Karen Lennox, Chicago - MEET THE COLLECTOR Series Part Fifty-Five

It was after recently interviewing Scott Lang and JoAnn Seagren, that I began to learn more about Karen Lennox and her deep involvement in this field. After spending many years working under Phyllis Kind she branched out alone and has placed work into various collections and museums ever since. Read on to hear more stories and revelations from Karen in part fifty-five of my ‘Meet the Collector’ series.

Karen Lennox in her bedroom next to a work by Miyoko Ito

1. When did your interest in the field of outsider/folk art begin and in what year? 
My mentor at the Allan Frumkin Gallery, Alice Adam, had purchased a small group of Joseph Yoakum drawings for the gallery's inventory. The year was 1970. There was no distinction in my mind between his drawings and the Jasper Johns and James Ensors that occupied the same gallery drawers - just his back-story was more interesting. I was not aware of the term “outsider art” at that point.

2. When did you become a collector of this art? And do you exhibit any of it on the walls of your home or elsewhere?
I tried to buy work as a young gallerist, especially Karl Wirsum who was my favorite then. I regret a missed chance to visit Joseph Yoakum who liked blondes and often gifted them a drawing. In 1972-1973, I acquired two Martin Ramirez drawings. Ramirez was presented as a collection, which Jim Nutt discovered and secured for the gallery to purchase, that instantly garnered major interest. We were asking $250-$3,000 a sheet. Joel Gray (the American actor) and Claes Oldenburg (a gallery friend and frequent visitor) both loved the work. Bringing out the animal scrolls during a gallery visit moved Oldenburg to get down on the viewing room floor and start barking like a dog in response to one of the drawings I had just unrolled! We were experiencing in real time how important the works were to fellow artists. Later, most of my early collection financed my daughter’s educations. Today, I have replenished that first collection with Edmondson, Traylor, Yoakum, Frank Jones, Eddie Arning, William Dawson, Philadelphia Wireman, EVB and James Castle.

Often I take curators on tours to Chicago collections when they wish to include these works in exhibitions. It is important to me to lend to these museum shows because I believe that we only have care and custody of the art we acquire. The above referenced self-taught works (dozens of them) are exhibited side-by-side in my apartment with works by the Chicago Imagists. Also, Miyoko Ito, an earlier SAIC attendee and an abstractionist that the artists collect. In fact, she was first spotted at the SAIC by Josh Kind, who was then married to Phyllis Kind, and he brought her to the gallery. It has been quietly observed that the rest of the Imagists entered the gallery because they wanted to show with the dealer who understood Ito.

Installation shot L-R: Peruvian Pot, H.C.W. dustpan sculpture, Ramberg ptg, Edmondson Dove sculpture and Yoakum drawing

3. Can you tell us a bit about your life background and then your experience of directing Phyllis Kind’s Chicago based gallery in the 70s?
When I arrived in Chicago, a year out of college, possessing degrees in Art History and English Literature, I was lucky to begin working at the Allan Frumkin Gallery. While there (in addition to Yoakum) I was exposed to the work of Art Green - then a gallery artist. Within the year, Art left to join the Phyllis Kind Gallery where his fellow SAIC graduates were now exhibiting. In the spring of 1972, I left to accept a position as co-director of the Phyllis Kind Gallery. In 1975, Phyllis opened the NYC branch of the gallery, where she then concentrated her time. Meanwhile, Chicago remained a hot bed of artistic, outside the box, exploration. It felt like the attraction to ‘Outsiders’ (a term which also fits the trained Imagists) coalesced in this city because of the deep support and interest of artists, collectors and the art school.

Legend holds that the true launch of collecting outsiders in America begins with a visit in 1951 by Jean Dubuffet, where he delivered his Anticultural Positions lecture at The Arts Club in Chicago. Having himself been influenced by the work of institutionalized artists collected by Hans Prinzhorn and coined ‘Art Brut’, the teachers and collectors in attendance began to look for examples of this more intuitive art that flew in the face of traditional norms. Mark Rosenthal called Dubuffet “one of the great disruptors of art history.” Once shown this work in their classes in the 1960’s, the group of emerging Imagists found their own non-mainstream inspiration. As Gladys Nilsson once said to me, studying and collecting self-taught “made us fearless” as to where they went with their own art. These Phyllis Kind Gallery artists were an integral part of ‘discovering’ and collecting self-taught artists in this country. 

Early on, the Imagists began collecting Joseph Yoakum's work in depth. Some time later, they introduced it to Whitney Halstead. Jim Nutt, while teaching at Sac State, discovered Martin Ramirez’s work in the lending files of his university (along with P.M. Wentworth). Later in the decade, Nathan Lerner, whose son ‘discovered’ the large volumes of bound drawings while being charged with cleaning out Henry Darger’s room, brought the work to the Kind gallery for exhibition. Jeffrey Wolf brought Elijah Pierce to our attention and my cohort at the gallery, Bill Bengtson, retrieving his lost I.D. from a local police station, found and brought into the gallery an early Hemphill discovery, Drossos P. Skyllas. Soon the drawers were full of this art.

Installation shot L-R: Miyoko Ito Still Life 1949 next to a Bill Traylor drawing

4. In 1981 you set up the Karen Lennox Gallery in Chicago – what sort of art did you show there as from what I understand it is not just outsider art but things like Lichtenstein too? You did some early solo shows for artists like Bill Traylor and Joseph Yoakum – what is it like looking back on these shows?
I launched the Karen Lennox Gallery late in 1981. Opening in a sublet on Ontario Street across from the Kind Gallery. I shortly settled into the old Allan Frumkin Gallery space on Michigan Avenue, next door to the Richard Gray Gallery.  These were heady, fun, scary days. During my first two years, I mounted one-man shows for Bill Traylor, Joseph Yoakum and Frank Jones. In retrospect, I may have unthinkingly launched as a self-taught gallery, but I was interested in showing art that I loved and I also loved reselling Roger Brown’s paintings, another of my favorite artists. Brown was a compulsive collector of self-taught art (especially Yoakum) and found objects, and was becoming a great American landscape artist. The rest of my program was emerging figurative artists. I was always picking Ray Yoshida’s brain as he was a legendary SAIC teacher and possessed a great eye! As time went on, I started selling almost exclusively in the secondary market. Eventually, I was selling everything from an early Monet Nymphaes, to paintings and sculptures by Warhol, Lichtenstein, Stella, Judd and Richter.

5. What is it that draws your eye away from contemporary art to outsider/folk art? Or do you collect both?
Whether trained or untrained, I collect art that feels ‘real’ to me. Maybe I can’t describe it any other way except that when you see it, it follows you. I love to quote Rob Storr (Jim Nutt/Portraits, MCA, 1999), “whether central or peripheral to our ordinary vision, the point is that once seen, a good painting is not forgotten”. Mostly I call it “real art,” but that is another story. The best art talks to the other art in your collection. My Chicago Imagist works have quite a buzz going on with the self-taught artists.

Installation shot L-R: A Frank Jones drawing and a Jim Nutt portrait painting

6. You’ve known Jim Nutt for a long time – can you tell us about the relationship over the years and his art making?
Jim Nutt is super intellectual and hard at times to draw out.  His precedents historically are deep and wide. Again, I would refer you to the Rob Storr essay. Favorite movies from his student days (I think) are ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ (1920) and the 1932 film ‘Freaks.’ He also absorbed a PBS series on Henry the VIII playing court tennis. While attending the SAIC, Jim and a fellow student, Tom Palazzolo, whose work I loved and years later showed in my gallery, ran a slide projector for Whitney Halstead's classes, so I would assume that much of the Art Brut collection might have been present in those early ‘slide shows.’ Decades ago while he was still teaching at Sac State, he gave a visiting lecture at the SAIC. I went. He set up his slide carousel and proceeded to show slide after slide of the work of Martin Ramirez, which he had recently ‘discovered.’ No talking… just running his projector. Finally, one of the students raised his hand and asked, ‘why are you showing us these slides’ to which Jim responded, ‘because I like the work.’ I don’t think it is important to figure out how he was influenced; just that the work he produces is genius.

7. What style of work, if any, is of particular interest to you within this field? (for example is it embroidery, drawing, sculpture, and so on). Would you say you had a favourite artist or piece of work within your collection? And why?
Sculpture. Once upon a time in the 1980’s, my colleague in the development of a major market for self-taught, John Ollman (of the Fleisher-Ollman Gallery) and I asked each other, if you could only live with one piece of art, what would it be? We exchanged slips of paper. Both of us wrote Edmondson. Although I now own Edmondson, today I am tempted to choose Miyoko Ito. Recently, a marvelous English/Chinese artist, Gordon Cheung, was standing in front of my Ito painting and said it reminded him of when, out walking, he sometimes notices a puddle of sunlight at his feet. Cheung said “she (Ito) scooped up the light and put it in this painting.” Or I would say Jim Nutt. I own his portrait paintings, but think it is a small, early work from 1972 (7x5-3/4 inches, 18 x 14.6 cm) that I cannot live without. It contains a small 1-1/2 inch painted head that reminds me of James Ensor’s “Masks Confronting Death” although Jim, himself, once looked at an Ensor etching in my apartment and said, ‘this is why I find Ensor so interesting, it is the way he renders clouds’. Lol, who would have guessed? 

Installation shot L-R: Edmondson Schoolteacher, Ramberg painting, Roger Brown paint brush, rocks, Roseville Pottery Pot, and the edge of another Jim Nutt reverse plexiglas painting

8. Where would you say you buy most of your work from: other dealers, studios, art fairs, exhibitions, auctions, or direct from artists?
Other dealers and private collectors.

9. Is there an exhibition/book in this field of art that you have felt has been particularly important? And why? Why was ‘Black Folk Art in America’ so good, in your opinion?
The publication of “Outsider Art” by Roger Cardinal in 1972 was seminal, as it reacquainted us with the Art Brut collection artists (and helped bury the term ‘folk art’). The book was followed a decade later (1982) with “Black Folk Art In America” to accompany a substantial show at the Corcoran Gallery (despite its title). I think I loved “Black Folk Art” because it first made me realize that there were great artists that were simply too poor to have the personal time to make art. Then, when they reached the end of their lives, often citing that God had spoken to them, the creative spirit just came pouring out. More recently, “Great and Mighty Things,” the tome on the Bonovitz collection of the best of the best of self-taught art is my favorite reference book. Many of the works will end up at the Philadelphia Museum of Art because Jill and Sheldon believe that they are only the arts custodians!

10. 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 – I know you’ve mentioned Bert Hemphill before, why was Bert so important for you?
Bert Hemphill (a founder of the American Folk Art Museum) and Bill Copley (artist and collector, especially of H. C. Westermann) were two of Phyllis Kind’s best friends. Both influenced our program at the gallery. Bert called the Chicago Gallery all the time to talk about the folk artists he was pursuing. His collection filled a NYC townhouse floor to ceiling. Despite several visits, I am sure I never saw it all. He directed us to Jack Savitsky, Frank Jones, Justin McCarthy and Malcah Zeldis.

Installation shot L-R: Miyoko Ito Painting, Vito Acconci Photographs, James Castle Double sided soot drawing (on Stickley Table), Ramberg Hair Candy paintings, Lee Godie ball point pen drawing (floor)

11. 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?
As I answer your questions, notice that I slip between terms. Art Brut, Outsider, Self-taught, Intuitive, Folk Art, etc. Chicago is the home of the Intuit Museum of which we are proud, so perhaps Intuitive should be my favorite of all the terms.

12. What’s next for you?
This week I just placed an Amoako Boafo painting in an American Museum (so it is hard to pin me down). I work privately with collectors on museum boards and occasionally venture out to participate in an art fair. I buy back from collectors to whom I once sold to, or broker purchases and sales for them. I like to build relationships and collections… the reason I do not sell online. Next up is a show I am excited to have been asked to curate – “Masterpieces of Chicago Art” (cooler by the lake). Watch for it in June 2021 in NYC.