Bryn Mawr College

Come to a screening of James Castle: Portrait of an Artist , a documentary on the self-taught artist James Castle, (USA, 2008, 53min. as seen in the PMA)

PLUS

A post-film discussion with FILMMAKER Jeffrey Wolf (who’s worked on films such as The Ref (1994), Billy Madison (1995) and Holes (2003))
and
Molly Dougherty , EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR of The Foundation for Self-Taught American Artists

Thursday, April 16th

7-9pm

Thomas 224

“James Castle (1889- 1977) was born in rural Garden Valley, Idaho and produced a remarkable body of drawings, collages, and constructions. Profoundly deaf since birth, he never learned how to sign, read, or write in a conventional manner, but instead communicated through the eloquent vehicle of his art. Over the course of a life lived on his family’s three successive farms, he amassed thousands of works on and in paper—his parents’ role as postmasters likely providing much of this ephemera—appropriating fugitive scraps of printed matter and packaging materials for use as surfaces, collage elements, and source material to draw from memory.

The bulk of Castle’s work can be classified as drawings, rendered in his preferred medium (chosen over orthodox materials) of stove-soot in saliva—and sometimes a mysterious “color of an unknown origin,” probably pigment extracted from paper-pulp—applied with a sharpened stick as stylus.

James Castle’s work is now included in major museum collections throughout the U.S., including the American Folk Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art ”

check out the trailer:
http://www.foundationstaart.org/artist_single.aspx?artist=1

check out the latest New York Times article on James Castle:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/arts/design/27cast.html?_r=1&ref=arts

questions: janelson@bmc