Folk Art Gallery
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
In the summer of 2026, the LSU Museum of Art premieres the Folk Art Gallery, the museum’s first concentrated gallery featuring work by self-taught and visionary artists. The cornerstone of the showcase is six paintings from the American Folk Art Museum in New York, on a one-year loan made possible by the Partner Loan Network (PLN), an initiative of Art Bridges. Established in 2017 by philanthropist Alice Walton, Art Bridges is a nonprofit arts foundation dedicated to expanding access to American art. The PLN supports museums in lending and borrowing works from one another’s collections, activating objects that might otherwise remain in storage and increasing public access across diverse communities.
In addition to the exhibition, a required PLN component is a robust educational and community engagement plan, ensuring that each loan is accompanied by meaningful interpretive programming that deepens audience connection and broadens the impact of the artworks on view. As such, the LSUMOA is launching (talk about the education component program here).
Artists represented in the American Folk Art Museum loan (image gallery above) include Jimmy Lee Sudduth (Alabama, 1910–2007) and Mose Tolliver (Alabama, 1925–2006), David Butler (Louisiana, 1898–1997), Sam Doyle (South Carolina, 1906–1985), Purvis Young (Florida, 1943–2010), and Mary T. Smith (Mississippi, 1904–1995).
Also featured in the gallery are several works by artist, activist, and minister Dr. Charles Smith (b. 1940), drawn from a recent transfer of fifteen sculptures from the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art, Inc., in Biloxi, Mississippi. Originally part of Dr. Smith’s complex outdoor visionary environment of hand sculpted and painted concrete, metal, and found-object constructions at his home in Aurora, Illinois, which he coined the African American Heritage Museum, the works were in danger of being destroyed when the artist moved to New Orleans in 2001 to care for his mother. Recognizing the need to preserve Smith’s art, which illustrated the events, places, and people of the Black diaspora, the Kohler Foundation, Inc. stepped forward to save over 500 objects by placing them in nineteen organizations across the United States, including the Hilliard Art Museum in Lafayette. Eventually their holdings were relocated to Biloxi. The LSU Museum of Art is delighted to bring the objects back home to Louisiana, where the artist currently resides.
Rounding out the gallery are artworks on long-term loan from entrepreneur and collector Doug McCraw of Birmingham, Alabama, including a monumental painting by Purvis Young and a metal sculpture by Richard Dial (Alabama, b. 1955), paintings by Clementine Hunter (Louisiana, c. 1887–1988) drawn from the Museum’s extensive permanent collection, and a large drawing by Thornton Dial (Alabama,1928–2016), recently donated by Winifred and Kevin P. Reilly.
The Folk Art Gallery will be on view June 11, 2026–July 11, 2027.