As part of its mission to give our community access to a visual narrative of the American South and highlighting art and artists in our community, The Do Good Fund is thrilled to offer this unique opportunity to see an abundance of work by Howard Finster, arguably the most renowned figure in Southern outsider art; and to work with the Largeman family who have developed an extensive private collection of folk art. Additionally, the back gallery will feature work by two more artists from the Largeman collection who have both made substantial contributions to Southern folk art: John Henry Toney and Purvis Young.
Howard Finster (1916-2001), a self-proclaimed Man of Visions, was born in Valley Head, Alabama as one of 13 children. In his 84 years of life, Finster worked as a farmer, factory employee, minister, bicycle repairman, and a professional artist, making over 46,000 paintings and painted objects. Creating cover art for two popular album covers by R.E.M. and The Talking Heads in the 1980's launched the artist to national fame. Finster's mission to "preach through paint" manifested itself through the spiritual and biblical imagery in his work. In addition to spiritual imagery, the incorporation of secular elements such as Elvis, Coca-Cola, and Henry Ford, create a clear touchpoint for his late twentieth-century audience and for the culture today. His prolific practice and the dissemination of his message throughout the country brought attention to the work of all varieties of artists throughout the South.
John Henry Toney (1928-2019), hailed from Seale, Alabama, at the edge of a swamp marsh. His life-long love for drawing led him to create work on board, poster-board, and cardboard using paint pens and markers. Although Toney's work does not intentionally reference any other artists or style, his self-taught drawings of animals and exaggerated female forms, are rich with personal references including his phone number, the expiration date of his driver's license and his age. He gained notoriety through his connection to Butch Anthony's Possum Trot Auction House and the Do-Nanny folk art festival.
Purvis Young (1943-2010), was an American artist of Bahamian descent who grew up in Miami, FL. He utilized found materials to develop a body of work blending painting, drawing, and collaged elements. Young found inspiration in his collection of documentaries, art books, and American history and spiritual folklore. Motifs of wild horses, landscapes, figures, sages, angles, warriors, boats, sports, and musicians, to name a few - contributed to Young's purposeful, artistic vernacular which became a vehicle for social commentary and a critique on social injustice. His work was featured in the 2019 Venice Biennale and resides in collections of museums around the world such as the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Centre Pompidou, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Please join us for a Do Good Salon on Thursday, April 17 at 6:00PM featuring a talk by Katherine Jentleson, Senior Curator of American Art and Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art at the High Museum of Art.
Katherine “Katie” Jentleson, PhD, is Senior Curator of American Art and the Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art at the High Museum of Art. Since joining the High in 2015, she has curated ten exhibitions, including Patterns in Abstraction: Black Quilts from the High’s Collection, George Voronovsky: Memoryscapes in 2023, and Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe, which has toured the country from 2021 through 2025. Her exhibitions and publications have been awarded major support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Art Bridges Foundation, and the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation, and the Terra Foundation for American Art. She has grown the High’s internationally renowned folk and self-taught art collection by more than six hundred objects, including major acquisitions of work by Voronovsky, Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, the Gee’s Bend quilters, and Henry Church. In 2022, she began a three-year term as the Co-Executive Editor of Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art. Jentleson holds a B.A. from Cornell University and a PhD in art history from Duke University. In 2022 she began a three-year term as co-Executive Editor of Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art.
Before she became a curator, Dr. Jentleson worked as an arts journalist in New York. Through her editorial assignments and general experiences at galleries and museums there, she discovered her passion for self-taught artists and their historical legacy in the United States. In 2010, she began her graduate studies in art history at Duke University, where she focused her research on the rise of self-taught artists during the interwar period. During her graduate career she received awards and fellowships from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Archives of American Art, and the Dedalus Foundation, and she contributed research and writing to exhibitions at the American Folk Art Museum, the Ackland Art Museum, the Nasher Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Prospect.3 New Orleans. Dr. Jentleson adapted her dissertation into a peer-reviewed book Gatecrashers: The Rise of the Self-Taught Artist in America (University of California Press, Spring 2020) and the High Museum of Art’s 2021 exhibition of the same name.
All Do Good Fund exhibitions and events are free and open to the public
Gallery hours: Wed, Thurs, Fri: 1-5 PM | Sat: 10-3 PM
The Do Good Fund Gallery | 111 12th Street suite 103 | Columbus, GA 31901