May 21, 1998
Contact:
Ann Marie Deer Owens, (615) 322-2706
[email protected]
Self-taught art repository established at Vanderbilt University
NASHVILLE, Tenn. - Art and cultural historians, psychologists and writers with an interest in self-taught art will find a new national repository for supporting documents about self-taught art at the Heard Library at Vanderbilt University. Daniel Prince, a Vanderbilt alumnus, is the founder of "Self-Taught Artist Resources (S.T.A.R.)," a non-profit corporation dedicated to increasing awareness and appreciation for self-taught artists and their work. He has donated to Vanderbilt more than 40 cubic feet of photos, slides, artists' biographies and other supporting papers that document his 25 years of working with self-taught artists.
"The files form an invaluable nucleus and magnet for the related papers we shall hope to acquire," according to Marice Wolfe, head of Special Collections and university archivist. Prince became deeply interested in folk and other non-traditional art while a student at Vanderbilt from 1969 to 1973. After graduation, he continued to create his own sculpture and collect self-taught art while traveling around the country as part of a visiting artist program for the National Endowment for the Arts. He sought out artists without formal training in rural schools, prisons and other places without established art programs while exhibiting his own work. His article for the American Art Review titled "Giants of Tennessee: The Primitive Folk Sculpture of Enoch T. Wickham" is believed to be the first nationally published piece on folk art environment. In another article in the American Art Review titled "A Good Likeness: Techniques in Self-Taught Portraiture," Prince began exploring a neuroscience aspect to the self-taught artists' work. He has drawn from American pragmatism, Gestalt psychology and more recent research on how the structure of the art relates to specific locations in the artist's mind. Prince also wrote for "Art and Antiques" and "Americana" and published chapters in other books in this field. This culminated in his book "Passing in the Outsider Lane" (Journey Editions, 1995). For more information on S.T.A.R., contact Prince at (615) 783-0003. For more news about Vanderbilt, visit the News and Public Affairs home page on the Internet at www.vanderbilt.edu/News/
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