Today we’d like to introduce you to Carl Hammer.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
Carl Hammer Gallery was an outgrowth of an increasing passion for collecting American artists’ works, especially work by self-taught artists. During the formative years of building a collection, I made several significant discoveries; artists who had little if any presence in the larger American art scene. When I opened my gallery in 1979, there was not another Chicago gallery whose primary focus was centered on presenting work by self-taught, Outsider artists. These were artists who did not focus on their creation of art as art but on the necessity of expressing themselves and their visions through pictorial and symbolic image making.
The Chicago community responded to the introduction of this body of work very well. The renowned Chicago Imagists were already avid collectors, using this genre of work to inspire and be incorporated in their own art expression. Over a period of time, contemporary art collectors began expanding their collections to include different artists from this genre. Today, several “Outsider” artists are recognized in museums worldwide and are regularly included side by side with some the great names in art history.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Not entirely. Convincing the public of the importance of this body of work took some time and support. Like I say, the visionaries in the acceptance of this work, were the foresightful contemporary artists themselves, who recognized the purity and instinctive genius of these artist and the genre itself. Dubuffet, himself, created an entire body of expression based on his discovery and “borrowing” from them both imagery and ideas. In Europe the equivalence to this Outsider genre was referred to as Art Brut.
Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about Carl Hammer Gallery – what should we know?
As I have already revealed, I am most proud of the role I have played in expanding the public’s awareness and appreciation of this body of work. We now represent many academically trained artists as well, but all fit comfortably side by side with the artists we have discovered who are considered “Outsiders”. One artist which I began showing in my gallery, Bill Traylor, was born into slavery in 1854, and was a share cropper farmer after emancipation until the mid 1930’s. He was forced to move to Montgomery, AL after the Traylor plantation was sold off. There, in Montgomery, he was essentially a street person. He was discovered there by a young white artist by the name of Charles Shannon, who watched as he saw the former slave making rudimentary drawings of a blacksmith shop across the street. Struck by the innate brilliance of the work he saw, which was done on backside of small panels of found cardboard, Shannon began to collect every drawing he could by Bill Traylor over the next 5-6 years. In the early 1980’s the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. mounted a groundbreaking exhibition titled Black Folk Art in America. Bill Traylor was included in that revolutionary exhibition and that exhibition heralded the new found awareness and acceptance the art world would soon have regarding this material. Next year, 2018, Bill Traylor is being featured in a one person retrospective of his work at the Smithsonian Institution of American Art.
Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
Being committed to something I believed in and which gave so much inspiration to me personally. Believing also in the innate intelligence of the self-taught artist, and being determined to get others on board in recognizing it as well.
Contact Info:
- Address: Carl Hammer Gallery
740 N Wells Street
Chicago, IL 60654 - Website: www.carlhammergallery.com
- Phone: 3122668512
- Email: INFO@CARLHAMMERGALLERY.COM
Image Credit:
Henry Darger (girls at war), Mary Lou Zelazny (under water figure), Mr. Imagination (on throne), Bill Traylor (man carrying cross form), Carl Hammer w Atticus
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