Creating Connections: Self-Taught Artists in the Rosenthal Collection Audio Exhibition
Bessie Harvey (American, 1929–1994), Peace, 1987, found wood, beads, feathers, and paint, 41 x 32 x 30 in. (104.1 x 83.3 x 76.2 cm), Collection of Richard Rosenthal
Verbal Description
Hello, my name is Darcy Schwass, and I am the museum’s director of marketing and communications. I will be reading the verbal description for Peace by Bessie Harvey in Creating Connections: Self-Taught Artists in the Rosenthal Collection.
Bessie Harvey was an American artist who lived from 1929 to 1994. Her sculpture, Peace, from 1987, is made of found wood, beads, feathers, and paint. It is in the collection of Richard Rosenthal.
Peace, by Bessie Harvey, is a sculpture in the round measuring 41 inches tall by 32 by 30 inches or 104.1 by 83.3 by 76.2 centimeters. Using found wood, beads, feathers, and paint, the artist created pieces she called (quote) “dolls.” This composition has no main viewpoint (in other words, there is no front or back). In this irregularly shaped and roughly textured assemblage, five heads spring up from a salvaged tree trunk or large branch. The lower part of the sculpture is painted red, silver, and black. The black area forms a roughly defined face with small red eyes and a row of white teeth. This form stretches upward into several limbs painted white, blue, brown, and silver. A large white head with a blue cap, red lips, and a thinner face extends from the top. There are also three brown heads with white eyes and grinning faces. The tallest one in the center has a silver headdress with a long, sharp, horizontal protrusion painted in white. One head on the outside has a headdress made of feathers. A silver bird head sits below this grouping and to the right.
Label Text
Hello, my name is Darcy Schwass, and I am the museum’s director of marketing and communications. I will be reading the label for Peace by Bessie Harvey in Creating Connections: Self-Taught Artists in the Rosenthal Collection.
Bessie Harvey was an American artist who lived from 1929 to 1994. Her sculpture, Peace, from 1987, is made of found wood, beads, and paint. It is in the collection of Richard Rosenthal.
Bessie Harvey’s Peace seems animated with an intense and magical energy. Some scholars view Harvey’s transformations of tree roots and branches as an extension of African art and religious beliefs. She perceived spirits in the organic forms and saw her role as to reveal them as God instructed: “I talk to the trees…. There’s souls in the branches and roots. I frees them.” She also felt obligated to teach Black Americans “the truth about themselves,” as her daughter, Faye Harvey Dean, notes. “Because everything we know, everything we have ever learned and been taught, for generations, was what we were taught by another race, not our own.”
Harvey was confident in who she was. “She had such an imagination that she would take us places where we’ve never been before,” Dean reminisces. Harvey shared her small sculptures with the patients at the Alcoa, Tennessee, hospital where she worked, until a visitor with art world connections recognized their sales potential.