June Issue 2000
St. John's Museum Of Art Features Works by "Outsider" Artist Clyde Jones
St. John's Museum of Art in Wilmington, NC, plans to celebrate the opening of the exhibition Haw River Critter Crossing: The Environment of Clyde Jones in a manner most appropriate for this "outsider" artist who is beloved by children throughout the region: the exhibition's reception will double as the museum's popular Annual Family Day Celebration. The June 17 event celebrates an artist - and artistic outlook - often associated with children, who represent the artist's favorite audience. The exhibit will continue through Sept. 3. Also in the Hughes Gallery through Sept. 3 is the exhibition "Rowan LeCompte: Sixty Years of Color and Light".
Educational plans for the exhibition include a presentation by photographer, folklorist and author Roger Manley, who wrote the book Signs and Wonders: Outsider Art in North Carolina in the early 1990s to accompany an exhibition of the same title.
Haw River Critter Crossing: The Environment of Clyde Jones represents one of the few exhibitions dedicated entirely to the artistry of Jones to be held at a major art museum. The exhibition includes several dozen two-dimensional paintings in the museum's Hughes Gallery as well as the lively, three-dimensional "critters" which will be free to roam the museum's garden area.
According to the book Signs and Wonders: Outsider Art in North Carolina, Clyde Jones was born in 1938, in nearby Pittsboro, NC. He worked as a laborer and logger at a nearby mill until 1979, when he severely injured himself with a chainsaw. During his long convalescence from the injury, he began cutting and assembling roots and stumps into animals, or "critters." His painting, which began in 1987, typically incorporates the heavy application of house and car paint onto plywood and discarded doors and depicts the animals and wildlife of Bynum and the Haw River.
The "environment" created by Jones around his home in Bynum, NC, includes hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of his critters - brought to life from the hickory and ash trees that grow along the Haw River. Hundreds of visitors bring their children each year to Bynum to play on the critters. Celebrities, including the dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, also have visited Jones to view his "Haw River Critter Crossing."
Jones' work has been shown at the Sawtooth Center for Visual Design and the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in Winston-Salem. His work was included in the exhibitions Signs and Wonders: Outsider Art in North Carolina. which toured the state in the early 1990s, as well as the exhibition Passionate Visions of the American South, organized in 1993 by the New Orleans Museum of Art.
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