Lisa Stone remembers the first time she visited Jesse Howard, a self-taught artist who festooned his Missouri farm with hand-painted signs. “He called his place ‘Sorehead Hill,’” says Stone, curator of the School of the Art Institute’s Roger Brown Study Collection. “He was one hell of a sorehead. We’d be standing by the side of the road, talking, looking at signs and so forth, and a car would drive by. And if the car didn’t stop he’d yell, ‘No cooperation!’ He’d scream it out loud. ‘No cooperation!’”
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Uncooperative others were a crucial theme for Howard, whose art is featured in a unique show Stone cocurated. They motivated the very first unconventional sign he painted, in retaliation when vandals destroyed a model plane he’d put on display. More than that, they triggered a 30-year outpouring of paint and rebuke–for betrayal, corruption, exploitation, failures of love. “I have been bawled out, bawled up, held up, held down, hung up, bulldozed, blackjacked, walked on, cheated, squeezed and mooched,” he once wrote. “Stuck for war tax, excess profit tax, state dog and syntax: Liberty bonds, baby bonds, and the bonds of matrimoney: Red cross, green cross and Double cross.” Or, more intimately, on a wooden plank: “What is a man to do? And what can a man do? When his family will not pull with him.”
Stone teamed up with Raechell Smith of the Kansas City Art Institute to create “Now Read On,” a show that investigates the Howard-Brown kinship. Currently running at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Betty Rymer Gallery, the exhibit comprises ten “tableaux,” each of which combines one Brown painting with a selection of Howard signs and objects to explore a common theme. “UnAmerican,” for instance, places Brown’s ominous vision of the House Un-American Activities Committee alongside Howard’s texts attacking the “thourly brain=warshed communist.” “In God We Trust” surrounds Brown’s beatific Arrangement in Blue and Gray, the Artist and His Friend Fishing with Howard’s testimonies about God and nature.
Where: SAIC Betty Rymer Gallery, 280 S. Columbus
