Harvard Art Museums Receive Gifts of Outsider Art from Didi and David Barrett

artwork: Bill Traylor - Mule and Plow, c. 1939–42. - Poster paint and ink on cardboard. - Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Collection of Didi and David Barrett ‘71 -  Photo: Harvard Art Museums, © 2011 President and Fellows of Harvard College.


CAMBRIDGE, MA.- The Harvard Art Museums announce a gift of 38 drawings, paintings, and sculpture from Didi and David Barrett’s 20th-century American Collection of Self-Taught, Folk, and Outsider Art. The gift comprises works by 24 American “outsider” artists, mostly from the 1930s through the 1990s. Among the notable figures represented in the collection are Bill Traylor, Joseph Yoakum, and Nellie Mae Rowe, whose work first came to public attention in the important Corcoran Gallery of Art exhibition Black Folk Art in America, 1930–1980. In addition, the Barretts’ gift includes three rare “ledger book drawings” made by members of the Plains Indian tribes in the late 19th century.

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