Reclaiming the Self-Taught Artist’s Creative Identity
The American Folk Art Museum is presenting Self-Made: A Century of Inventing Artists, an exhibition examining how “self-taught” artists in the United States have shaped their identities through authorship, agency, and self-representation. The show spans the early 20th century to today and features more than 90 works organized around self-portraiture, alter egos, and autobiography, with many pieces drawn from the museum’s collection and shown for the first time. It includes artists such as Henry Darger, Clémentine Hunter, and Martín Ramírez alongside international figures like Aloïse Corbaz and Adolf Wölfli and contemporary artists including Nicole Appel, Susan Janow, and Joe Coleman. The exhibition builds on AFAM’s “Rethinking Biography” reparative cataloguing initiative and is presented at the museum’s free-admission location at 2 Lincoln Square in New York.
From This Briefing
This story was covered in Sanctions, Scandals, and Venice’s Market Fever