In 1987, the American artist David Hammons set out on a road trip to North Carolina to visit a selection of self-taught “Outsider” artists, who were to be included in the exhibition Outside/Insight, which he would co-curate with fellow artist Ed McGowin at the Clocktower gallery in New York. The term “Outsider,” often used interchangeably with self-taught or folk art, was, in the case of the Clocktower show, indicative of art by untrained makers operating outside art world establishments.

For Hammons, born in Illinois, resident first of Los Angeles and then of New York, this would mark his first trip to the American South, as well as his first intimate exposure to Outsider art, the central qualities of which were already a part of his oeuvre. Found materials, litter and scraps found around his neighbourhood, had, by that point, featured prominently in Hammons’ work, and would continue to do so throughout his career. Though it received relatively little critical attention, Outside/Insight captured an important chapter in the development of Hammons’ artistic sensibility. The show evinced his identification with vernacular African American cultural forms, self-effacing relationship to authorship, and profound sense of the value of everyday objects and gestures.

Hammons’ Untitled, 2009, in the main gallery, hails from the artist’s acclaimed first series of draped canvases, exhibited at L&M Gallery, New York, in 2011. Here, the canvas, silver-painted in swathes and drips, recalls the work of Abstract Expressionism’s greatest practitioners; while the stretched and billowing bin bag adhered to its surface, riddled with holes, might have floated up, haphazard, from the street below. The magic of this work lies in the intersection of its formal rigour and the unabashed vernacular form. It is at once a structural critique, a visual pun, and a Duchampian joke - a tension that Hammons has toyed with throughout his career.

In his own words, the artist has aptly positioned his work "somewhere between Marcel Duchamp, Outsider art, and Arte Povera,"and the legacy of Hammons” involvement with Outsider art is particularly clear in Untitled, 2009.

In conversation with this work from Hammons, the library is hung with work by acclaimed American self-taught artist Hawkins Bolden (1914 - 2005). Tragically blinded at the age of 8, Bolden navigated life through making. His sculpture, crafted from debris gathered in and around his home in Memphis, Tennessee, served first and foremost a practical utility: frightening the birds from his tomato patch. But these works, pieced with eyes, mouths, and ears, are - even at their most abstract-figurative sculptures. They embody an understanding of form through touch and memory and are intimate portraits of both their maker and the community from which they come.

David Hammons studied in Los Angeles at the Chouinard Art Institute and the Otis Art Institute at Parsons School of Design before settling in New York in 1974. Hammons was the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship in July 1991. In addition to site-specific, public performances and installations, the artist has been exhibited worldwide. His work is collected by major public and private institutions internationally, among them: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge; Glenstone, Potomac; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; SMAK, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent; Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris; Francois Pinault Foundation, Venice; and Tate Britain, London.

Sculptures by Hawkins Bolden are held in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA, among others.

Photos: Matthew Hollow