Acknowledgments

Percy, Ann

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Acknowledgments

Ann Percy

James Castle: A Retrospective

Acknowledgments

Author

Ann Percy

PublisherPhiladelphia Museum of Art

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23013

Acknowledgments

With warmth and deep appreciation, we who have organized this exhibition and written its catalogue recognize the contributions of James Castle’s niece Geraldine Wade Garrow (1930–2007), who shared a home with the artist for twenty years. Her intelligence, perceptiveness, and sharp memory of the artist’s everyday life aided our research immeasurably, and her congeniality, enthusiasm, and hilarious sense of humor bore us along the sometimes rocky path toward rediscovering the man she knew as Uncle Jim.

James Castle was a fiercely hard worker. He discovered his mission early in life and pursued it with a vengeance, at his chosen task almost every day of his long life. The ghost of his determination seems to haunt those individuals who undertake to study his enormous production, as is demonstrated by the number of willing collaborators who assisted me in preparing this exhibition and catalogue and by the truly immense effort they contributed. Without them the project would have had no beginning, middle, or end.

Any serious endeavor involving Castle must start at the J Crist Gallery in Boise. Its director, Jacqueline Crist, acts as agent for the artist’s estate, and the gallery houses a considerable body of his works as well as a huge visual archive on his art and life. Jacque Crist knows more about James Castle than anyone alive, and she labored long and hard beside me to organize the exhibition and contributed an illuminating essay to this catalogue. Her husband, Charley Crist, in the course of the past three years became a historian—tracking down land records, censuses, historical photographs, and marriage and death certificates related to the Castle family—and a photographer as well, filling in many gaps in the huge photography campaign undertaken by the Philadelphia Museum of Art at the J Crist Gallery. Its excellent archivist, Andrea Merrell, did a yeoman’s job in providing a mountain of detailed information needed for both the exhibition and catalogue. Jacque, Andrea, and I together made the initial selection of works for the show, and I benefited greatly from their wide familiarity with Castle’s oeuvre. I also owe a huge debt of gratitude to Cate Brigden for her help. At the Boise Art Museum, curator Sandy Harthorn, who was able to meet James Castle at the beginning of her career at the museum and has worked with his art for more than three decades, could not have been more generous in sharing ideas and information with us. The museum’s registrar, Kathleen Bettis, was extraordinarily kind in her assistance.

One of the great pleasures of working on Castle in Boise was getting to know the various members of his family who remember him well, in particular his first cousin Eleanor Scanlon Thompson and his nieces and nephews Georgia Allred, Gail Johnson, the late Guy Wade Jr., and Joe Beach. Castle’s great-nephews and great-nieces Pat Garrow, Doug Wade, Kimberly Johnson, and Cathy Wade Morris were a delight to work with, and all have liberally shared their recollections of the artist. (I share my most fearsome life experience with Cathy and her husband, Lee, descending the very steep, narrow, unpaved Grimes Pass Road in the mountains near Garden Valley in a half-ton pickup towing a twenty-five-foot fifth-wheel camp trailer.) As a special celebration of the Castle exhibition, the entire family made a remarkable gift to the Philadelphia Museum of Art of twenty-three of the artist’s best works then belonging to the estate, a wonderful donation for which we are deeply grateful and that makes this institution’s holdings of Castle’s art second only to those of the Boise Art Museum among public collections. The staff of the Idaho School for the Deaf and the Blind in Gooding, in particular interim director Harvey Lyter and Jerry Wilding, director of its museum, have been most gracious in sharing their time, knowledge, and files with us. I am also indebted to the Idaho State Historical Society in Boise for the opportunity to publish a number of turn-of-the-century photographs of Garden Valley and Boise locales from their collection. Tom Trusky of the Idaho Center for the Book kindly provided a photograph of James at work as well as bibliographical information.

Many collectors of Castle’s art live in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, and the galleries that carry his work in those three cities have been helpful in countless ways. John Oilman of the Fleisher/Oilman Gallery in Philadelphia discovered Castle soon after his work began to appear on the market in the mid-1990s, fell in love with it, and introduced the artist to the city. His impeccable eye for Castle’s art guided me from the start, and several times he rescued me from deepest quicksand and set me back on the right road. William Pym, Claire Iltis, and Heather Shoemaker at the gallery provided much information and fielded numerous questions. In Chicago, Karen Lennox of the Karen Lennox Gallery, with her remarkable energy and commitment to Castle, assisted in many ways, not least of which was transporting me to fourteen Chicago-area private collections in two and a half days (despite her legendary skill at the wheel, my second most fearsome life experience). The results of those we-broke-the-sound-barrier-in-a-car excursions are evident in the large number of loans to the show from generous Chicago collectors. In New York, the staff of Knoedler & Company were unfailingly helpful in locating works in private collections, providing photographs, and offering advice when needed. I am especially grateful to Ann Freedman, Frank Del Deo, and Melissa De Medeiros for their unstinting and patient support.

At the same time that the Philadelphia Museum of Art began work on the James Castle exhibition, the Foundation for Self-Taught American Artists in Philadelphia, whose mission is to collect and create film footage on self-taught American artists, decided to make James Castle the subject of its first original documentary. I had the good fortune of collaborating often with Jeffrey Wolf of Breakaway Films during the creation of his film, and the exhibition and documentary became two independent but complementary enterprises that developed in a creatively intertwined manner. Writers for this catalogue have made good use of the transcripts of interviews created for the documentary—Jeff Wolf’s conversation with painter Terry Winters was so compelling that it is published in its entirety as one of the essays—and we are delighted to be able to include the finished film, James Castle: Portrait of an Artist, as a DVD in the print edition of this book. Sincere thanks go also to Jeany Wolf, Molly Dougherty, executive director of the foundation, and Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz, its founders.

Colleagues at museums lending to the exhibition have provided invaluable help, for which we are most appreciative: Brooke Davis Anderson at the American Folk Art Museum, New York; Sandy Harthorn at the Boise Art Museum; Suzanne Folds McCullagh and Mark Pascale at the Art Institute of Chicago; Jane O’Meara at the Milwaukee Art Museum; and Carter Foster at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. I owe a debt of gratitude to Robert Clay, director of the Boise Gallery of Art (now the Boise Art Museum) in the early 1960s, and to James Haseltine, director of the Salt Lake Art Center during those same years, for sharing their recollections with me. Much needed help with loans and research questions was also provided by Rachael Arauz, David Brownlee, Jonathan Bucci, Margaret Bullock, Annette Dixon, Jeanne Fulfs-Meisel, Jennifer Gately, Katherine Hutchinson, Maurie Kerrigan, Greg Kucera, Annalisa Olson, Judy Sourakli, and Waqas Wajahat. I have especially enjoyed working with folklorist Brendan Greaves, author of the essay on Castle’s text works in this catalogue, who has opened up whole new perspectives for me. Very special thanks are owed to Paula Marincola, director of the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative.

At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, many of my colleagues have been deeply involved with this project. Our stalwart and essential Special Exhibitions staff, Suzanne Wells and Zoë Kahr, nursed along the complicated arrangements for the show from the start, always cheerful and unflappable, even in the eye of whatever storm might be occurring at any given moment. Our conservators of works of art on paper, Nancy Ash and Scott Homolka, were asked two years ago to examine a few of the museum’s Castle works for stability for travel—and ended up volunteering to write a technical essay on the artist’s eccentric homemade and home-found materials, dispatching many misconceptions about how he fashioned his pieces. In addition, they provided all the medium descriptions for the catalogue’s checklist, a monumental task that serves to provide a much more comprehensive picture of the artist’s working methods than has hitherto been available. When they enlisted the help of the museum’s scientists Beth Anne Price and Ken Sutherland for scientific analyses of materials, the latter two became so intrigued with Castle’s art that they expanded the scope of their investigation and contributed their own essay to the catalogue. Together these contributions resulted in a groundbreaking study in the field of self-taught art. Specialized expertise and generous support for their work was provided by Michael Craig and Don Chegwidden at Crayola LLC, Forks Township, Pennsylvania; Jim Delaney at Ciba, Newport, Delaware; Suzanne Quillen Lomax at the National Gallery of Art, and Alison Oswald and Gina Gorrell at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Scott Stoeffler and Elaine Schumacher of McCrone Associates, Inc., Westmont, Illinois; Patrik Tiede at Magle Life Sciences, Lund, Sweden; and Andrew Lins at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The editor of this catalogue, Kathleen Krattenmaker, contributed so much to its creation—far beyond the fundamental task of editing—that she is truly part and parcel of its existence. Time and again she rescued me from certain shipwreck and by her extremely hard work skillfully shepherded the whole complex effort along the road to completion. Throughout she has been a joy to work with. Sherry Babbitt, director of publishing at the museum, gave every possible support to the project. Richard Bonk saw the catalogue into production with an eagle eye, while the book’s designer, Jo Ellen Ackerman of Bessas & Ackerman, conceived a volume very much in harmony with Castle’s own aesthetic. The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s photography department undertook to do as much of the photography for the book as possible, a colossal job that produced admirable results. Graydon Wood, senior photographer, took many of the pictures himself, mainly in Boise, and Andrea Nuñez and Jason Wierzbicki took others in collections in New York, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia. Sahar Coston did much of the photo editing, and Amanda Jaffe, with Conna Clark, director of rights and reproductions, coordinated the effort. Vivian and Gary Weisner, lenders to the exhibition, kindly hosted an afternoon of photography of works assembled from several New York collections.

I have been fortunate in having two extraordinarily able exhibition assistants, Evelyn Tauben and, after her departure, Meredith Rogers, who wrestled uncooperative databases into submission and produced miraculous lists, loan letters and loan forms, exhibition histories, bibliographies, and other necessary documentation, besides organizing the huge photographic campaign and checklist compilation. Between them, they accomplished the work of four people. Curatorial intern Lauren Rosenblum helped with bibliographic research. The museum’s splendid library staff, headed by Danial Elliott, proved essential, as always, and I am especially grateful to Lilah Mittelstaedt Knox, Mary Wassermann, Jesse Trbovich, and Evan Towle. Our registrar’s office has one of the largest jobs of any department in organizing the museum’s exhibitions, and I offer special thanks to Irene Taurins, senior registrar, along with Tara Eckert and Wynne Kettell. It was always a pleasure to work with our ever resourceful grants manager, Peter Dunn, who oversaw four major funding applications for the show. My colleagues in the Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs—Rhonda Davis, Gary Hiatt, Kevin Kriebel, John Vick, Shelley Langdale, Jane Landis, and, above all, Rita Gallagher—each contributed in much appreciated ways. Carlos Basualdo, Michael Taylor, and Emily Hage of Modern and Contemporary Art, Kathleen Foster of American Art, and Carl Brandon Strehlke and Jennifer Vanim of European Painting before 1900 provided critical aid at various points. Alice Beamesderfer, associate director for collections and project support, is always a strong and sustaining presence behind the museum’s exhibitions.

Five dear friends and colleagues helped more with this undertaking than my thanks can adequately express. Innis Howe Shoemaker, the Audrey and William H. Helfand Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, was a staunch and steady advocate of the project from the beginning; without such encouragement no exhibition can move forward. John Ittmann, curator of prints, has lived next door to an ever-spreading overflow of James Castle images for the last three years and, with his remarkable eye, offered almost daily some acute and articulate insight into the artist’s work, many of which no doubt made their way into my essay. My esteemed niece and longtime friend Marion Boulton Stroud Swingle, one of the stellar figures in the contemporary art world of Philadelphia and far beyond, is a firm believer in Castle’s worth and turned this belief into generous support of the show. James Castle’s niece Gerry Garrow, until her untimely death in 2007, was the backbone of all our efforts to rediscover her uncle and his art; every expedition with her was a beguiling and nostalgic trip into the past. Anne d’Harnoncourt adored James Castle’s work and lent this enterprise her perfectly attuned attention—a push here, a pull there—exactly as needed. It is a great sorrow to all of us that she is not here to do what she loved best: edit, tweak, advise, and then delight in yet another of the many exhibitions she saw into being at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Ann Percy, June 2008

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