MARGARET DAY ALLEN is the author of the book When the Spirit Speaks: Self-Taught Art of the South and a member of the Folk Art Society of America Advisory Board. She often writes about self-taught art.
KATHRYN ALLEN is the retired Senior Editor/Acquisitions of Southern Methodist University Press in Dallas, Tex., and a docent at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. She is a former docent at the Kimbell Art Museum in Ft. Worth, Tex.
JAY ALTHOUSE, from Raleigh, N. C., is a composer and arranger of music for school performing groups. He and his wife, Sally, have collected folk art for almost 30 years.
The late GEORGINE CLARKE was visual arts program manager for the Alabama State Council on the Arts. She went to France as part of the official Alabama delegation.
WAYNE COX directs a public policy research organization. He also documents, collects and writes about self-taught art. He and his wife, Myrene, live in Miami, Florida, and Port Maria, Jamaica. They were recently named by Art and Antiques Magazine to its list of the Top 100 Art Collectors in the United States.
WILLIAM L. ELLIS is an associate professor of music at Saint Michael’s College in Colchester, Vt. He wrote the entry on Tripp for the Folk Art volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 2013) and wrote about Edwin Jeffery Jr. for the Spring 2014 Folk Art Messenger.
MATT GEIGER is a journalist and author living in Wisconsin. His recent book, The Geiger Counter: Raised by Wolves & Other Stories, (HenschelHAUS/2016) is available now in stores and online. Visit his website: http://www.geigerbooks.com.
BUD GOLDSTONE worked from 1955 to 1981 as an engineer for North American Aviation. From 1959 to his death in 2012, he volunteered as a conservation engineer for the preservation of Simon Rodia's Watts Towers, a National Historic Landmark in Los Angeles. In 1959, he ran a controlled scientific proof-load test and stress analysis on the Watts Towers that proved them to be stable and prevented the city from demolishing them. He wrote the proposal for a $1,900,000 grant from FEMA to repair earthquake damage to Watts Towers and also a $485,000 grant to repair earthquake damage to the California State Landmark, Bottle Village, in Simi Valley. With his wife, Arloa Paquin Goldstone, he was the author of The Los Angeles Watts Towers, published by the J. Paul Getty Foundation in 1997. You can see a full obituary in The Folk Art Messenger #82.
LARRY HARRIS is an architect, photographer and art collector who lives in Houston. His website: www.narrowlarry.com is dedicated to the documentation of visionary folk art environments throughout the United States.
BERNARD HERMAN is the George B. Tindall Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies and Chair of the Department of American Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the editor of Thornton Dial: Thoughts on Paper, and many other books. His forthcoming book, Fever Within: the Art of Ronald Lockett, will be published in June. The concurrent exhibition will be on view at the American Folk Art Museum, June 21-September 18, 2016, then travel to the High Museum of Art and the Ackland Art Museum.
JO FARB HERNANDEZ is Director and Professor Emerita of Thompson Art Gallery and Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at San Jose State University. She also serves as Director and Chief Curator of SPACES (Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments).
STEPHEN P. HUYLER, Ph.D., is an art historian, cultural anthropologist, photographer and author. His book, Daughters of India: Art and Identity (2008) was reviewed in The Folk Art Messenger, Winter 2008.
RAY KASS is a nationally recognized artist and a professor emeritus of studio art at Virginia Tech. The founder and director of the Mountain Lake Workshop at Virginia Tech, he produced workshops for Howard Finster (1985), John Cage, Jiro Okura, Stephen Addiss, James De La Varga and Merce Cunningham, among others. He is the author many publications, including John Cage: Zen Ox-Herding Pictures (2009), The Sight of Silence: John Cage's Complete Watercolors (2011) and Morris Graves: Vision of the Inner Eye (1983). His future plans include a retrospective exhibition of the work of the Virginia artist Georgia Blizzard, with Lee Kogan as co-curator. He a founding board member of the Folk Art Society of America.
MINHAZZ MAJUMDAR is a writer and designer engaged in the documentation and promotion of folk art and craft forms in India. For more than a decade, she has been working with artists and craft communities across India, presenting India’s finest traditional practitioners to audiences worldwide.
JOAN PEARLMAN from New York City, has taught at N.Y.U., The New School and the American Folk Art Museum Institute. She recently participated in a two-person exhibition of her photographs in “Woods Hole Women of a Certain Age.”
LUIS “EL ESTUDIANTE” JOAQUIN RODRIGUEZ
is General Coordinator, Proyecto Bayate. He is a Naif painter who lives and works in Mella, Cuba.
photo by Ann Oppenhimer
FRED SCRUTON is a professor of art in Northwestern Pennsylvania. He travels extensively throughout the U.S. to document ‘outsider’ and ‘visionary’ artists. His work can be seen at fredscruton.com.
JAMES SELLMAN is the President of the Folk Art Society of America. He and his wife Barbara have been traveling throughout the world collecting art for more than 35 years and have been members of the Folk Art Society of America for 22 years. They have donated more than 200 pieces of traditional African art to Richmond's Virginia Union University, and they have made significant gifts of drawings and paintings by Thornton Dial to that and other American institutions. The Sellmans have spent the past 25 years supporting African American artists, exhibitions and other academic projects. Since 1978, Sellman has served on the Clinical Faculty of the Medical College of Virginia-VCU Medical School. In 2001, he was recognized by the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill as one of the 35 outstanding psychiatrists in America.
JAMES & BARBARA SELLMAN are longtime collectors of the work of Thornton Dial and other Southern outsider artists, in addition to African Art. James, a practicing clinical psychiatrist, is President of the Folk Art Society of America, and Barbara is a member of the FASA Board of Directors.
The late E. LEE SHEPARD was Vice President for Collections and Sallie and William B. Thalhimer III Senior Archivist of the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond, Va.
JOHN TURNER, from Berkeley, Calif., is an artist, writer, world traveler, a retired arts producer for KGO-TV in San Francisco, and a former curator at the San Francisco Craft and Folk Art Museum.
The late DICK WENSTRUP lived on a farm near New Richmond, Ohio, and collected folk art and books. He was a member of the Folk Art Society's National Advisory Board.
JEFFREY WOLF is a New York writer, director and film editor. His 2008 documentary film, James Castle: Portrait of an Artist, portrays Castle’s life and creative process, as told by family members, artists and members of the deaf community. His newest documentary, Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts, will premier during the opening of Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum on September 28, 2018.
LARRY YUST is a filmmaker and photographer living in Los Angeles. The photographs for the Salvation Mountain article were taken recently and have never before been published. “The mountain constantly changes, and I can’t stop taking pictures of it,” Yust says.
