Herbert Singleton

Herbert Singleton's boldly carved and painted cedar panels both skewer and exalt his life and times. Singleton displayed keen insight into the socio-economic limitations imposed upon many in the New Orleans area. He railed against hypocrisy on both sides of the racial divide.

     Singleton overcame many hardships, some compounded by his own misdeeds. He survived a near-fatal shooting, drug addiction, and all tolled, nearly 14 years in prison—many of them in the infamous Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.

     He first derived meaningful income from artistic endeavors in the early 1980s, carving walking sticks for New Orleans buggy drivers and “voodoo protection” stumps for friends. After his final stint of incarceration, the dispirited artist found a soul-saving catharsis in woodcarving. He dismantled an old chifforobe and created his first bas-relief panel, Dog Worms In Me, which depicts a stark white skeletal figure cut out of a black background, bordered by red. The heads of serpents are shown peering from the infected figure’s ribcage.

     In such works as Who Do We Trust and Who Speak For Man, Singleton addressed our seeming inability to meet the standards we set for others. In one masterwork, he carved self-destructive indulgences—drugs, gambling, sex—into a huge cypress log he salvaged from the Mississippi River. Exhibited as the “Algiers Rosetta” in “High on Life: Transcending Addiction” at the American Visionary Art Museum, Singleton referred to his work more directly as the Tree of Death. In other more festive works he paid tribute to the uniqueness of New Orleans culture.

     Singleton's artworks are in numerous important public and private collections worldwide including the New Orleans Museum of Art, the High Museum in Atlanta, Georgia, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland.

 

—©Gordon W. Bailey

Art Outsider et Folk Art des Collections de Chicago. Paris: Halle Saint Pierre, 1998.

 

Bailey, Gordon W. "Herbert Singleton: 1945–2007" Raw Vision, no. 61 (Winter 2007): 26.

 

Diving in the Spirit. Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University, 1992.

 

Flying Free: Twentieth Century Self-Taught Art from the Collection of Ellin And Baron Gordon. Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1997.

Moses, Kathy. Outsider Art of the South. Atlgen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, 1999.

 

Perry, Regenia A. “Contemporary African American Folk Art in America: An Overview.” International Review of African American Art 11, no. 1 (1993): 4–30.

 

Sasser, Bill "Herbert Singleton" Raw Vision, no. 40 (Autumn/Fall 2002): 30–37.

 

Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art from the South, Volume 1, edited by William Arnett and Paul Arnett. Atlanta, Georgia: Tinwood Books in association with Schomburg Center for Research in Black Cultures, New York, 2000.

 

Yelen, Alice Rae. Passionate Visions of the American South: Self-Taught Artists from 1940 to the Present. New Orleans: New Orleans Museum of Art in association with University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 1994.