000710Linda Anderson(b. 1941)2001.8.1src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/26143/full1512031095Stephen Warde Anderson(b. 1953)1995.11.1src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/2568/full150824381Eugene Andolsek(1921–2008)Some of Eugene Andolsek’s drawings radiate outwards like mandalas, with layer upon layer of kaleidoscopic geometric patterns; others have an op art quality and appear three-dimensional, with bold lines undulating around intricate circular designs. Andolsek made thousands of these pieces with India ink on graph paper over fifty years, working for hours each night at his kitchen table. His meditative process involved first creating an outline in black, precisely shaped with a compass and straightedge, and then filling it with color, the ink mixed to a specific hue with an eyedropper. Although the drawings appear mathematically meticulous with their exacting symmetry, Andolsek stated that they simply “came out” of his mind during trance-like experiences. Andolsek didn’t consider his drawings art—they were a way for him to channel and alleviate his anxiety—but he did carefully store them in a trunk. Born in Adrian, West Virginia, in 1921, he had been interested in art as an outlet since childhood. However, his father wouldn’t permit his son to sketch the women’s fashion that fascinated him, so instead Andolsek collected stamps and appreciated the patterns of the crochet pieces and quilts made by his mother. He started creating his drawings in the 1950s after he had begun working as a stenographer, and despite the decades-long stability of his career, including a position with the Rock Island Railroad, he felt a persistent unease about his job security. He kept the drawings private for almost his entire life. He stopped making them only due to vision loss in the early 2000s. Then, after an attendant in the senior assisted-living center where he was living in Crabtree, Pennsylvania, noticed them and brought them to the attention of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, which in turn shared them with the American Folk Art Museum, he was included in the 2005 exhibition <em>Obsessive Drawing</em>. Andolsek died in 2008. His complex, abstract compositions reflect the solace he found in making art. Often, as he put it, he would look up from his kitchen workspace “and a drawing was there and I didn’t even know how it got there.” Allison C. Meier, 2025 Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).2005.18.4src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/2966/full1511571008Captain Robert Andrews(1863–1925)1969.1.100src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/545/full15066087Antoine Angelain(1793–1860)2002.30.9src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/3895/full150980675Ken Anger(1905–1961)150953621Johnson Antonio(b. 1931)A0009_Rosenak_ArtistPhoto_Antonio_1987_001src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/27297/full1682323471Nicole Appel(b. 1990)Nicole Appel creates “patchwork portraits” that represent friends, neighbors, and other people whom she meets through depictions of the things they are passionate about, whether it’s animals, travel, or brands. Each of these unconventional portraits is incredibly involved, as she may spend months on a single work. In these colorful drawings, she organizes images into rows and columns, often including advertisements, logos, and posters as well as references from her life, travels, and art history. She usually works in rich layers of colored pencil on paper, creating intricate detail for everything from the iconography of sardine cans to teddy bears, making variations so that even repeated items are never exactly the same. Some of her earlier work is more loosely organized than her later, more structured “patchwork” pieces. For instance, in <em>Hamburgers, Heels, and Dresses</em> (2014), different types of burgers, gowns, ice cream flavors, high heels, and the In-N-Out Burger logo overlap on the page. The piece was made for a longtime friend and celebrates her interests in fashion and food and her life in Southern California. Another piece, made for Appel’s mother, an ophthalmologist, involves Russian boxes and animal eyes. Appel was born in Queens, New York, in 1990. From an early age, she has created art such as illustrated birthday cards for imaginary friends, and later for real people, that featured gifts she wanted to give them. She continues to view her art as a form of gifting to the individuals she portrays through vibrant arrays of objects. In Manhattan’s Pure Vision Arts studio program, which supports artists with autism spectrum disorder or intellectual/developmental disabilities, she expanded her card making to pieces of 19" × 24" paper. Her art was first presented at the 2013 Outsider Art Fair in New York, and since 2016 she has created work at Brooklyn’s LAND Gallery. Allison C. Meier and Dylan Blau Edelstein, 2025 Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).2026_1_1isrc: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/30015/full151147985José Rafael Aragón(1795–1862)1996.4.2src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/26511/full150833402Felipe Benito Archuleta(1910–1991)A0009-01-04-ArchuletaFelipesrc: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/9279/full150934589Joe Archuleta(active late 20th century)1989.7.1src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/1992/full150996705Leroy Ramon Archuleta(1949–2002)A0009_Rosenak_ArtistPhoto_ArchuletaL_1989_001src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/27298/full1516112839Zebedee Armstrong(1911–1993)A0009_Rosenak_ArtistPhoto_Armstrong_1992_001src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/27299/full150791327Eddie Arning(1898–1993)With flat planes of saturated color and abstract shapes, Eddie Arning created drawings based on both memories and pop culture. Although his practice spanned only a decade, from 1964 to 1974, he evolved his ideas from simplified forms of animals, windmills, and flowers based on his childhood in a German Lutheran farming community in Texas into increasingly complex compositions inspired by advertisements and photographs in magazines and newspapers. His earliest pieces are mostly in wax crayon that densely fills the entire sheet of paper. Later works, made with oil pastels, are more luminous. He also experimented with collaging found materials such as postage stamps. All of his drawings were made within institutions to which he had been committed for symptoms that would likely now be classified as schizophrenia; his creative transformation of source material from popular media reflected his ability to push his art forward even in a place of isolation. Arning was born in 1898 in Germania, Texas, to German immigrants. He was institutionalized at Austin State Hospital in his twenties. In 1964, Helen Mayfield, an artist volunteering at the state nursing home to which he had been transferred, introduced him to crayon-on-paper drawing. Mayfield and Alexander Sackton, an English professor at the University of Texas at Austin, were pivotal in supporting the development of his art through their friendship over the years. Sackton donated works to several museums across the United States, helping to secure Arning’s recognition. This is how Arning's drawings came to the American Folk Art Museum. Some are accompanied by their original sources of inspiration, which provide a demonstration of how, in his hundreds of drawings, Arning was never simply replicating what he saw. A Lucky Strike ad is transformed into an unnaturally hued portrait of a woman, a cigarette pack hovering dreamlike by her purple shoulder, and a travel illustration from <em>Look</em> magazine informs a detailed scene of an angular female figure and an airplane, the abstracted flowers in her hand echoing the geometric shapes of the landing gear. Arning largely stopped drawing when he left to live with his sister in McGregor, Texas, in the early 1970s; he died in 1993. During his lifetime, his work was exhibited locally and nationally, including a solo show in 1985 at the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center in Williamsburg, Virginia. Allison C. Meier, 2025 Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).1981.20.1src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/1285/full1512071105Susan Arrowood(c. 1836–1917)1986.20.1src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/1855/full1513421947Artists unidentified2005.8.32asrc: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/4253/full150666103Artist unidentified70.4.16src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/7351/full150924573Jane Aruns(active late 20th century)1991_9_3src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/28129/full1512051098Steve Ashby(1904–1980)Although Steve Ashby created idle carvings throughout his life in Delaplane, Virginia, it was only following his retirement as a farmhand and the death of his wife that he devoted himself to sculpture. Starting in the early 1960s, he created two main bodies of work of mostly human and animal figures. One was concentrated on small pieces cut from plywood, painted with model-airplane paint, and adorned with cast-off objects such as broken toys, saw blades, and bottle caps; the other was focused on large sculptures made from tree trunks and branches. He installed many of the almost-life-size figures of people in his yard, several of them dressed in his late wife’s clothing. Born in 1904, Ashby was the second of twelve children in a family whose ancestors had been enslaved in this rural part of Virginia. A keen observer of his agrarian community, Ashby created sculptures—regularly including moving parts—that interpreted, with a dash of humor, its work and leisure. He adapted the American folk art tradition of wind-activated whirligigs for his portrayals of people milking cows, fishing, and doing laundry. Other kinetic works featuring women with hickory-nut breasts were bawdier, and even erotic; these he kept hidden inside his house. He also borrowed heavily from magazines and catalogs, often pasting faces cut from the pages onto the rough edges of the hand-sawn wood. His assemblages, which he called “fixing-ups,” drew the attention of collectors about a decade after he had started filling his yard and home with these crudely formed yet inventive works. Before his death, in 1980, he was featured in the 1973 exhibition <em>Six Naives</em> at the Akron Art Institute. Although his art was a vivid reflection of the daily life around him, he claimed to be most inspired by dreams: “I wake up with an idea that won’t let me get back to sleep. So I get up and make that idea.” Allison C. Meier, 2025 Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).A0009-01-08-AshbyStevenA0009_Rosenak_ArtistPhoto_Ashby_1977_001src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/27300/full1513682010Phyllis A. Ashildsin(1947–2024)2012.13.17src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/7469/full1514292271A. Sisco Regalia Co.(active mid-19th century)2015.1.45src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/4997/full1515492679David Augur(1790–1864)2018.1.2src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/21417/full150960634Joseph P. Aulisio(1910–1974)1978.8.1src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/656/full151031772Marino Auriti(1891–1980)Marino Auriti dreamed of a structure that could do the impossible: contain and express the knowledge of the entire planet. He filed a design with the U.S. Patent Office in 1955 for “Il Enciclopedico Palazzo del Mondo,” or “The Encyclopedic Palace of the World,” describing it as a museum to present “all the works of man in whatever field, discoveries made and those which may follow.” It would honor human ingenuity in “everything from the wheel to the satellite” and hold laboratories and displays to further that spirit of creation. As inspiration, 126 bronze statues would adorn its encircling colonnades, depicting “writers, scientists, and artists past, present and future.” Most spectacularly, Auriti spent three years building an eleven-foot-tall model of the Encyclopedic Palace at a 1:200 scale. He surrounded it with four columns and meticulously added 792 celluloid windows, balustrades crafted from cut hair combs, and functional doors across its 136 stories. It was constructed humbly from bits of metal, wood, and plastic in the chassis of an old car in his Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, garage, but he envisioned its cylindrical tower, crowned by a metal spire, soaring to 2,322 feet among the national monuments of Washington, D.C. A retired auto-body mechanic who had immigrated to the United States from Italy in the 1930s, Auriti also crafted handmade frames, copied Old Master paintings, and built other architectural models, although none so ambitious as the <em>Encyclopedic Palace</em>. This project’s utopian attempt to secure and organize learning and knowledge was likely influenced by his firsthand experiences with the violent disruptions of the two world wars and the rise of fascism in Europe. He wanted to share his idea with the world and is known to have exhibited the model twice in his lifetime in a specially designed pyramidal case made of glass and metal. After he died in 1980, however, it was put in a storage locker. Yet his family never gave up on finding a permanent place for the model to be preserved and appreciated by the public. After their tireless outreach to numerous institutions, the American Folk Art Museum finally acquired it in 2003. Its international star turn came in 2013 when it was selected as the centerpiece of the Venice Biennale. Allison C. Meier, 2025 Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).2002.35.1in situsrc: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/4203/full1515512686John Avery(active early 19th century)83.1.6src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/20309/full151042788Mary Etta Kimmel Bach(1872–1974)1992.27.5src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/2397/full15064568Andrea Badami(1913–2002)2012.19.1src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/9248/full1513121790Anthony Wise Baecher(1824–1889)2013.1.27src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/3515/full150745255Captain Clarence Bailey(1882–1952)1969.1.14src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/455/full1514752383Stas Balabanov(b. 1982)2016.25.1asrc: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/6487/full1514052217Calvin Balis(1817–1863)2014.10.1src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/5187/full1514312274W.C. Baptist(active early 20th century)2015.1.62bsrc: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/5019/full150917563James Bard(1815–1897)1984.18.1src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/1441/full150935591Joel Barkelow(1853–1952)1969.1.123iisrc: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/24818/full150679138J. Barker(active mid-19th century)1983.22.1src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/1405/full151098899Olivia Denham Barnes(1807–1887)2002.11.1src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/2853/full1512081106Susan Bartels(active late 20th century)1991_9_4isrc: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/28130/full151068844Morton Bartlett(1909–1992)For the hundreds of photographs that he made from 1936 to the mid-1960s, Morton Bartlett posed incredibly detailed plaster and clay dolls that he made by hand in scenes that range from the playful to the provocative. The professional quality of the color and black-and-white images, in which dolls dressed as cowgirls and in fur-collared coats appear ready for fashion magazines, reflects Bartlett’s career in commercial photography, although he largely kept this aspect of his work private. The fifteen dolls that he created are children (twelve girls and three boys) between the ages of eight and sixteen. About half-life-size and articulated, each took around a year to make and was given a wig of human hair and hand-sewn outfits. The dolls are also anatomically correct, as revealed in the nude photographs that he staged, along with more dramatically lit studio-like shots and candid images of dolls reading books or enjoying the beach. Bartlett was born in Chicago in 1909 and lived much of his life in the Boston area, also working in advertising and graphic design. There are only two known instances of him sharing this body of work: once in a 1962 article in <em>Yankee</em> magazine titled “The Sweethearts of Mr. Bartlett” and another in a twenty-fifth-anniversary report for the Harvard class of 1932 in which he stated, “My hobby is sculpting in plaster. Its purpose is that of all proper hobbies—to let out urges that do not find expression in other channels.” Shortly after the 1962 article, he put the dolls and the photographs into storage, where they stayed until they were removed from his home following his death in 1992. After the dolls’ rediscovery in 1993, when art dealer Marion Harris acquired them at an antiques fair, there has been speculation about what they meant to Bartlett. Some have theorized that they represent a longing for a family, as Bartlett was orphaned at the age of eight and later adopted by a wealthy couple in Cohasset, Massachusetts. Others, though, such as his friend and neighbor the sculptor Kahlil Gibran, have opined that he may have made the dolls intending to market them as toys. Whatever his intention, there is an uncanny life to the photographs that transcends their artificiality, suggesting an interest in how identities are formed and made through images. Allison C. Meier, 2025 Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).1998.10.6src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/2760/full1515722717Marcel Bascoulard(1913–1978)In three decades of photographic self-portraits, Marcel Bascoulard posed in a series of dresses of his own design. His appearance changes gradually over the years—his shoulder-length hair greying and the wrinkles on his face becoming more defined—yet he presents himself nearly the same way in all of them: standing with a confident gaze directed into the lens, as if to say, this is who I am. The figure in this photographic biography differs from the one most people knew in Bourges, France, where he spent his adult life on the streets after a tumultuous childhood. Born in 1913 in nearby Vallenay, he was a teenager when his mother killed his father, and although he briefly studied art, his creative work would be made on the outskirts of society. Often unhoused or in marginalized lodgings, he sold or traded pencil and pastel souvenir drawings of historic sites in the medieval city to support himself and the cats he rescued. Although he was arrested at least twice for wearing women’s clothing, including during the Nazi Occupation, he mostly wore the dresses, which ranged from demure Victorian styles to bold constructions in vinyl, when creating the photographs. Close friends operated the camera, and the backgrounds included interior spaces, city streets, and rustic settings, with Bascoulard regularly holding a mirror in his right hand. Even in public spaces, he is always alone, as if in an alternate world of his own creation layered over this one. He stated simply, “For the purpose of art, when I put on women’s clothing, I take my camera with me and have people I know take snapshots of me.” Only one print of each self-portrait is known to exist. He made the photographs from the 1940s until 1978, when he was tragically murdered. A square in Bourges was named in his honor and a bronze bust of him was installed there, as he was then best remembered for his realistic city scenes. The private photographs did not come to wider light until years later. In 2021, Bascoulard’s self-portraits were featured in the American Folk Art Museum’s exhibition <em>Photo Brut</em>. Allison C. Meier, 2025 Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).2019.19.3src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/25310/full151113919Philip Joseph Bauer II(1867–1929)2003.3.1src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/26045/full1515372656John Bauman(1765–1809)2019.5.1src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/23319/full151041786Mary C. Baxter(active late 19th century)1985.15.1src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/1612/full150863453Harold Bayer(1900–1996)1977.6.1src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/616/full150690157Bear and Pears Artist(active early 19th century)1988.10.1src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/1916/full1512091107Susan Beechy(active mid- to late 20th century)1980.37.27src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/1024/full151145983C. Y. Beiden(active mid-19th century)1998.17.3src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/26841/full1512701675José Belandria(active late 20th century)2007.4.47src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/18936/full1511591011Roberto Belandria(active late 20th century)2007.4.6src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/4288/full1512561221Zedekiah Belknap(1781–1858)2019.7.2src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/26274/full150945607John Haley Bellamy(1836–1914)2015.1.147src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/5103/full1515712714Larlie Bellamy(1887–1975)2019.15.8src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/23590/full1515702713Dr. Raymond F. Bellamy(1885–1970)2019.15.3src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/23585/full150681141John Bell(1800–1880)2005.8.25src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/3322/full1512481203William J. Bell(active late 19th century)1988.24.1src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/19099/full1513662008M. Bemis(active mid-19th century)2009.13.82src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/4633/full150872471Hector Alonzo Benavides(1952–2005)What at first appear to be patchworks of woven fabric are actually intensely detailed drawing in the work of Hector Alonzo Benavides. Up close, the threaded patterns are revealed to be made of tiny dots, circles, squares, and triangles, minutely sketched with an ultra-fine-point ballpoint pen. Some are purely black and white, and others have rainbows of lacelike accents or filigrees in metallic inks, resulting from Benavides’s experiments with color over the many nights he spent producing hundreds of drawings in his Texas home. He sometimes devoted ten to fifteen hours at a time to these art sessions, rotating the paper as a piece organically evolved. When he started in the 1960s, Benavides was engaged with portraits and drawings of animals. His work became increasingly abstract, although an occasional bird was still incorporated into the lattices of lines. He once called himself “the most obsessive man you’ll ever meet” and cited a spiritual influence: “I just sit down and ask God what he wants me to see. And then I see the picture in my head. The entire thing. It repeats over and over while I’m working.” A devout Roman Catholic born in Laredo, Texas, in 1952, Benavides grew up on his family’s ranch in Hebbronville. He stated that despite the abstraction of his drawings, they were embedded with meaning; triangles, for instance, represented the Holy Trinity. He had always enjoyed drawing as a child and made it a lifelong practice, but the death of his mother in 1996 propelled him to immerse himself in his art as a way to channel his grief. He also used it as an outlet for his obsessive-compulsive disorder symptoms, explaining, “I’ve turned a negative into a positive.” He worked in various jobs, including as an optician, a substitute teacher, and a security guard in San Antonio, creating drawings in his off hours but usually keeping them to himself, until a cousin brought them to the attention of the Webb Gallery in Waxahachie, Texas, in the early 1990s. His work was included in the touring exhibition <em>Spirited Journeys, Self-Taught Texas Artists of the Twentieth Century</em>, organized by the University of Texas at Austin in 1997, bringing his intricate work to wider appreciation before he died, in 2005. Allison C. Meier, 2025 Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).1998.12.1src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/3858/full1511801051José Manuel Benavides(formerly known as Santo Niño Santero, 1793–1862)1996.4.4src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/26508/full1514992551Mary Lee Bendolph(b. 1935)2017.23.1src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/26618/full150731230Charles Benefiel(b. 1967)2005.19.1src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/2967/full151071850Mozell Benson(1934–2012)151022751M. Berbif(active late 19th century)1978.31.6src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/697/full1515112594Ariane Bergrichter(1937–1996)The density of images of daily life in all its gritty detail that Ariane Bergrichter captured in hundreds of drawings—intensely drawn in ballpoint and felt-tip pen—testifies to the many hours she spent observing the people and places of Brussels. Yet there is a dark undercurrent to the scenes of cafes, tram stops, and bustling streets that reflects feelings of pain and isolation. Along with the fragments of overheard conversations annotating the drawings, which filled notebooks, paper scraps, collages, and beer coasters, are records of the internal, berating voices that haunted her. One reads, in part, “I have not had an hour of independence since 1988—It is as if one allowed a kettle whistle to blow in my head. Inhuman, experimental rat.” Born in Dresden in 1937, Bergrichter endured the 1945 bombardment of the city and the sudden death of a half-brother before marrying and moving to Belgium. She found success in Brussels as a model under the name Sonia—images of herself and fashion would later appear in her drawings—and had two children. A subsequent divorce, loss of custody, and deterioration in health from asthma and psychosis contributed to a decline that would endure the rest of her life. She initially found an outlet in elaborate assemblages of objects that she collected from the streets and staged on the walls of her apartment, although she ultimately destroyed them. It was Bergrichter’s autobiographical writings and drawings, which she started in the late 1980s and continued into the early 1990s, that her family discovered heaped in trash bags after she died, in 1996. These were left in suitcases for two decades before her daughter finally unpacked them and brought them to the attention of the American Folk Art Museum, where they were shown for the first time in 2018 in the exhibition <em>Vestiges & Verse: Notes from the Newfangled Epic</em>. In 2022, Bergrichter’s first monographic show was presented at the Art et Marges Musée in Brussels. Allison C. Meier, 2025 Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).2018.9.1asrc: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/24478/full150700178Berks County Artist(active early 19th century)1994.6.1src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/20417/full151111915Peter "Charlie" Attie Besharo(1898–1960)1998.10.8src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/2762/full150895512Idabell Bester(1901–1993)150923572James R. Best(1866–1933)1969.1.22src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/463/full1512611598Big Hunting Creek Pottery(active 1881-1883)2002.38.3src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/3901/full1516032783Thomas Birch(active late 19th century)2020.18.1src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/26661/full15062519Aaron Birnbaum(1895–1998)1998.10.9src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/2763/full1513561987Mae Bishop(active late 19th to early 20th century)2009.13.33src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/4495/full1513541985Mary Jones Bishop(active early 20th century)2009.13.22src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/4484/full150718208Calvin Black(1903–1972)Seen from above, the compound is rambling and haphazard, isolated from all signs of life. It is situated on Calico Ghost Town Road, in Yermo, California, a lonely, featureless expanse of the Mojave Desert. It is here that Cal and Ruby Black made a life together on land that they purchased sight unseen from a magazine ad and called “possum trot,” an old southern expression for a shortcut between two locations. Who knows what they thought once they arrived at their new home in the middle of nowhere. They had no children, but they had each other and their faith, their hardworking ethic, and Cal’s talents and can-do optimism. Over time, they filled the emptiness with the sound, animation, and phantasmagoria of more than eighty child-size female figures, ramshackle structures, moving trains, merry-go rounds, stage coaches, and covered wagons, Ferris wheels, totems, signs, and paintings. The Blacks were rural southerners. Cal was born in Tennessee, and Ruby was from Georgia, where they met while he was traveling with a circus and carnival. They were married in 1933, and moved to California, where Cal panned for gold. But standing in frigid waters for hours at a time, year after year, took its toll, and in 1953, they relocated to the desert, hoping the change would improve his health. The year that Highway 15 was extended along their stretch of land, the Blacks started a rock and tourist shop, hoping to attract passing motorists. Business was slow, and Cal conceived the idea of carving lifelike dolls that he would station around the property, alone and in vignettes, positioned high and low. Using a hatchet and pocketknife, he shaped figures from downed redwood telephone poles, with sugar pine for noses, and arms and legs that would swing eerily in the dry desert wind. Ruby refashioned outfits from cast-off clothing that grew more and more tattered through exposure with each passing season. The compound became ever more populated and the dolls more elaborate as the Blacks collaborated on shaping each personality, naming and discussing character, deciding eye and hair coloring, and choosing appropriate clothing and accessories. By 1969, Cal had added the Birdcage Theater to his ghost town emporium. As a teenager, he had won a prize for singing in falsetto voice. This, with his circus and vaudeville experience, prepared him to record original skits, songs, and dialogue, and activate the “actors” by placing speakers in the back of their heads connected to battery-powered tape recorders. “The Fantasy Doll Show” included dance, dolls riding bicycles, and performing acts of derring do, and the admission was fifty cents. Each doll had a tip can. If a visitor was especially delighted with a particular feat, he or she could make a contribution toward the purchase of perfume or a piece of jewelry for the performer. In March 1972, Cal had a heart attack. As Ruby related to filmmaker Allie Light in 1974, Cal had been trying to fix the windmill and he fell down in the yard. “He told her he was dying. She had no help, no telephone, and no one passed on the road. So he died. He lay in the yard all afternoon because she couldn’t move him,” said Light. Calvin had asked Ruby to burn the dolls when he died, but she did not, preferring to keep the site intact as long as she was able. When Ruby died in 1980, the dolls were dispersed, and Possum Trot was no more. Stacy C. Hollander, “Calvin Black and Ruby Black,” exhibition brochure for American Perspectives: Stories from the American Folk Art Museum Collection (New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2020). 1985.35.5src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/1713/full1517263417Ruby Black(1915–1980)1985.35.71516702939Emery Blagdon (1907–1986)Emery Blagdon made every one of his wire assemblages and geometric paintings on wood scraps as part of a whole. Together, they were what he called <em>The Healing Machine</em>, a massive installation, assembled in a shed outside his home in the Sand Hills of Nebraska, that was intended to harness the energy of Earth to alleviate pain and prevent suffering. With the barest of tools, usually just needle-nose pliers and a hammer, he wove and wound baling wire, folded aluminum foil, and bundled discarded objects; he added details in paint, the minerals of which he considered curatively powerful. By the time of his death, in 1986, the shed held hundreds of chandeliers of worked metal illuminated with strings of Christmas-tree lights and painted light bulbs in repurposed coffee cans. Blagdon had previously wandered far from Nebraska, where he was born in the small town of Callaway in 1907, riding boxcars and picking up work as a seasonal laborer, as he was known as an inventive and adept mechanic. He returned to his home state in the mid-1930s, when his mother was dying of cancer, and soon witnessed his father also taken away by the disease. Perhaps frustrated by the lack of human skills to stop their difficult declines, he looked for a way to channel the therapeutic electricity that he believed was below the planet’s surface. Although Blagdon largely worked in a solitude that increased over the three decades that he devoted to <em>The Healing Machine</em> and became more of an eccentric local figure, his connection with an area pharmacist named Dan Dryden led to his <em>Healing Machine</em> being saved from obscurity. He had first visited Dryden to acquire mineral salts for his ever-evolving work, and Dryden was stunned when he saw the space, especially as it contrasted with the isolation of the surrounding cornfields. After Blagdon died, Dryden and his friend Don Christensen stewarded the preservation of <em>The Healing Machine</em>, with much of it acquired by the Kohler Foundation in 2004. Allison C. Meier, 2025 Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).2022.6.85src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/25628/full1516863064Elizabeth Blahd(b. 1954)2023.11.4isrc: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/26902/full150925574Jane M. Blair(1926–2023)1989.23.2src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/2045/full150941602John Blair Sr.(1842–1928)1512431194William A. Blayney(1918–1985)1998.10.10asrc: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/2764/full150671124Henry Clay Blinn(1824–1905)1997.13.1src: https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/4713/full