Up a creek with many a paddle

For its 15th anniversary, Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art celebrates with the exhibition “Take Me to the River.” If those words have you humming a certain new-wave anthem, the association isn’t completely off base. As it happens, David Byrne chaired the honorary committee that put together the institution’s fifth-anniversary show at the Chicago Cultural Center. That was back in the days when Intuit was a nomadic institution camping out in donated spaces, including the Roger Brown studio on Halsted. Work by the late Georgia artist Howard Finster graced the Talking Heads’ Little Creatures album, and Byrne showed tremendous support early on for Intuit.

But, fun facts aside, the title of the show was not picked with that in mind.“The connection to the river was important visually,” says curator Ken Burkhart. Which is partly the reason Intuit chose a piece by Chicago self-taught artist Joseph Yoakum for the invitation postcard. The river could also symbolically represent the different currents and streams of the folk art/art brut/outsider/self-taught world that Intuit has been exploring since its inception. “Yoakum occupies a special place in that early time period that we are representing in the context of the show,” Burkhart says. “Many Chicago collectors knew him and collected works directly from him.”

Since this is an exhibition that examines Chicago’s relationship with outsider art—rather than a straight-up (and done-to-death) survey—this is particularly apt. “One of the goals we had was to wade through this history that we have all heard a thousand times in a thousand different ways and not rewrite it, but reexplore it,” he says.

To that end, Intuit hosted a symposium (the final installment will be November 4 at the Arts Club). “The beauty of working on this show is being able to talk to people who collected in that time period [1960s–80s],” Burkhart says. He started the process of working on the exhibition a year ago by compiling a list of the key players in the city and then passed it around for input. That is how Chicago artist Gertrude Abercrombie, a surprise for this writer, came to be included. Burkhart says that more than one person asked, “What about Gertrude?”

Abercrombie has always been associated with the jazz scene and Chicago surrealists. “She sort of gained a recognition with a more established academic art group, less of an ‘outsider,’?” he says. But Abercrombie was largely self-taught and, as Burkhart points out, she had no interest in technique. “She fit quite nicely.” (There are several amazing pieces by Abercrombie currently on display at the Julia Thecla show at DePaul Art Museum.)

Most of the work is from local collections and includes a selection of text pieces by Missouri artist Jesse Howard (1885–1983). The late Chicago imagist Roger Brown first met Howard in 1971 and started collecting his hand-painted signs of philosophical rantings, including one here on a metal shovel.

And of course there is a Henry Darger: Jennie Ritchie, After the Raid, a long, double-sided watercolor from his series about little girls. The Darger piece is suspended from the press-tin ceiling so viewers can study both sides. It faces, appropriately, a piece by Howard Finster—the other superstar outsider artist. Among the wonders here are the large wooden cathedrals that Aldo Piacenza, a Chicagoan from Highwood, created as birdhouses.

Burkhart believes the exhibition covers all the right bases in part because so many people who care about the topic and the artists had some input. “That is the magic of doing a show,” he says. “You can start out with an idea and it pretty much tells you where to go.” That is, if you know how to go with the flow.

“Take Me to the River” is at Intuit through January 6, 2007.