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Featured Artist: T.A. Hay
Thomas Andrew Hay (1892–1988) was born in Clinton County, Kentucky, where he grew up on his family farm before leaving home at age fifteen. After several years spent “hobo-ing” throughout the United States and working as a map sketcher for the British military in World War I, he returned to Kentucky, where he would spend the rest of his life. It was not until Hay was in his late seventies, unable to keep up with farm work, that a woodworking hobby gave way to greater creative expression. He began creating simple, yet refined, images using accessible materials. With shoe polish for paint and his finger as a brush, he decorated gourds, wood blocks, paper plates, found styrofoam, and his own hand-carved sculptures.
Though his work may at first appear as conceptually simple as he has presented it visually, T. A. Hay’s work is imbued with meaning. He displays an innate ability to distill forms into fundamental, yet recognizable, geometries, bringing to mind Alabama artist Bill Traylor. The two-dimensional pieces exhibited in “Farm Works” depict such subjects as horses, ox shoes, and spinning wheels, his ardent repetition of which mirrors the meditative routine of farm labor. During his life, he occasionally received local press and visits to his home to view his art, but Hay’s work has not been widely shown.
The Jessica Weber Collection
2022
Jessica Weber (New York City) is an American art director, graphic designer, business owner, and adjunct professor of design. She founded her eponymous design firm in 1986, specializing in branding, marketing, and development strategies for highly effective communications in the not for profit sector.
Ms. Weber is a member of the board of the Society of Illustrators and serves on the advisory boards of the West Side Campaign Against Hunger, Aid for AIDS, the Fales Rare Book Library of New York University, and the Martina Arroyo Foundation. Ms. Weber is an adjunct teaching professor at Parsons School of Design, a faculty member of the Institute for Charitable Giving, a guest lecturer at Marywood University’s MFA design program, and is a former member of the faculty of the School of Visual Arts. She is Of Counsel to Jerold Panas, Linzy & Partners.
She previously served as Chairman of the Board of the Mercantile Library Center for Fiction and served on the boards of the Public Health Research Institute, Parsons School of Design, the Scholarship Fund of the Art Directors Club of New York, and the Presidents Advisory Council of New School University. Ms. Weber also served on the advisory board of the Medill School of Journalism’s Publication Program at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL.
David Butler, Flying Bird, 9” (ht) x 16”(w) x 9”(d)
She lectures frequently and has served on numerous juries for visual arts competitions. Ms. Weber is a member of the Century Association, ArtTable, Women in Development, the Art Directors Club of New York, the Society of Publication Designers, the Society of Illustrators, and is an alumna of both New York University and Parsons School of Design.
Tanner|Hill Gallery
Outsider Art Fair 2019
Tanner|Hill Gallery at the Outsider Art Fair - New York January 17-20, 2019:
Ulysses Davis
Ulysses Davis (American, 1914–1990) was a Savannah, Georgia, barber who created a diverse but unified body of highly refined sculpture that reflects his deep faith, humor, and dignity. His carvings were featured in the seminal 1982 exhibition “Black Folk Art in America, 1930–1980” at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where they were applauded as important examples of African American vernacular art. Because he wanted his work to stay together after he died, Davis rarely sold his sculptures. He said, “They’re my treasure. If I sold these, I’d be really poor.” As a result, the carvings have had little exposure outside Savannah, particularly since his death, and Davis is little known outside folk art circles. (credit: American Folk Art Museum, NYC, NY)
Willie Young
2019 Exhibition
On January 18, 2019, during Americana Week at Christie’s in New York, two Willie Young works from the William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation and Family Collections were sold to benefit the Foundation and the Harlem Children’s Zone.
Approximately 20 pieces by Willie Young were also on view in a companion gallery at Christie’s from January 12-18, 2019. The works in the exhibition were lent by the Willie Young Collection and the William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation.
View the Christie’s online catalogue here.
Damien Crisp
Interference - 2018 Exhibition
Interference included a compilation of Crisp’s work spanning many years, including paintings, collage, and his book, Slave. Probably best known for his political activism, his work is often viewed through a political lens, though it can also be read as deeply personal. Crisp’s work exists in a space between directness and ambiguity. Using poetic gestures, Damien Crisp suspends direct interpretations of his artwork through emotive mark-making, and he develops new linguistic associations with repetitive text. His artwork intuitively relates to anyone living in the 21st century. Unpacking the significance of Crisp's work is a thought-provoking exercise for semioticians, painters, and psychoanalysts.
Damien Crisp is an artist currently living and working in Chattanooga, TN. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and his Master of Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. His works in painting, writing, photography, collage, and installation. Learn More About Him Here.
This show was part of a curatorial series by Ashley Hamilton.
Ashley Hamilton
Guest Curator, 2018
Ashley is an important guest curator at Tanner | Hill Gallery. She was the co-founder and curator of Easy Lemon, the first artist’s residency program in Chattanooga, TN, where she hosted “happenings” created by established inter-media artists from around the United States. She started several curatorial projects, including a series of pop-up shows called "Gallery for a Night." During undergrad at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga, she helped manage Apothecary Gallery and served as an artist’s assistant for local artists. Additionally, she works as the public relations and creative director for New Dischord, an interdisciplinary arts festival in Chattanooga. In 2013, Ashley was honored with the prestigious “Artists and Authors Club” scholarship.
Ashley’s work as an artist and as a curator often explores issues regarding the struggle of self-identity, focusing on psychoanalytical notions such as displacement and repetition compulsion. Although trained as a painter, her work exists in an expanded field of painting, manifesting in various ways including performance, sculpture, installation, and video.
She is actively involved in the arts, and was recently featured as a “game-changer” in Chattanooga Now’s “Changing Chattanooga” series. Ashley spends her time on a sailboat in Florida and in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Available artwork is offered online here.
Tanner|Hill Gallery
Willie Young Featured at The Baker Museum
March 28 - July 23 2017
Willie Young view an installation of Thornton Dial's The Reservoir (1990) with Weatherspoon Museum Director Nancy Doll last summer.
Artwork by Willie Young will be featured at the Baker Museum in Naples Florida. The museum hosts the third installation of Inside the Outside: Five Self-Taught Artists from the William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation from March 28 through July 23.
Praise for the show by independent scholar Tom Patterson noted that Willie Young stands out from Thornton Dial, Nellie Mae Roe, Bill Traylor and James Castle through his "highly refined and... impressive command of shading and modeling".
Co-Curated by the Katonah Museum of Art, the exhibit was most recently on view at the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina Carolina.
Tanner|Hill Gallery Presents Drawings
Outsider Art Fair 2017
Tanner|Hill Gallery will show a private collection of drawings that date between 1890 and 1900 at the Outsider Art Fair - New York January 19-22 2017.
The works on paper possess a distinctive dialect of colloquially informed written passages that were created by an artist working just before the beginning of the 20th century. Locations mentioned in the drawings range from the rural midwest of the United States to the urban areas of southern states; and, they depict activities related to farm life, clothing and fashion, and historic battles from the Civil War. These homespun, iconoclastic vignettes of life and human foibles and animal habits, in general, are highly personal, creative drawings that are very distinctive versus the highly Victorian drawings that were popular at the time.
Tanner|Hill Gallery Presents Willie Young
Outsider Art Fair Paris 2016
Untitled, 2004. Graphite on paper, 24 x 18 in. Detail
October 20-23
Hotel du Duc 22 rue de la Michodière, 75002
Press:
artnet news
Tanner | Hill Gallery is pleased to present the work of Willie Young at Paris OAF 2016. This will be the first time Young’s work will be shown outside of the United States.
Willie Young was born in 1942 and has lived and worked in and near Dallas, TX his entire life. He is, broadly categorized, a self-taught artist. With the exception of the drawing classes he attended with Chapman Kelley’s in the 1960’s Young’s practice has developed independently, and in large part amid the quiet bustle of the barbershop where he worked shining shoes for the past several decades.
The “self-taught” designation is of course irrelevant to the viewing of actual artworks, and in Young’s case the term seems particularly anomalous as applied to drawings that powerfully contradict unspoken assumptions of works made outside the mainstream. Where qualities of blunt and uncensored expression might be expected, Young’s drawings are unvaryingly fine-handed: they are suggestive instead of forthright, muted instead of overt. They bring to mind a creative state of sustained and patient invention - in which cryptic forms unfurl through a deliberate cross hatch. Young’s restrained palette is limited to the dull sheen of graphite from a 2B pencil, occasional touches of white chalk, and the ground of his paper that rarely strays far in tone from the found-kraft wrapping he began using in the 1970’s.
Commonplace things - roots, acorns, cracked sidewalks - often serve as starting points for Young’s works. Revisited in countless variation through series of drawings, these initial forms take on new and unknown identities; extending and receding in untethered space, they hint at a sense of subtle freedom and mysterious purpose within the stark confines of the paper’s edge.
It is not surprising that these innately sophisticated drawings are often described in terms of a not-quite-deciphered puzzle. As Sarah Gold wrote of Young’s work in the New York Times:
His untitled pieces feature enigmatic objects — unrecognizable, but executed as carefully as medical illustrations — suspended in negative space, and all of them share a certain sort of clinical, sci-fi aspect. One drawing, of a segmented, horn-shaped form, might be a piece of armor worn by a futuristic warrior; another long-stemmed, geometric structure might be a space station on a distant planet. Still other shapes, bearing long articulated tendrils, suggest protozoan life-forms seen under a microscope.[1]
Tom Patterson, writing for the Winston-Salem review, described Young’s work as follows:
Aside from his finely honed drawing skills, Young’s work is distinctive for what it doesn’t show. In each case he gives what look like a carefully rendered segment of something that mostly goes unseen, as if it’s been erased or shrouded in impossibly dense fog identical in color to the brown wrapping paper on which Young apparently prefers drawing.[2]
Young’s work has been represented by Tanner|Hill Gallery since 2006 and featured in solo exhibitions at numerous art fairs across the United States. His drawings were included in Prospect New Orleans 2015, and were recently on view at the Katonah Museum of Art and the Weatherspoon Art Museum as part of the exhibition “Outside the Inside: Five Self-Taught Artists from The William Louis Dreyfus Foundation.” Young has been nominated this year for a Joan Mitchell Foundation 2016 Emerging Artist Grant.
[1] Sarah Gold, “Outsider Art under one roof at the Katonah Museum of Art,”
New York Times, NY Region, August 13, 2015.
[2] Tom Patterson, “Exhibition from billionaire’s art foundation challenges 'outsider' designation,”
Winston-Salem Journal, July 10, 2016.
Inside the Outside at the Weatherspoon Art Museum
August 2016
Willie Young’s work is currently on view at the Weatherspoon Art Museum in North Carolina, featured in “Inside the Outside: Five Self-Taught Artists from the William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation.” The exhibition includes Young’s drawings alongside the work of self-taught greats - James Castle, Thornton Dial, Nellie Mae Rowe and Bill Traylor. Organized by both the Katonah Museum of Art and Weatherspoon Art Museum, this traveling exhibition will head to the Baker Museum of Art in Naples, FL. next year.
“Inside the Outside” was reviewed in both the New York Times and The Greensboro News and Record.
Willie Young at Griffin Barber Stylist in Farmer’s Branch, Texas.
Tanner|Hill Gallery
Outsider Art Fair 2016
For the past two Outsider Art Fairs we have had solo shows for two different artists: Stephanie Wilde of Boise, Idaho and T.A. Hay of Kentucky. In this year’s fair, we will host a solo exhibition by Dallas based artist, Willie Young.
Although Young ‘scribbled’ most of his early life, as he says, the majority of his graphite drawings have been executed in-between shoe shines at various barbershops around Dallas since the mid-60s.
Freely drawn, untitled pieces on solid fields of found brown paper make up his earliest body of work. Young’s pieces expand from atmospheric, organic drawings seemingly untethered by gravity to nonspecific but heavily grounded surreal ‘landscapes’. Narrative is so unimportant to Young that he has never titled any piece.
Although narrative elements are extraneous to Young’s drawings, and his works are thematically unrecognizable, Young has said his work is inspired by observing ‘small life details’ - from a crack in the concrete, to the bones of small animals he has found and kept for inspiration, or dust particles floating in a framed window.
Most recently Young’s work was included in the Katonah Museum of Art exhibition Inside the Outside: Five Self-Taught Artists from the William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation. The exhibition travels to the Weatherspoon Museum of Art opening in May 2016.
The Outsider Art Fair has been a wonderful show this year, with the new venue of the Metropolitan Pavilion serving artists, exhibitors and visitors well. Winter Storm Jonas has given us all some challenges, but we're open and enjoying the intimate feeling lent to the day by the inclement weather outside. There have been many favorites, pictured here are Stephanie Wilde's work at Stewart Gallery, and Thornton Dial's "Smooth-Going Cats Going to the Top", 1988, at Fred Giampietro.
Tanner|Hill Gallery Presents T.A. Hay
Outsider Art Fair 2015
Tanner|Hill Gallery Presents Stephanie Wilde
Metro Show 2015
The Jealous Curator
Guest Curator, 2013
The Jealous Curator was a guest curator of the exhibition entitled Beautifully Boring at Tanner|Hill Gallery from February 8 – March 29 in 2013. Artists included Holly Farrell, Leah Giberson, Samantha French, and Mark Bradley Shoup. Below is her curatorial statement:
”There are beautiful things that we experience every day, but don’t really see. Buildings you pass while rushing to work, an old coffee mug on your desk, the cozy chair that you flop into when you get home from a busy day. Most people would never consider these things special enough to be artistic subject matter, but this collection of work is just that. Everyday things that your eye most likely skips right over. We need to take the time to slow down, and study the lovely objects and places that surround us… whether we realize they’re there, or not! All of them have a story to tell, and I think you’ll find that ‘boring’ really can be beautiful.”
Mark Bradley Shoup
