Mennello Museum shows off items from its permanent collection in 'Self Taught Black Artists in the American South'

Winner of a Writer's Pick for "Best Small but Mighty Museum" in Orlando Weekly's 2023 Best of Orlando Awards, the Mennello Museum of American Art continues to punch above its weight with its current exhibition. The show installed in several of the museum's galleries creates a narrative of transcendence through the work of 14 self-taught Black artists. Many are from Florida and several are represented in the museum's permanent collection.

Despite their lack of access to formal art education, each artist found ways toward self-expression with talent and mastery that make their lack of credentials irrelevant. Many started young. Jesse Aaron, however, started chainsawing wood at 80, carving human and animal figures from stumps and branches to aid his wife's failing loss of sight. They have startling personality, with each sculpture blending the wood's character with the figure's personality. Mary Proctor and Purvis Young, from opposite ends of the state, paint in distinctive styles. Young, a self-taught artist from Overtown in Miami, has a dour street art sensibility while Proctor's legendary doors are bright, colorful and redemptive. "The Heavenly Choir in Gold" glows with found-object glory. Four rows of women are dancing wearing old jewelry, gold chains outlining bodies and faces, hair flinging this way and that against a background of painted clouds and blue sky.

Nellie Mae Rowe is one of several artists in this exhibit with a backstory almost too difficult to comprehend in our contemporary world. The daughter of a freed slave, she picked cotton on her father's farm. She married in her early teens to escape the brutal labor and had two husbands before marrying Henry Rowe at age 48, the age at which she began making art. "Bearded Lady" (above) depicts two women gossiping while a third figure parades down the street, presumably the woman of the painting's title. Its psychedelic colors, the woman's pink and green dogs, and the flowering vine unfolding across the top of the painting — a visual depiction of the street talk, encircling a man in the background — are like a psychedelic alternate dreamworld she created to battle her harsh reality.

Bessie Harvey, like many of the artists here, began observing and making art at a very young age. She later had 11 children and worked a night shift at a Georgia Hospital. Her "Face of Africa III" is a tree root turned upside down; the brightly decorated tendrils emanate from a central knot which she shaped into an unforgettable wide-eyed, staring black face baring its teeth. And if that weren't enough to seed your dreams, turn to Alyne Harris' "Devil With Angels in His Teeth," a large acrylic on canvas that depicts, yes, a fierce devil the color of a raging fire chewing angels, vengeance on his mind. Its urgency contrasts with the subtlety of many of Harris' other biblical depictions. She is an accomplished painter with a unique hand, a brushy minimalism.

Harris and Dr. Porchia Moore, both from Gainesville, will be at the Mennello at 1 p.m. on Saturday, April 27. Moore, assistant professor of museum studies at the University of Florida, will give a talk about the artist's regional influence on her peers, and the direction of folk art, and Harris will discuss her work in more detail. It will be a chance to see some mighty visions, art that speaks from the heart through all the layers of class, race and religion, and learn more about folk art from a scholar and from the source.