Marcel BascoulardIn 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).https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/25310/fullhttps://collection.folkartmuseum.org/people/2717/rdfMary Paulina CorbettIn hundreds of imaginative drawings produced over a decade in the mid-twentieth century, Mary Paulina Corbett chronicled the adventures of the “Catville Kids.” Most of the pieces deal with the happenings of daily life, from romantic encounters and trips to the pool to parties and gossipy meetups at the soda fountain, but they are made more fantastic by regular cameos of the masked Lone Ranger and recurring animal-human hybrid characters. These cat- and dog-headed figures—including “Ackie Puss” and “Dogie Bark”—are part of a cast of twenty-four characters inspired by Corbett’s extended family, friends, and the animals on her family farm in Pennsylvania. Most of the drawings are double-sided, with saturated colored pencil and watercolor detail alongside annotations of characters, dialogue, and the date and time of their creation. The works show the influence of popular culture, particularly film, television, and children’s literature, and her homemade scrapbook holds clippings and photographs of the stars of the day. Born in 1930, Corbett spent almost her entire life on a farm in Booths Corner, Delaware County. She worked as a bookkeeper and, in addition to her drawings, is known to have designed and dressed dolls. She kept her art practice private, with 714 drawings coming to light only after the two boxes containing them were removed from her attic and sold at an estate sale, from which they were acquired in 2015 by the architect David Knapp. Corbett was then living in a nursing facility. Before her death in 2019, the new owner of her art was able to connect with her and learn that she had created the drawings from 1942 to 1951, when she was between the ages of twelve and twenty-one. More than a hundred of Corbett’s works on paper, now at the American Folk Art Museum, reveal how she expanded her techniques over time as her art became more sophisticated and less cartoonish, such as in her later ink-wash pieces. Allison C. Meier and Valérie Rousseau, 2025 Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/27996/fullhttps://collection.folkartmuseum.org/people/2877/rdfMorris HirshfieldMorris Hirshfield’s earliest works are painted over reproductions of artwork taken off the walls of his Brooklyn apartment. Among them, <em>Beach Girl</em>—the first of his stiffly posed “dream girls”—would yield the derisive nickname “master of the two left feet.” Despite criticism, Hirshfield persevered, painting landscapes, biblical scenes, and especially animals. These curvy felines, zebras with forlorn expressions, and lions with thickly painted manes all gaze out at the viewer from densely decorated canvases. Before he committed himself to painting at the age of sixty-five, Hirshfield worked in New York’s garment industry, establishing himself as a purveyor of women’s shoes with the E. Z. Walk Manufacturing Company, which he founded with his brother. In the art collector Sidney Janis’s 1942 book <em>They Taught Themselves: American Primitive Painters of the 20th Century</em>, Hirshfield is quoted: “Even in my young days I exhibited artistic tendencies—not in painting—but in woodcarving, for at the tender age of 12 I aroused our little town by producing for myself a unique noise-maker to be used in the Jewish Purim festivals at the synagogue.” Born in 1872 in a small Polish town near the German border, Hirshfield moved to the United States at age eighteen, part of a large wave of Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe. In New York, he found work making women’s coats. After his retirement in 1937, when he returned to his childhood passion for art, he paid close attention to the details of clothing, surrounding his nudes with lavish draperies and fabric. He also used an approach to painting similar to that for garment making, tracing preparatory drawings as if they were sewing patterns. <em>Angora Cat</em> caught Janis’s curiosity while he was perusing art at Hudson Walker Gallery. As he recalled in <em>They Taught Themselves</em>, “In the center of this rather square canvas, two round eyes, luminously gleaming in the darkness, were returning my stare! . . . They belonged to a strangely compelling creature which, sitting possessively upon a remarkable couch, immediately took possession of me.” This work was exhibited in the 1939 exhibition <em>Contemporary Unknown American Painters</em> curated by Janis at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where Hirshfield received a solo show in 1943, three years before he died. In 2022, the American Folk Art Museum opened <em>Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered</em>, the most comprehensive exhibition of his work to date, featuring forty-two of his paintings—more than half of his output. Allison C. Meier, 2025 Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/2736/fullhttps://collection.folkartmuseum.org/people/842/rdfHans KrüsiFor decades, Hans Krüsi was an eccentric presence on Bahnhofstrasse, the lively luxury shopping street in Zurich, Switzerland. Wearing a hat decorated with artificial blooms, he sold bouquets of daffodils, rhododendrons, and roses, as well as bright drawings and paintings of alpine life. Along with rustic farmhouses and church spires in mountainous settings, a recurrent theme was the Alpaufzug processions, when cows return to summer pastures. His drawn and stenciled subjects embellished his postcard-size paintings, wood assemblages referred to as “cow machines,” and sculptures made of found objects such as bottles, milk cartons, and shopping bags. He created constantly, using soft brushstrokes on paper napkins and coasters found in cafés, letting the ink soak into the material. In his exuberant experimentation, he sometimes painted forms in psychedelic colors before defining with bold lines the shape of an animal or tree. He also used techniques such as spray-painting over fern leaves for an organic pattern. Born in 1920, Krüsi was raised in German-speaking eastern Switzerland by foster parents on a farm and later lived in an orphanage. He subsequently lived an itinerant life on the margins, finding shelter in derelict buildings in St. Gallen. He started selling flowers after World War II but began making art only in the mid-1970s. In his home and studio in St. Gallen, which he left daily to journey to Zürich with his flowers and art, cats and pigeons moved in and out freely in a space that evolved as its own art environment. The thousands of Polaroid photographs he took capture the formation of his creative life. Particularly attuned to seasonal shifts, he obsessively chronicled the repetitions of the world around him, notably by creating audio recordings of insects, birdsong, bells in St. Gallen, and, of course, cows. His “cow machines,” which he activated like film strips, reference the cacophonous cattle homecoming, soundtracked by the large bells clanging on the animals’ necks. Krüsi’s drawings caught the attention of Galerie Buchmann in St. Gallen, leading to his first exhibition in 1981 and recognition in the local press. He was soon advertising himself as a painter with business cards. After his death in 1995, the Kunstmuseum Thurgau received a major bequest of his art and archives. Allison C. Meier, 2025 Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/25598/fullhttps://collection.folkartmuseum.org/people/2355/rdfYumoto MitsuoYumoto Mitsuo fragments his depictions of animals, architecture, archaeological finds, airplanes, and more into vivid shapes, giving jubilant energy to the semi-abstract scenes that are outlined and then richly filled with colored pencil. He often picks clashing or multitudes of hues for a single piece, with the colored boards that he regularly uses as surfaces enhancing the kaleidoscopic effect. Although fantastic birds, insects, cats, and ships often appear in his work, buildings are a recurring motif. These are sometimes based on locations in his home country, Japan, but frequently are inspired by photographs of structures from around the world, from the onion domes of Saint Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow to the angular wooden churches of Poland and Ukraine. All are flattened into interconnected shapes that are saturated with glorious color. Yumoto was born in 1978 and creates his art as a member of Atelier Incurve, a non-resident studio that was established in 2002 in Hirano-ku, Osaka, to support visual artists with developmental or mental disabilities. He began drawing when he was in his twenties and described himself in a 2022 Atelier Incurve interview as “a man for drawing pictures.” He has consistently exhibited in group and solo shows at Gallery Incurve in Kyoto. He started receiving international attention in the early 2000s, including through presentations by the Phyllis Kind Gallery at the Outsider Art Fair in New York. The gallery also featured him in a 2005 group show of Atelier Incurve artists. Allison C. Meier, 2025 Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/25695/fullhttps://collection.folkartmuseum.org/people/2935/rdfMichael RothloffMichael Rothloff’s imaginative wood sculptures and objects often reflect life in the United States, his adopted country, in the early twentieth century. According to his dated signatures, he carved his incredibly detailed pieces between the early 1900s and the 1920s, painting and creatively accessorizing the blonde-colored fruitwood sculptures. He depicted flappers, women bathers, American military servicemen grasping rifles, and suffragists holding signs and umbrellas. Most of these figures stand just over a foot tall. He also created tributes to American icons, identified on their labeled bases, such as Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and Uncle Sam, who has an American flag in one hand and an eagle in another. More fantastic, and suggesting a religious or moralistic streak, are the devils with pitchforks and memento mori–style skeletons holding scythes. The most elaborate surviving examples of his work that demonstrate his expert woodworking skill are his furniture pieces that are alive with zoomorphic ornamentation. A pair of lively snakes serves as the back slats for a rocking chair that is crowned with a stag head, and a small bed frame is covered with a whole bestiary, including alligators, dogs, a deer, a fox, a pig, a cat, and more, embedded in its finely made form. Rothloff was born in 1855 in Leitzburg, Germany, and immigrated to the United States in the early 1880s. It is unknown if he was inspired by fanciful European carving traditions such as the Black Forest–style furniture that emerged from Switzerland in the nineteenth century and often incorporated bears, deer, and other alpine animals into its designs. He and his wife, Anna, settled in Athens, Pennsylvania, eventually having eight children. He was known as a talented cabinetmaker. Little is recorded about his life. His 1930 obituary in the <em>Evening Times</em> of Sayre, Pennsylvania, reported that his death at seventy-five followed a long illness and that he worked for many years at the Athens Furniture Company. A number of his pieces were offered in a 1984 Christie’s sale. Although exhibitions of his art have been infrequent, his works were included in a folk art group show in 2014 at Edward Thorp Gallery in New York and in the exhibition <em>Self-Taught Genius: Treasures from the American Folk Art Museum</em> at the American Folk Art Museum that opened the same year. Allison C. Meier, 2025 Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/2723/fullhttps://collection.folkartmuseum.org/people/752/rdfGregory "Mr. Imagination" WarmackAfter a near-death experience during which he experienced visions of an ancient civilization, Gregory Warmack reinvented himself as Mr. Imagination, or simply Mr. I. He used a range of cast-off materials, but especially bottle caps, to create thousands of elaborate sculptures. Many evoked royal objects such as thrones and staffs; faces of kings and other regal figures were carved from industrial sandstone, a byproduct of steel casting. He also turned old paintbrushes into portraits and created assemblages from cat-food cans, ping-pong paddles, buttons, sponges, and roof tin, frequently referencing the motifs of ancient Egypt and African masks. Warmack was born in 1948 in Maywood, Illinois, and grew up on the South Side of Chicago. At a young age, he started carving small objects and crafting jewelry from discarded material to sell on the streets to support himself. He took on the moniker Mr. Imagination after he survived being shot and robbed in 1978 and began avidly creating art with a new drive to express positivity in the world around him through what others cast off. As he once stated, “Everything I find, I reuse in my art and give it a new purpose. I teach others that the creative process is open to all if you just use your eyes and your imagination.” His first major solo show opened in 1983 at the Carl Hammer Gallery in Chicago. He relocated to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 2002 and was involved in numerous local community-focused art projects, such as transforming a bus shelter, and major commissions such as pieces for Walt Disney World and the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. Following a catastrophic fire in 2008 that destroyed his home and studio, he moved to Atlanta, where he used the salvaged remains of charred sculptures in his art. He died in 2012. Allison C. Meier, 2025 Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/2819/fullhttps://collection.folkartmuseum.org/people/440/rdf