Folk Art

One of Ulysses Davis' granddaughters has said the artist used to sit in front of the television on election night, a block of wood in hand, ready to start carving a bust of the winner once the election was called. Until his death in 1990, Davis added each new president to the collection of 40 busts that has become his best-known work. The works are part of an exhibition called "The Treasure of Ulysses Davis" at Atlanta's High Museum of Art.

Packed to the rafters with folk art from Mexico and other parts of Latin America, the Folk Tree has been a Pasadena institution for years. But rising rent and slowing sales are forcing owner Rochalinne "Rocky" Behr to look for new digs for her South Fair Oaks Avenue store, a labor of love into which she has poured 20 years and thousands of dollars in personal savings. Behr closed a nearby second location in March because of sluggish sales.

If you think that immigrant bashing is practically becoming an art form in America, you may want to stop by UCLA and inspect the literal evidence. The targets are hanging on display at the university's Fowler Museum, life-size pinatas of half-human, half-rabbit creatures that practically dare you to pick up a stick and take a hard whack at them. They belong to "Green, Go!"

Jimmy Lee Sudduth, a folk artist known for painting with mud, berries and other items to create images of people, buildings and his dog, Toto, has died. He was 97. Sudduth, who had been in declining health, died Sept. 2 at a medical center in Fayette, Ala., a town in the rural western part of the state where he grew up and first gained wide notice in the 1970s and 1980s. A prolific, self-taught artist, he began painting as a child.

ON the surface, Charles Dickson and Dominique Moody appear to have much in common. Both are distinguished local African American artists who have persevered through potentially debilitating health problems. Both are storytellers -- the soul of folk art -- who have a love of found objects, which they often incorporate into their art.

GRACING the exhibition catalog cover for "Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India" is a detail from a painting by Nilima Sheikh titled "Firdaus II: Every Night Put Kashmir in Your Dreams." In it a man holds open his robe to reveal an abdominal wound, vaginal in suggestion, as well as a landscape replete with tiny meandering rivers, stepped mountains, lush and arid lands, temples and villages, curly clouds and wayward winds. The landscape covers the man's uncovered torso.

Captivated by the roadside tableaux of California, a young Chicago transplant started photographing the unorthodox landscape: a ranch covered with hubcaps, a rock-shop yard with hand-carved dolls, a golf course punctuated with signs of hand-painted poetry. The intent was to document "a magical world created from what most other people would consider junk," Seymour Rosen said.

Mose Tolliver, a folk artist whose self-portraits and vivid images of nature and the female form done in house paint on plywood made him a leader of the modern-day "outsider art" movement, has died. He was 82.

As children of the Great Depression, Jerome and Evelyn Ackerman had modest dreams: They wanted to own their home and decorate it with beautiful things. In 1952, the couple left Detroit to start a mom-and-pop arts studio in Culver City, and in the decades that followed they produced hundreds of handmade ceramics, tile mosaics, woodcarvings and rugs -- affordable home furnishings that, starting Sunday, will be elevated to museum pieces.

For James Gibson, a black college dropout in the 1950s, the future seemed dreary. Gibson, living here in what was an outpost of the Jim Crow South, saw few opportunities besides hard, monotonous work on the railroad, or picking oranges and grapefruit. Then a friend told him of a lucrative, if improbable, alternative to menial labor. Paint a Florida outdoor scene, then sell it, the friend told Gibson. It was advice -- and it was a dare.