Wayne Cox - MEET THE COLLECTOR Series Part Sixty-Three

John Maizels, Editor of Raw Vision Magazine told me about the next collector featured. Wayne Cox, now living in Florida, features as part sixty-three in my Meet the Collector Series. This one has been a long time in the making, but Wayne tells a fascinating story, so it was definitely worth the wait. He and his wife have a very specific eye for their collection, so read on to find out more…

Wayne Cox with “Stem of Jesse” (Everald Brown) described in the Washington Post as “the kind of sophisticated brilliant work that exposes the pretentiousness of terms like ‘folk art.’”

1. When did your interest in the field of outsider/folk art begin?
My first exposure to the work was an object I constructed for myself. I was a boy in the early 1950s living on the Texas-Mexico border while my father was helping build the Falcon Dam on the Rio Grande River. I would occasionally scavenge the bed of his pickup for varying little scraps of rubber-encased or bare wire, discards from the day’s work. I cut and bent these pieces and joined them into a shape until it reached for me its maximum power. As a child, I evidently felt instinctively I could harness power into objects. Of course, I was attempting to draw onto myself the powers of my father. I kept this object in a small wooden box for years. It was important to me. It was certainly less harmful for me than some of the other gleanings I took from his pickup: Mercury that I loved to roll around in my hand. And scraps of lead my friends and I melted and poured into wooden molds to form derringers. I am probably lucky to have survived my childhood.

The folk art I encountered early in life was in Mexican-American churches where we went to Mass: retablos and milagros; and especially yard grottos like that of a neighbor. I admired these but did not develop a particular interest in it. I had my own culture to create. My first organized introduction came in 1976. I was on sabbatical in Europe and happened to be in Lausanne. The Collection de l’Art Brut had just opened months earlier. The museum wasn’t on my radar, like Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise or Matisse’s Chapel of the Rosary. But why not? I don’t remember much, not the Wolfli’s or the Aloise’s that must have been on the walls that day. What I remember is small constructions of adjoined found stones, like miniature cairns, made by prisoners as I recall. No doubt a reminder of something I had made myself 25 years earlier.

Clockwise from top left: “John Crow” (Leonard Daley); “Rock Faces II” and “Prayer Time” (Everald Brown); “Senior Bird” and “Everald” (William “Woody” Joseph); “Birth of Christ” (Albert Artwell); “Dove Harp” (Everald Brown).

2. When did you become a collector of this art? How many pieces do you think are in your collection now? And do you exhibit any of them on your walls or elsewhere?
That came nine years later. In 1985 my wife, Myrene, and I lived in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the United States. I was 43; she was 39. We took a trip to the coastal town of Ocho Rios, Jamaica, to get away from the cold for a week over the Christmas holiday. The hotel news stand displayed a copy of Jamaica Journal, a cultural magazine. Its cover article was on the “Intuitives of Harmony Hall,” self-taught artists known as intuitives whose works were shown in an annual exhibition at an Ocho Rios art gallery. I bought the issue. I learned that year’s exhibition opened while we were there. We were casual museum goers, but not art collectors. We had modest incomes. My wife taught elementary school and I directed a small nonprofit group that studied tax and budget policy.

We went to the opening. Each artist had his or own separate signature language and the works were products of highly original imaginations. We purchased two works. One by Albert Artwell was a small painting of the “Birth of Christ.” It had the standard features of this narrative, except the figures were black and Bethlehem was set in Jamaica; the nativity translated into Jamaican. Taking bible wisdom and claiming it as one’s own – the gospel according to Artwell. The second work we bought was “Everald,” a black bust in carved wood by William “Woody” Joseph. It bore little resemblance to carved works shown in the local craft market. It was minimalist in execution, sparsely rendered, yet fully rendered, a figure with a presence.

We decided to return to Jamaica each Christmas holiday, but to Negril, not Ocho Rios. Negril was much more laid-back. We returned to the next two annual intuitives exhibitions at Harmony Hall, buying a couple works each time, including works of Everald Brown. Becoming dedicated collectors had not yet sunk in, but it was in the back of my mind. I found little information back home on Jamaican art. I decided to focus my learning on Haitian art, about which much was written. Seldon Rodman’s Where Art is Joy was eye-opening. I placed the work in a spiritual context as an aspect of voudou. My work took me to Washington D.C. a couple times a year. I would carve out an afternoon each trip to spend at Bolivar Gallery and its library, where Fritz Racine took me under his wing. I bought two paintings of Gerard Fortune there, one each of the female loa Erzulie and the male loa Damballah. These paintings have hung above our bed for over 20 years. I was preparing myself for Jamaican self-taught art through Haitian art and through readings on European art brut and Black Atlantic art. In 1989, Dallas Museum of Art opened “Black Art Ancestral Legacy,” which showed the African-influenced common cultural core of diaspora art of the Caribbean and the United States. I attended the exhibition when it reached Richmond, Virginia. It featured two of the artists we already collected, Everald Brown and William “Woody” Joseph.

In 1990 I finally went to the National Gallery of Jamaica in Kingston. I met with David Muir, the deputy director. He agreed to accompany Myrene and me to visit intuitive artists scattered around the island and introduce us. We carried on from there, collecting their works and documenting the artists through audiotape, photographs, and, later, videotapes. We got serious then. We created a mission statement. We had limited resources. we would focus only on Jamaican intuitives; We would do one thing well. Our limited money would go directly to the artists themselves. It would be a very long-term project. We knew that we knew nothing; nor did we have the cultural background to understand with much insight.

While we chose some works that had a specific personal appeal, we consciously included works that seemed strange and had artists’ explanations that seemed impenetrable at the time. The rule: acquire and tape; decipher later. We wanted a record based on the artists’ choices not ours. We wanted to create a body of information in the artists’ own voice about how they saw themselves and their work. Our contribution would be to create this record and make it available and to create a repository of some of those works. What, if any, would ultimately prove to be important would be for others more qualified than us to determine later.

It turned out it did not take long for institutions to come calling. In 1992 Bockley Gallery, active in US self-taught and indigenous art, in our hometown Minneapolis learned about our fledgling collection and did a four-person show, “Visionary Roots/Four Jamaican Intuitives.” The following year, a museum in Bogota borrowed works of Everald Brown for “Ante America/Regarding America.” The curator learned of the collection from the National Gallery of Jamaica. In 1996, Cavin-Morris Gallery did a New York City show of works from our collection. The following year, Randall Morris curated “Redemption Songs/the Self-taught Artists of Jamaica,” a nationally touring museum exhibition of 130 works from the collection, plus 10 others.  

The New York Times provided half a page of coverage to this exhibition when it reached the New York City area. Its reviewer described it as “one of the finest exhibitions of the season.” Several other loans to exhibitions followed. In 2006, Art and Antiques magazine named Wayne and Myrene Cox to its list of the 100 top art collectors in the United States, based not just on the collection but the documentation, the lending and our relationship with National Gallery of Jamaica (NGJ).

In 1992 we decided we could spend two or three months each year in Jamaica. We bought a small house near Negril. We bought a car there so we could get around. We could keep future works we collected there. In 2000, we bought Coral Hill, a large house we renovated overlooking Little Bay, just west of Port Maria. The location was more central to the artists and much closer to Kingston. Coral Hill served as a private museum of sorts with international anthropologists, art historians, collectors, museum officials and others as frequent guests. We sold Coral Hill in 2017 when we decided it was time to simplify our lives and consolidate everything back at our home in south Florida. That year, the National Gallery of Jamaica exhibited “Spititual Yards,” which I co-curated, drawing upon the collection works and videotapes and photographs. We donated many of the works of that exhibition to NGJ.

Our collection is now solely in the United States. It consists of several hundred works. Because of size limitations, mostly paintings are currently displayed at our condominium in Weston, FL. Larger paintings and almost all three-dimensional works are in storage nearby. Works that tour almost constantly, such as Everald Brown’s “Instrument for Four Persons,” and Dudley Irons’ matchstick “Black Star Liner,” remain in their custom crates. A group of works is at Cavin-Morris Gallery in New York City, where they are used in exhibitions there and occasionally loaned to museum exhibitions.

Clockwise for top left: “Rasta Queen” (Ras Dizzy); “Star Guitar” (Everald Brown); “Spotted Goat” (Leonard Daley); “Blue Velvit” (Ras Dizzy); “Dove Drum” (Everald Brown); “Judgment” (Albert Artwell).

3. Can you tell us a bit about your background? And do you still study tax and budget policy?
There may be an art-collecting gene in my body. My great grandmother and the great grandfather of reknowned philanthropist and art collector Agnes Gund, President Emerita of the Museum of Modern Art, were sister and brother in Lacrosse, Wisconsin, back in the late 1880s, children of a brewery owner. Agnes Gund’s side of the family developed a wealth-generating gene; mine did not. My grandfather migrated to Montana, near the site of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, where he worked as a carpenter. His wife died young, leaving him with several children, some of whom, including my mother, were sent to orphanages.

My father left Oklahoma after eight years of schooling and migrated to California during the Dust Bowl. He developed his skills and was superintendent of construction on several dams in the 1940s and 1950s. When their children reached about high school age, my mother and father moved to San Antonio, Texas, where he managed smaller construction projects that didn’t require moving every two or three years from one dam site to another.

After undergraduate school, I worked as a newspaper reporter and later as a community planner in San Antonio. After graduate school in urban studies, I was recruited in 1970 to work in the department of housing and development at the newly created Metropolitan Council in St. Paul, Minnesota. I moved on from there to work in the Twin Cities as a consultant or staff in housing, health care finance and jobs policy. I was an officer in a health care advocacy group that succeeded in greatly expanding affordable health care in the state. I was part of a philanthropy study group that succeeded in increasing the portion of Minnesota grants going to programs for those most in need.  

I helped found Minnesota Music Academy, aided Minnesota Songwriters Association and created the Council on Equal Opportunity of the Arts, which helped secure broader federal support for arts organizations serving people of color. I wrote the amendment to the bill to create a Minnesota High School for the Arts to ensure it included popular arts as well as fine arts. But public and private funders continued to resist supporting work beyond the traditional fine arts, despite the fact it was blackballing the arts of choice of most of the public.

My experience in advocacy in the arts led indirectly to why I became a collector. Instead of attempting to reforming institutions, why not undertake a small arts project on one’s own? One where the scale of the effort required to produce a quality result was of a size one could manage just on one’s own. That’s what great galleries do. Undertake a quality project on one’s own; trusting one’s judgment and integrity, and the field can learn from this effort. Class will tell. Quality can begat quality. A friend told non-profits wondering whom to solicit from: “Go to fertile ground.” Avoid funders that have a different focus. Fertile ground, for us, was going to be in Jamaica. We were going to be our own funders, our own institution.

In 1985, the same year we began collecting, I switched focus in advocacy. I settled into my future life’s work. I created Minnesota Citizens for Tax Justice as an affiliate of the Washington D.C. research group Citizens for Tax Justice, whose research on how some of the nation’s largest, most profitable corporations paid no federal income taxes sparked the seminal federal tax reform act of 1986 that closed egregious loopholes and tax shelters and treated sources of income similarly. I served as executive director of MCTJ until I retired in 2014. I also served as president of the national Citizens for Tax Justice from 1999 until 2017. During that time, CTJ developed the progressive tax proposals that were put into law that finance the health benefits of the Affordable Care Act to this day. Most of the sound 1986 reforms are now eroded. Profitable corporations and those with great wealth once again pay little. CTJ’s research continues to point to needed solutions, but I am retired now and no longer part of that effort.

Large painting: “Duppy City” (Everald Brown): clockwise from top left: “River Maid” (Reginald English); “Bambury, St. Catherine” (Paul Perkins); “Police in the Home” (Evadney Cruickshank); “Bin Falow Cowboys” (Ras Dizzy); “Seed” (Errol McKenzie); “Jonah” boats (Joseph Brown); “River Maid”, John “Doc” Williamson; two alabaster works (Williamson).

4. 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?
Jamaica’s intuitives create in a wide variety of media from a hillside of stacked stones shaped in the figure of the spirit White Moon Mother (Errol McKenzie), to cut-out metal works of other spirit figures such as river mothers and whoodies (Reginald English) to paintings of the interior spiritual life of the croton leaves that Brother Everald Brown uses for divination, to the biblical scenes and admonitions that adorn the banners and the corrugated metal panels that enclosed Elijah’s revival yard, to the offertory tables, effegies, incised metal panels, and carved wooden figures Lloyd Atherton placed in his yard to attract the ancestors and their wisdom, to the crouched figure his father, Vincent Atherton, carved to serve as his protection at the entrance to his carving hut. “This one is good to counteract the devil,” Atherton told me. That work later stood guard on the doorstep of our home in Jamaica. Atherton replaced it with an equally fearsome one.

Many Jamaicans live their lives in response to both the seen and the unseen world. The essential works of these creators were works created in service to the spiritual forces they followed or works created to help them control unseen forces, good and ill, they believed acted upon them. As such, their creations were the same impulse of their fellow creators in Haiti and the Black South. Voudou in Haiti animated much of the creation there. In Jamaica, it was primarily revival, also kumina and Rastafarianism.

We collected terracotta works; signs; sculptures in wood, bamboo root, alabaster and metal; spiritual musical instruments; paintings on cloth, hardboard, plywood, metal, matboard and paper; and assemblages such as a miniature Mercedes. The car was missing an engine, so we inserted a Red Stripe beer bottle under the hood to power it. Check out the engine, we told visitors. The works that meant the most to us were the works that meant the most to the creators themselves-private visions, works created in service to their spiritual guides or psychological needs. Objects of protection. Objects of resistance. We also collected found objects, such as a root in the form of a coiled snake and bamboos roots that had an animal shape. We placed several of these with their “heads” popping up above the surrounding bromeliads. We also admired the creators’ poetic imagination. To alabaster carver Doc Williamson, sculpture is “the memory of creation.” To Ras Dizzy, painting is “the curtain of heaven.” Woody Joseph told me he carved wood to “capture the heart of justice.” Their approach to their work was archetypal.

Four paintings of the “Moon Mother” in her various forms by Errol McKenzie (at Coral Hill).

5. A conflicted term at present, but can you tell us about your opinions on the term outsider art? How do you feel about it and if there are any other words we should be using instead?
It is successful as a brand, but in disfavor within curatorial ranks. I didn’t like the term outsider art for the same reason I didn’t like the term post-impressionist: It failed to describe the thing itself; it simply said what it is not. It harkens to Dubuffet’s notion that art brut was outside of conventional culture. In the narrow Black Atlantic portion of the field I follow most closely, the works are uber cultural--private twists, but drawn from a common cultural wellspring. Works from the heart of the country and from the depths of its culture. I liked Gerald Wertkin’s take on it in the mid 1990s: It wasn’t work from the outside, rather work from deep inside one. I have used two terms: self-taught and intuitive.

A little history on the term intuitive art. In the 1970s, the National Gallery of Jamaica did exhibitions of what it called its “self-taught” artists. In 1979 it mounted the “Intuitive Eye” exhibition. Thereafter it referred to these artists as intuitives. NGJ discontinued its “self-taught” exhibitions and folded the intuitives into its Annual National exhibition. David Boxer, who curated the “Intuitive Eye” exhibition, no longer liked the term self-taught. He used himself as an example. He was educated as an art historian but did not attend art classes. He became a self-taught contemporary artist, drawing upon his awareness of art history. He sought a term that excluded those like him with an art history awareness. He chose intuitive. The term had been used in this fashion earlier in Europe. “Intuitive eye” was also used a year or so earlier in a book by Jamaican cultural leader Rex Nettleford.

Boxer and Nettleford believed the group of Jamaica’s artists possessed a link to ancestral knowledge that they were able to draw upon. Boxer felt Jamaica’s intuitives such as John Dunkley, Kapo, Everald Brown and William “Woody” Joseph were equal to the great Haitian masters. His support for intuitive artists drew great push-back from many of Jamaica’s elites and its leading art critic who felt the nation’s art standards were being sacrificed by acceptance of these untrained artists. Boxer stood his ground. To him, these artists possessed depth and displayed great creative imagination in bringing their works to life. Nothing was being sacrificed. When the complaining artists get as good as these intuitives, come talk to him then. In 1982, the exhibition “Jamaican Art 1922-1982” toured the US. The reviews singled out the intuitives for praise, only pouring more fuel on the fire. Jamaica gained its independence in 1962, but the decolonialization of minds took much longer. To me, “intuitive art” gets to the core of things better than “outsider art.” Now some Jamaican trained artists object to the term as they feel intuitive should apply to them similarly as they feel they work from a highly intuitive inner source, as I am sure most of the good ones do.

The most interesting thing in term warfare now is how the Souls Grown Deep Foundation is labeling works it donates or sells to museums. It no longer uses a term it used before: vernacular art of the American South. It now describes the works as African-American art from the American South, as has the recipient museums largely. It seems to be divorcing itself from the vernacular/self-taught/outsider art field. Is the “field” starting to disintegrate?

6. Your collection has a major focus on Jamaican artists, which I know began from a trip in 1985. What is it that draws you to art by Jamaican intuitive artists? Can you tell us about a particularly memorable trip to visit artists there?
Often, the strength of these creators’ graphic sense matched the power of their visions. When it did, these artists produced magic, “the kind of sophisticated brilliant work that exposes the pretentiousness of terms like ‘folk art,’” as one reviewer in the Washington Post described a work of ours by Everald Brown. Our visits to artists covered a period of 25 years. At Brother Brown’s house at Murray Mountain high in the remote hills of central Jamaica, we often watched as his family performed musical prayer services. One day, Brother Brown invited Myrene to pick a croton leaf from a bush behind his hillside house. He and his wife, Sister Jenny, studied the markings on the leaf and determined which psalm of the bible pertained. Brother Brown read the psalm aloud. He and Sister Jenny then divined the message suggested by the leaf and the psalm combined and passed that wisdom on to Myrene. The Browns’ divination is a Jamaicanized variant of the type of African divinations such as Ifa divination performed in the Yoruba tradition, with the leaf substituting for the divination tray, and the leaf markings substituting for pattern of the thrown kola nuts. The river flows. It was only after 12 years of collecting and documenting that I felt knowledgeable enough to begin writing about these artists. I ended up writing several essays for exhibitions and co-curating one.

Clockwise from top left: “Black Art Man,” “Ethiopian Apple II,” “Doorkeeper,” “Dove Drum” (each by Everald Brown); two sculptures by William “Woody” Joseph: “River Maid” and “Untitled (Standing Figure)”. Regarding Joseph, a Washington Post art critic wrote, “Sculpture with such spiritual resonance and evocative presence is rare in the world. It is only produced by great artists.”

7. Would you say you had a favorite artist or piece of work within your collection? And why?
The work Myrene would grab in case of fire would be an extraordinary wedding scene by Evadney Cruickshank. I would probably risk burning trying to decide which of the works of Everald Brown I would take.  

8. Where would you say you buy most of your work from: galleries, studios, art fairs, auctions or direct from the artists?
We bought 80% of the works directly from the artists themselves at their homes. Most of the rest we bought from a dealer in Kingston where the local artists would drop off their works. The works were sparsely available elsewhere. The works with the most cultural depth probably wouldn’t have been chosen for gallery walls in Jamaica. We occasionally bought from other collectors or galleries in Jamaica to fill in gaps covering the periods before we started collecting.

9. Is there an exhibition in this field that you have felt has been particularly important and why?
The Bill Traylor exhibition at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art was superb. The Fowler’s exhibition on Haitian art and culture was magisterial. “Black Art Ancestral Legacy” that I mentioned earlier did the best job of incorporating both mainstream and self-taught art within a common cultural context. Exhibitions at Cavin-Morris Gallery have done the best job over the past 25 years furthering this knowledge. The subject is ripe for a major museum update. I believe Halle St. Pierre in Paris may be interested in such a project. I hope so.

10. Are there people within this field that you feel have been particularly important to pave the way for where the field is today?
There’s a very long list. But here’s the short list of those that were important to my learning. In the US, Robert Farris Thompson, Judith McWillie, Seldon Rodman, Leslie Umberger, Shari Cavin, Randall Morris (who joined me on several artists’ visits that he has reported on in blogs), Jake Homiak, Kenneth Bilby and the late William Arnett. In Jamaica, the late David Boxer, the late Barry Chevannes, Veerle Poupeye, Herman Van Asbroeck, and David Muir. John Maizels in England has opened his Raw Vision pages generously for over 30 years to articles on many of the artists I collect. I am currently finishing an article for him on Everald Brown. Each of these persons I listed have contributed to the knowledge bank I have drawn from over the years. Far and away for me the greatest teachers I encountered were the artists themselves. They know best what the art is. The rest of us are their students.

Myrene Cox with “Acrobatic Love” (Milton George).

11. I know you loan a lot of art out from your collection to other exhibitions. Why is that important for you?
It came as a complete surprise to us. It wasn’t planned. We had no knowledge of the workings of the visual art world when we began. Early on in our collecting, somehow word got out. When we received museum requests for lending, we realized that lending needed to be an important function for the collection. Exhibitions are the principal way knowledge in the field grows. I developed the capacity to handle such requests professionally. I kept a good digital catalogue with high-quality digital images, so museums that were interested could view the works and make choices. I developed good packing skills for those institutions whose budgets didn’t allow for professional art shipping. In the past few years, collection works have been exhibited in Bristol and London in England, Paris, Sao Paolo, Kingston and Montego Bay, Jamaica, New York City, Washington D.C. and Miami.

12. There have been two major shows from your collection. What was it like seeing the work in space other than your own house and why was it important to you to do these shows? Would you ever plan another in the future?
The large “Redemption Songs” exhibition at Diggs Gallery, Winston-Salem, North Carolina USA, in 1997 marked the first time we had ever seen a large portion of our work in one place at one time. It was a wonderful feeling. It gave us a much fuller sense of what we had accomplished. I had helped secure Everald Brown a US visa and he spoke at the exhibition. I was able to videotape him piece by piece with him explaining each of his works in detail (except when I would point to a certain symbol, and he would say, “I can’t talk about that a-tall.”) I doubt there will be a large exhibition of the main works of the collection in the future, but we will continue to lend when asked. A large one-man exhibition in the U.S. of the work of the man whom Holland Cotter of the New York Times referred to as “the great Everald Brown” would certainly be in order. Next year marks the 20th anniversary of his death.

13. Are there any artists you are looking to add to your collection?
We are no longer adding works. We are at the stage of our lives where we have begun paring down. We made major donations of works to the National Gallery of Jamaica, Frost Art Museum in Miami and Fondo del Sol/MOCHA in Washington D.C. A museum in Europe purchased a large group of the works of Vincent Atherton.   

14. Is there anything else you would like to add? 
There is a lot of archival work still to accomplish including additional digitizing of audio and video tapes and slides. The work continues. Our contact is artjamaica2@yahoo.com.

Wayne Cox with Dudley Irons’ “Black Star Liner’” described by the New York Times as “an amazing sculpture pieced together almost entirely from matchsticks of Marcus Garvey’s fabled “Black Star Liner.” Caribbean Crossroads of the World exhibition, Studio Museum of Harlem, 2012.