Bernard Herman, North Carolina - MEET THE COLLECTOR Series Part Sixty Two

An academic friend suggested this next collector to me, who collects art alongside being a distinguished professor of Southern Studies, American Studies and Folklore at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. Bernie Herman features as part sixty-two of my ‘Meet the Collector’ series. Read on to find out more about his academic work alongside his art collecting.

Bernie Herman

1. Can you tell us a bit about your background? And a bit about your PhD in folklore and folklife?
I grew up in southeastern Virginia and attended the College of William and Mary in the time of civil unrest around the war in Vietnam, the ongoing battle for civil rights, and the rise of women’s rights. My primary interests were in literature and what we now think of as visual culture. I was also very much drawn to the objects of everyday life (primarily through the poetical works of Charles Olsen and Francis Ponge) – an interest that deepened dramatically working in summers on archaeology crews and learning the art of photography. After I graduated from college, I spent a year on the road documenting historic buildings for the Virginia Historic Landmarks Commission. I met my wife Rebecca in Smithfield, Virginia, where she was teaching art in the elementary school. In the course of that work, I also encountered really incredible buildings, objects, and people. Friends in the southern highlands lent me a copy of Henry Glassie’s Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States. After I finished reading, I looked at the author’s bio and saw that Henry had studied Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania. That seemed like a good idea at the time, so I applied and off I went. I knew for a fact that all of us inhabited a poetics of everyday life and things and I wanted to learn how to see and articulate that understanding. Folklore held little regard for the boundaries of more conservative disciplines, offering instead powerfully expansive ways to document and reflect on the worlds of made things from song to landscapes to speech to foodways.

2. When did your interest in the field of outsider/folk art begin?
I was hooked when our parents packed us into the family car one day and we drove from our home in Norfolk, Virginia, to Washington D.C. to see the first installation of James Hampton’s “The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly.” I was just starting high school at the time and pretty much self-alienated from everything. I walked into that gallery and could not breathe! The complexity, light, texture, everything – the spirituality and scale of it – I was simply blown away. I still see vividly that image in my mind’s eye. It was one of those moments in life where you are totally immersed in a lyric moment that precedes narrative and sense-making. I remember nothing else from that journey – only that revelatory instant of pure wonder. I was not inspired to collect the art but drawn to the ways in which certain objects in certain circumstances just ratchet your brain into an entirely new way of seeing and being in the world. After the experience of the “The Throne of the Third Heaven,” I was drawn to the larger body of art that fell outside the academy and whatever canons were in play. Various writers and others attempted to corral that work under a variety of labels – all of which proved conceptually insufficient (even marginalizing and sometimes intellectually corrupt) to categorize and contain its breadth, depth, and diversity.

Entry room to house. The sculpture is by Terry Turrell and the large painting is by Jon Redmond.

3. When did you and your wife become collectors of this art?  How many pieces do you think are in your collection now? Do you exhibit any of it on the walls of your home?
Rebecca (an artist in her own right) and I began to collect when we were first married. I was in grad school and she was a public-school teacher in Philadelphia. We would go out and about on weekends to various flea markets and simply look. We had no money for luxury, but we considered art a necessity. We still have a 19th century watercolor of a catfish that set us back to the point that we dipped into our grocery budget. We’ve always collected, but we’ve never considered ourselves collectors. We just find it impossible to live without art. I can’t say how many works are in our home for two reasons. First, we don’t think about the art around us as something to be enumerated. Second, we don’t really think about art as a definable category. What we do think about is how every piece affords a continuous engagement with creative and critical thought. We finally reached a point where almost everything is out where we can visit the art as we pass from room to room, work at our desks, or sit for conversation. Rebecca has placed work to create vistas down halls and craft intimate corners.

4. You’ve written several books on self-taught artists including Thornton Dial: Thoughts on Paper and Fever Within: The Art of Ronald Lockett. Were these to coincide with exhibitions, or just artists you are particularly fascinated in? Have you written any others in this realm?
The two books you mention are collections of essays compiled to parallel exhibitions that I helped curate at the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. To my knowledge, the Dial exhibition was the first to focus exclusively on his drawings, in this case the drawings he made in the first two years after he began creating works on paper. Fever Within was the very first exhibition of Ronald Lockett’s art. The books were intended to speak to and through the art in the exhibitions. More to the point, I was (and am) very much committed to opening the conversation to new voices and perspectives. Accordingly, I invited contributors whose voices were generally unknown or unheard within the very tight circle of the field. The chief exception is my friend Colin Rhodes. He is well known in the universe of Art brut and outsider art scholarship, but not so many folks know that he comes to the work as an artist in his own right. The third volume in this series will be The Unfinished Business of Unsettled Things: Art from an African American South and will accompany a third exhibition at the Ackland that will open at the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina. All three of these shows flow out of my work with the late William Arnett, the extraordinary mind and energy behind the preservation, documentation, exhibition, and interpretation of artists that include Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Ronald Lockett, Bessie Harvey, Mary Lee Bendolph, Arlonzia Pettway, and many more. Additionally, I’ve contributed to several other books and catalogs.

There are three more books in progress and in relatively advanced stages: Wordsmithing: The Spoken Art of Lonnie Holley with Josh Massey and Lonnie Holley, Quilt Spaces (based on roughly 500 pages of interviews with Gee’s Bend artists), and Troublesome Things in the Borderlands of American Art (gratefully supported with a Guggenheim Fellowship).

5. You’ve also taught in a couple of universities around self-taught and vernacular art – what sort of response does this get in your classes? 
Great question! The audience is generally small, but always responds to the art. The larger issue is that there is no easy way to frame the course content and objectives in a short course description. Almost all students who join the seminar are drawn by curiosity. In seminar, though, the individual explorations are dynamic and freewheeling. This last time around, projects focused on work as varied as U.S. Hindu temple design, Zach Grear’s altered photographs, and the art of Fukunosuke Kusumi made during his incarceration in a Japanese American internment camp.

Front room in house

6. I’ve heard you’ve done a lot with the Gees Bend Quiltmakers – can you tell us how you came to know them and what your interests are with them?
My first encounter with the Gee’s Bend quiltmakers came through Shelly Zegart and Bill Arnett who were discussing the second big travelling exhibition on the architecture of the quilts. Bill reached out and asked if I would write for the catalog. I said I would, but that I wanted to spend some time in the community getting to know the makers and recording interviews. I visited several times and over the course of time recorded roughly thirty interviews of varying length. What emerged from those conversations transformed how I thought about writing as a practice. My essay appeared in the catalog, but that left roughly 500 single-spaced pages of conversations and fieldnotes. I wrote a book-length manuscript twice, but it wasn’t doing the work it needs to accomplish in terms of centering the voice of the artists. I’m getting ready to return to the project one more time. The working title is Quilt Spaces and the book will explore how the artists speak to the work that quilts do within their own creative imaginations.

7. What style of work, if any, is of particular interest to you and your wife within this field? (for example is it embroidery, drawing, sculpture, and so on)
Our primary interest is works on paper and art from what sculptor Melvin Edwards describes as “familiar form” media.

8. A conflicted term at present, but can you tell us about your opinion of the term outsider art, how you feel about it and if there are any other words that you think we should be using instead?
The term “outsider” serves a very particular purpose in conversations around art in a variety of contexts. It has done the necessary work of positioning an amorphous body of work in a way that makes the art critically visible in relationship to other categories such as contemporary or folk. The designation outsider also speaks to contexts of art markets and art as a commodity. The larger issue with outsider, however, is that it is a category that implicitly operates in the orbit of a larger unarticulated category of art. As such, the idea of “outsider” depends on several overlapping and conflicted qualities. I’ve spoken and written on some of these including the connoisseurship of dysfunction, the authority of margins, and the anxieties of authenticity. The general impulse is to find a “better” categorizing term, but that does not address the larger challenge of the work that categories do in terms of mapping the boundaries of cultural and social power.

9. Would you say you had a favourite artist or piece of work within your collection? And why? What about your wife Rebecca?
I’m not sure that we have a favorite individual artist or work. As I sit at my desk, I’m surrounded by pieces by Kenojuak Ashevak, Thornton Dial, Charles Benefiel, Purvis Young, Diego Rivera, Michael Bramwell, and Rebecca. It’s immersive and inspiring.

10. Where would you say you buy most of your work from: galleries, studios, art fairs, exhibitions, auctions, or direct from artists? 
We have a handful of galleries we favor, but we also acquire work from artists and exhibitions.

One corner of study in house (L-R): Purvis Young, Rebecca Herman and Thornton Dial.

11. Is there an exhibition in this field of art that you have felt has been particularly important? And why?
We’ve been fans of the Outsider Art Fair in New York for years. It’s always an education in what is new as well as what the journal Raw Vision termed canonical. The art is varied and often compelling. The best part, though, is the sidebar conversations that occur with gallerists, collectors, and others. There are also occasional museum exhibitions that offer really important opportunities to engage the art in interpretive contexts. The curatorial and exhibition work, for example, that Katie Jentlleson does at the High Museum in Atlanta and Leslie Umberger at the Smithsonian American Art Museum springs to mind immediately.

12. Are there any people within this field that you feel have been particularly important to pave the way for where the field is at now?
There are so many influential folks on so many levels that it’s hard to know where to begin. Colin Rhodes, Bill Arnett, Katie Jentleson, Leslie Umberger, Henry Boxer, Valérie Rousseau, Cara Zimmerman, Mark Sloan, and Lonnie Holley stand out at the moment.

Top: Thornton Dial (left) and Mehrdad Rashidi (right). Underneath are Bart Schultz snakes and then Josh Coté crows.

13. Have you ever shown work from your collection within an exhibition, either dedicated to your collection or loaning pieces out to shows?
We lent our Terry Turrell to the American Visionary Art Museum once, but our collection is generally unknown, and we are happy with that.

14. Are there any artists that you are still looking to add to your collection? 
Indeed, but we are not always in agreement. We are getting ready to add two works by George Peterson, who makes these really powerfully textured works out of recycled skateboards.

15. What are you working on at the moment? I guess you are still teaching too?
I’m working on several things at present. The project at the top of the list is an edited collection of essays, The Unfinished Business of Unsettled Things: Art from an African American South and exhibition with the Ackland Art Museum that I mentioned earlier. Hot on the trail of that project is a book Wordsmithing: The Spoken Art of Lonnie Holley with Josh Massey. There’s the Gee’s Bend Quilt Spaces project. And, a volume called Troublesome Things in the Borderlands of American Art that begins each chapter with an encounter with a work by a different artist that affords a path into a larger understanding of art and material culture that emanates from the object. The chapters (some actually written!) include Transparent Things, Ambient Things, Wonderous Things, Translated Things, Lyrical Things. Each chapter builds out from the work through interviews with the artists.

16. Is there anything else you would like to add?
Only that we cannot imagine our life without art. And, thank you.

Another wall in the study in the house including (L-R): Lonnie Holley on bottom left, portraits of my grandfather the journalist Leo Lania including a sketch by Diego Rivera, and two Malcolm McKesson drawings on the right.