How you can participate
In addition to producing full-length, broadcast-quality documentary films and videotaping living artists and environments, the Foundation actively researches and collects existing films, videos, raw footage, and images of artworks about self-taught American artists.
We need your help! Donations of material for immediate use on this website and for future inclusion in Foundation produced films would be welcome. Outright gifts—of film and video (finished and raw footage), audio, digital images, artists' portraits, and links to relevant websites—will help the Foundation fulfill its mission and provide an important resource for the many scholars, curators, collectors, advocates, and champions of this important area of artistic achievement. For more information, please contact mdougherty@FoundationSTAART.org.
Foundation For Self-Taught American Artists' Featured Film:
A 53-minute documentary film by Jeffrey Wolf, produced by the Foundation for Self-Taught American Artists, portrays James Castle's life and creative process, as told by family members, art historians, curators, artists, collectors, and members of the deaf community. A true case of triumph of the spirit, Castle's inspirational story is one of monumental achievement.
About this film
Purchase the DVD
Purchase the Soundtrack
Other films the Foundation recommends:
Grandma's Bottle Village
Grandma Tressa Prisbrey built her first bottle house to hold her 17,000 pencils. This was the beginning of The Bottle Village in Simi Valley, California. Interviewed at age 84, Grandma Prisbrey is a vivacious guide to her brilliant houses crammed with objects scavenged from the county dump. The film is an exploration of her creativity, pizzazz, and sense of the absurd. The film lovingly documents the interiors of 15 of her houses and sidewalk mosaics—all masterpieces of assemblage and tapestries of artifacts. One of Light-Saraf Films most popular titles, Grandma’s Bottle Village is also part of their compilation DVD Visions of Paradise.
About this film
About Bottle Village
The Cats of Mirikitani
Eighty-year-old Jimmy Mirikitani survived the trauma of WWII internment camps, Hiroshima, and homelessness by creating art. But when 9/11 threatens his life on the New York City streets and a local filmmaker brings him to her home, the two embark on a journey to confront Jimmy's painful past. An intimate exploration of the lingering wounds of war and the healing powers of friendship and art, this documentary won the Audience Award at its premiere in the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival.
About this film
Forrest Bess: Key to the Riddle
Painter, fisherman, visionary, eccentric—Forrest Bess lived his life in obscurity, at an isolated bait camp off the East Coast of Texas. From 1949 through 1967, Bess showed at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York City (along with artists like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko). But Bess's art was only part of a grander theory, based on alchemy, Jungian philosophy, and aboriginal rituals, which proposed that hermaphrodism was the key to immortality. Narrated by actors Willem Dafoe and Ruth Maleczech the documentary combines the beauty of Bess's art with the drama and tragedy of his personal life. Interviews with people who knew Bess, including art historian Meyer Schapiro (his last interview) and Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman bring life to this forgotten artist. Forrest Bess: Key to the Riddle is a fascinating look at one of America's most unusual artists. Producer-director: Chuck Smith. Director & camera: Ari Marcopoulos, 2000, color/b&w, 48 minutes.
About this film
The Angel That Stands by Me: Minnie Evans' Paintings
Minnie Evans is the embodiment of the visionary artist. She is an 88-year-old Black painter in North Carolina who has created a rich world of mythical animals, religious symbols, and natural beauty. The film explores the sources of her art, focusing on her mystical visions, on Airlie Garden, with its magnificent azaleas and swans, where she worked for 27 years and did most of her paintings, and on the African-Methodist church where the connection between her art and her religious fervor becomes evident. She tells about her mystical visions and traces her slave ancestry to her great grandmother's grandmother who was brought from Trinidad and sold as a slave in North Carolina. We see Minnie with her 101 year old mother and at the Evans' family reunion of six generations. Minnie Evans has had many solo exhibits, including one at the Whitney Museum in New York.
About the Artist including a short video clip
More about this film
The Sacred Vision of Howard Finster
Perhaps the most famous American self-taught artist of all—with over 46,000 numbered pieces, probably the most prolific, too—Reverend Howard Finster was the self-styled prophet and superstar of the scene. In the early 1960s, after preaching for forty years, Finster was called upon by God to transform the land around his Summerville, Georgia, home into the Paradise Garden, a towering found-object sculptural shrine to the Lord and human industry and invention, which eventually included the functioning World’s Folk Art Church, Inc.
About the Artist including a short video clip
Purvis Young: Contemporary Urban Painter
Born in Liberty City, Miami in 1943, the painter Purvis Young is today intimately linked to Overtown, another Miami neighborhood that has provided inspiration, raw material, and audience for his constructed paintings. A deep-seated sense of place and of history suffuses Young’s ecstatic, rhythmic surfaces; his story is likewise the story of his longtime community.
About the Artist including a short video clip
More about this film
Possum Trot: The Life and Work of Calvin Black
Calvin Black was a folk artist who lived in California's Mojave Desert and created more than 80 life-size female dolls, each with its own personality, function, and costume. He also built the "Bird Cage Theater," where the dolls perform and sing in voices recorded by the artist. The film works on two levels. One is the documentation of the artist's legacy and commentary on women: grotesque female figures moving in the desert wind and the theater with its frozen "actresses," protected by his widow from a world she views as hostile. The other is the re-creation of the artist's vision through the magic of film, as the camera enables the dolls to move and sing and brings theater to life as the artist imagined it. Possum Trot is part of the "Visions of Paradise" series on contemporary folk artists directed and produced by Irving Saraf and Allie Light.
About the Artist including a short video clip
More about this film