Leroy Person (1907 - 1985) | Bench

North Carolina
Circa: 1978
Circa: 24" x 35" x 14"
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Born in 1907, Leroy Person was an African American artist from Mud Castle of Occoneechee Neck, North Carolina. Raised on sharecropped farmland, Person worked his adult life at a sawmill and retired due to work-related respiratory issues.

After retirement, Person began carving into fence posts, the clapboards, and moldings of his house. With encouragement from a neighbor, he started creating freestanding sculptural works made with discarded wood that he carved and then colored with wax crayons.

Person’s art is clearly an extension of the African cultural diaspora, yet his work is fully singular. It doesn’t look like anyone else’s, and no one else’s looks quite like his.

His carved pieces of wood are dense with incised geometric and organic leaf and tree-like patterns, circles that are said to represent the sun and saw blades, and chiseled images of wrenches that hark back to his sawmill days are sometimes scattered within the overall designs.

His work often has freestanding or vertical elements that he put onto tableaus, representing reductive interpretations of snakes and farm animals, like hens and roosters. Person would also sometimes whittle numbers and letters representing a symbolic language known only to him and his family. He used ordinary crayons as one would, in a formal sense, use encaustic wax—heavily worked and rubbed into the chip-carved wood surface that gives it a sheen and surface quite different than paint. Person’s work is deceptively simple and the more time one spends with it the subtle complexities, sophisticated forms and sublime nature of the works come through.

Among others, Person’s work is in the permanent collections of The Smithsonian, The American Folk Art Museum, and The High Museum in Atlanta.

Provenance: Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 1986; Private Southern Collection.

HIGH RESOLUTION IMAGES AVAILABLE.

Condition: Excellent.

Price: please inquire

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