Alex O'Neal, the Mean Hippies (Drawing With Rattlesnake Warrior and Red Rebels) Outsider Art

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Paper measures 21 X 33 inches
Born and raised in Mississippi, Alex O'Neal graduated from Rhode Island School of Design … Read more Paper measures 21 X 33 inches
Born and raised in Mississippi, Alex O'Neal graduated from Rhode Island School of Design and School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In the Eighties, his formal education overlapped regular visits with Mississippi self-taught artists, including Mary T. Smith, Luster Willis, and Son Ford Thomas. He later immersed himself in art brut collections and European art brut in Switzerland, Germany, and France. His work is also inspired by African-American self-taught outsider art. O'Neal's drawings and paintings have been shown at The Drawing Center, New York; BRIC, Brooklyn; P.S.122, New York; Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca, NY; Woodruff Arts Center, Atlanta; Tennessee Arts Commission, Nashville; Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS; Centre d’Art des Pénitents Noirs, Aubagne, France; Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans; Chicago Cultural Center; Ecomuseu, Valls d'Aneu, Spain; Amory Arts Center, West Palm Beach; Huntsville Museum of Art, AL; Rockefeller Art Center, SUNY Fredonia; ART LA; Field Projects, New York; LOG at Lump Gallery, Raleigh, NC; and Linda Warren Projects, Chicago. His work is in volumes 16, 38, and 104 of New American Paintings. His paintings and drawings idiosyncratically depict circumstances that associate Americans, i.e. dysfunction, nature worship, cults, homegrown terrorism, Hollywood, reverence for Native America. There is formal influence from stylization found in Romanesque fresco, early American portrait painting, and rock-n-roll imagery. Narratives eventually included other animals and earlier backwoods terrorists to make a very unpeaceable kingdom in works like “Mississippi Law: STOP”, “The Mean Hippies”, and “Untitled (Mesopotamian Dream)”. Some characters are in an ancient frame of mind, being “touched by the tiger”. Mean hippies, already attempting to fortify themselves through associations with animals, have various personal talismans, i.e. the bullet-riddled STOP sign, a peppermint shoestring. Supernatural characters speak star language, increasingly resemble animals, personify landscape and weather, and lick the sun for the ultimate empowerment from nature.
O'Neal has been awarded fellowships from John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, Tennessee Arts Commission, and National Endowment for the Arts. He has been a resident artist at the Studios At Mass MoCA, Djerassi Artists Program, Woodside, CA; Camargo Foundation, Cassis, France; Klitgården Refugium, Skagen, Denmark; Millay Colony for the Arts, Austerlitz, NY; Saltonstall Foundation, Ithaca, NY; Ragdale Foundation, Lake Forest, IL; Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, Temecula, CA; Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland, and Fundacíon Valparaíso and Centre d'Art i Natura, both in Spain.
The artist lives and works in Cooperstown, New York, and is represented by Linda Warren Projects, Chicago. See less