Meet the Folk Artists Who Turned Everyday Life Into Art

Anna Mary Robertson had spent most of her adult life doing what farm wives did—cooking, quilting, raising children, running a household through the long seasons of the Virginia and New York countryside. When arthritis made embroidery too painful to continue, her sister Celestia suggested she try painting instead. She was seventy-eight years old. What followed was one of the most improbable careers in American art history.

Art collector Louis J. Caldor discovered her work hanging in a drugstore window in 1938 and immediately bought several canvases. Within two years, the Galerie St. Etienne in New York was mounting her first solo exhibition. By the 1950s, her shows were breaking attendance records worldwide. She lived to 101, producing more than 1,500 canvases—rolling landscapes of a remembered rural America filled with apple orchards, snowy hills, and the warmth of communal work. Sugaring Off, one of her most beloved paintings, sold at Christie’s in 2006 for over $1.3 million.

Howard Finster was a Baptist minister in Georgia who had already spent years building an elaborate folk art sculpture garden—his “Paradise Garden” in Pennville—before a vision in 1976 changed his direction entirely. He saw a face in a smear of white paint on his thumb and heard a voice he believed was God telling him to paint sacred art. He took the commission seriously.

He went on to complete more than 46,000 numbered works, tracking the count meticulously because he believed God had assigned him a specific total. His flat, densely lettered canvases mix Bible verses with Elvis Presley, UFOs, and American history—an idiosyncratic theology rendered in the brightest possible colors. You may have encountered his art without realizing it: he painted the album covers for R.E.M.’s Reckoning and Talking Heads’ Little Creatures, bringing his visions to a whole new audience.

Bill Traylor was born into slavery in Benton, Alabama, around 1853. He spent decades as a sharecropper after emancipation, then moved to Montgomery in 1928. By the late 1930s, elderly and homeless, he was sitting on the sidewalks of Monroe Street with pencil and cardboard, drawing. He was approximately eighty-five years old when he made his first piece of art.

From 1939 to 1942 he produced nearly 1,500 works on scraps of cardboard—bold, simplified figures of people, animals, and scenes from rural and urban Black life. His imagery has a taut, almost architectural economy: a single dog, a man on a mule, a group gathered at a fountain. A young artist named Charles Shannon organized his first exhibition in 1940. None of the works sold. In 2018, the Smithsonian American Art Museum mounted a major retrospective—the largest ever devoted to an artist born into slavery—and the world finally caught up.

Henry Darger was born in Chicago in 1892, raised in poverty, and spent most of his adult life working as a hospital janitor and custodian. He lived alone in a rented room, attended mass daily, and kept almost entirely to himself. When his landlords discovered the contents of his apartment after he moved to a nursing home in late 1972, they found something staggering.

Darger had spent decades creating In the Realms of the Unreal—a 15,145-page illustrated fantasy novel, accompanied by hundreds of large-scale watercolor and collage illustrations depicting a rebellion of child slaves led by heroines called the Vivian Girls. It is widely described as the longest work of fiction ever written. He died the following year, one day after his eighty-first birthday, never knowing his work would one day hang in major art museums. The discovery remains one of the most astonishing finds in the history of American art.

On Good Friday 1935, Minnie Evans sat down and made her first drawings. She later said she had been compelled by visions and dreams she could no longer hold back. Born in North Carolina in 1892, she had left school at thirteen and spent years doing domestic work before becoming the gatekeeper at the beautiful Airlie Gardens in Wilmington—a job she would hold for decades, collecting admission tickets while the botanical grounds bloomed around her.

Her drawings are layered and radially symmetrical, full of central faces with wide-open eyes, lush botanical forms, and imagery drawn from the Bible and the natural world. She worked in pencil, ink, wax crayon, and oil on paper, building compositions of remarkable formal invention. Art historian Nina Howell Starr began championing her work in the early 1960s; by 1975, the Whitney Museum had mounted a solo show. Today her work is held by the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian, the Whitney, and more than forty other institutions.

Martín Ramírez left his home in Jalisco, Mexico, in the mid-1920s to find work on California’s railroads. He knew no English. The Depression cost him his job, then his bearings. By 1931 he was homeless and had stopped speaking; he was detained by police and committed to a state psychiatric hospital, where he would spend the remaining thirty-two years of his life.

Working with whatever he could find—paper bags, examining-table paper, pages glued together with oatmeal and saliva—he created drawings of striking formal power: horseback riders, Madonnas in flower-framed niches, and trains entering tunnels through concentric bands of finely drawn line. A visiting professor named Tarmo Pasto noticed his work in the late 1940s and began saving it. Ramírez died in 1963, largely unknown outside the hospital. In 2015, the U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp honoring him, and the American Folk Art Museum held a landmark retrospective of his work in 2007.

Edgar Tolson grew up in the mountains of Wolfe County, Kentucky, the fourth of eleven children. He worked as a carpenter and stonemason, married twice, and fathered eighteen children. After a stroke in 1957 left him unable to continue heavy labor, he devoted himself to woodcarving—and discovered he had something urgent and particular to say.

Tolson worked within the Appalachian whittling tradition, but his subjects became increasingly personal. His signature “Fall of Man” cycle—a series of carved figures depicting Adam, Eve, the serpent, and the expulsion from Eden—is considered a masterpiece of American folk sculpture. In 1971, Smithsonian curator Ralph Rinzler included his work in the Festival of American Folklife in Washington, D.C., bringing national attention for the first time. The Whitney Biennial followed in 1973. The Smithsonian American Art Museum holds several of his carved figures today.

Mose Tolliver was born near Pike Road, Alabama, around 1918 or 1920, one of twelve children of sharecroppers. He found work in Montgomery doing odd jobs. In the late 1960s, while working at a furniture factory, a load of marble fell and crushed his legs. Unable to work, he began painting to pass the time and ease his pain. When the factory owners offered him art lessons, he turned them down. He wanted to find his own way.

Working with house paint on plywood, door frames, and scrap wood, he developed a flat, frontal style of startling directness. He signed everything “Mose T,” with a distinctive backward S. His subjects—birds, watermelons, animals, and self-portraits often showing himself upright and vital on crutches—have a warmth and wit that collectors recognized immediately. His work is now held by the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.