Article relating to an exhibition, 1982
Published by: Time magazine
Year published: 1982
Number of pages: 2
Unpaginated.

Exhibition review of Black Folk Art in America, 1930 - 1980, Finale for the Fantastical: Washington’s Corcoran mounts a fiery, marvelous folk show. Time magazine, March 1, 1982. The exhibition was held at the Corcoran, in Washington, D.C.

In the review art critic Robert Hughes wrote very admiringly about the exhibition, which had “opened at the Corcoran last month… Fifty years, 20 artists (most of them completely unknown outside their own communities), and almost 400 works - this is a singular act of discovery. Lovers of the quaint need not attend, for there is something fiery, marvelous and strong every ten feet.”

In this review, Hughes was particularly taken with self-taught artist James Hampton’s magnificent work, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly, c. 1950-64, 180 pieces in total configuration, gold and silver aluminium foil, kraft paper and plastic over wood furniture, paperboard and glass.

Wrote Hughes “[the exhibition’s] masterpiece… is James Hampton’s Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly. Hampton (1909-64), a janitor for the General Services Administration in Washington, started his own sect, of which he was the only member. The Throne was his life’s work. It occupied him for 15 years, and it was still unfinished, locked in a rented garage, at his death. It was provoked by visions of Moses, the Virgin Mary and Adam. They inspired him to raise a monument, not to a past event but to a future one - the Second Coming of Christ. [The work’s] centrepiece would be a throne on which God would sit, surrounded by his angels and saints.”

Hughes devoted a significant amount of his review to Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly, concluding, somewhat ruefully, that “nothing else in in the show is quite so majestic…” Hughes argued that the exhibition represented a passing moment in time, or the end of an era, and that societal changes worked against the continued flourishing of contemporary Black folk art. He concluded, emotively, that “When popular culture becomes the quantified product of skilled technicians - something done to people and not by them - folk art dies. So one should see it now. It will not be here tomorrow. This is the last of it.”