Working in rural Idaho, James Castle practiced a kind of sorcery: appropriating the print ephemera that flooded the village post office his mother ran, he alchemized a mixture of soot and saliva, painting with a matchstick. Far from the aegis of Pop Art, Castle was replicating and remixing mass media, his Untitled, n.d. a brilliantly graphic work that renders the Kellogg label something like the Betsy Ross flag. Deaf, unable to sign, immensely private, and far from gallery circuits, he nevertheless fantasized about exhibition, drawing up salon-style installations for his work, and attaching strings to his pieces, as if poised, any moment, for exhibition.
It’s a good thing he was. Memory Palaces: Inside the Collection of Audrey B. Heckler at the Folk Art Museum in New York, bursts with the work of eighty artists: art on walls, art leaning against walls, art peeling off the wall, art meant to wheel, whirl and be walked with. Each of these works could only have been wrought from a particular mind, and this exhibition gifts the viewer a couple of paces within each of these monastic creations. It is, one might say, a constellation of memory palaces.
The cloistered Castle is just one of many palaces on show. There is the work of Charlie Willeto, where a vitrine of wooden figures lift their arms—in surrender? ritual? excitement? —accompanied by bow or broom. His work is doubly private to me: a Navajo medicine man, Willeto referenced a runic, culturally specific vocabulary, but also eschewed tribal rules to carve these figures. Similarly, there is the work of Guo Fengyi, who referenced Chinese painting through the use of white brocade scrolls and seal stamps, but layered with ink pen forms entirely of her own.
Alongside a whorling drawing by Martín Ramírez, behind a tin creature by David Butler, and below a metamorphosing tree by Christine Sefolosha are Georgia Blizzard’s engorged vessels, with little faces and limbs pinched out of Appalachian creek-bed clay: Unwilling Virgin, clutches her voluminous stomach, while the waves of her hair fade into the lip of the jug. There are Edmund Monsiel’s graphite drawings on the back of a cement bag, Joaquim Vicens Gironella’s deep-grooved cork works, Jimmy Lee Sudduth’s sorghum-syrup- and Coca-Cola-soaked paintings—too many here, unfortunately, to name.
Folk art, outsider art, art brut, self-taught art: these works are so wide-ranging that they settle uneasily even into a name. These artists were generalized, stigmatized, taken advantage of: looking for inspiration outside of academic tradition, artists like Jean Dubuffet and Paul Gauguin sought out the work of children, people with mental illness, and makers from non-Western cultures, lumping them all together.
What unites the artists in Memory Palaces is only that they made art which, despite everything, managed to exist. It took a stranger’s gift of a book on kiln firing to burnish Blizzard’s clay works into permanence, and a career-ending bout of arthritis for Guo Fengyi to stop manufacturing others’ designs and begin making her own. Achilles G. Rizzoli held a career in an architecture firm and labored, by night, on an imaginary architecture that was seen by nobody in his lifetime, not even his mother, to whom he dedicated the magnificent Mother Symbolically Represented/ The Kathredal. What memory palaces did not meet the feat of exhibition, were instead reduced to rubble?
A “Memory Palace” is also a technique. To illustrate: to remember a shopping list, I might imagine, as I walk through my living room, eggs nestled into the cushions on my couch, window-blinds of bacon, a vase brimming with milk atop a cabinet made of rice. A memory palace is a magnificent thing, a world unto itself—but one sealed off, with turrets and moats. On view here, at the Folk Art Museum, itself a refuge against the battery of the New York art world, Memory Palaces hints at the worlds that run parallel, beneath, within, or without.
My desk at The Museum of Modern Art desk overlooks the sculpture garden, that Modernist oasis. We had just celebrated a massive building expansion that had razed the old building of the Folk Art Museum. It is now only a mile away, but there is a world of difference: in attention, recognition, funding, space. Here is a tale not only of two cities, but of two art histories.
I spent my lunch break in MoMA’s galleries, and as I walked, I let myself fall into a different place: in Monet’s strokes I saw Guo Fengyi’s swirling pen-lines, out of the Rothko’s swaths of colors peered Sefolosha’s little faces; and in the gaps of that magnificent, Modern, collection, I saw something intimate, and different, and lovely. To that palace of memory, of mind, I felt myself yield.