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PrintNot Your Grandma's Christmas Angels
Folk-art show focuses on highly personal apparitions
Karl Mullen, "Priestess"
used courtesy of American Folk Art & Framing
Most angels harking the herald in December are depicted in lovely tones of benignity or whimsy: the slender golden-haired messenger, the chubby Hummel cutie. But when Betsey-Rose Weiss, owner of American Folk Art & Framing in downtown Asheville, put out a call to her roster of visionary artists, she wasn't expecting the usual. "I had high hopes, because knowing these artists as I do, we speak of spirit, God and revelations...a lot." The response, she says, "was immediate and overwhelming, the conversations deep, and the resultant paintings deeply personal."
Rudy Bostic sees Biblical visions in cardboard boxes, and then, says Weiss, "cuts the boxes apart, leaving the parts where his visions are located." His revelatory "Praying Angel," in which a Byzantine-serious icon is trimmed in birdlike feathers and framed by a series of detailed illuminations, invokes the Old Testament (as does much of visionary folk art). Lucy Hunnicutt, a gallery regular, contributes a portrait of a full-figured, enigmatically smiling African-American angel held close by doves and a plaintive message: "When you love folk, you can't stand the fact that they are being unjustly treated." Karl Mullen's indigo-haloed "Priestess" is totem-like and solemn, her mission indeterminate but unwavering. Wood carving and ceramic sculpture are also represented in the 11-person exhibit.
"These are not traditional Christmas-themed spirits, nor seasonal, but eternal," says Weiss. "They are personal visions of the the angels that surround each artist."
Virgins, Saints and Angels runs through Dec. 31. www.amerifolk.com
