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The
Artist Paints, and He Also Multiplies
Laura
Vozzella, The Baltimore Sun
October 5, 2008
What makes an artist assemble 193,000 toothpicks?" PeteHilsee, spokesman for the American Visionary Art Museum, mused the other day.
The Baltimore museum boasts a 16-foot scale model of the ocean liner Lusitania made with something the uninspired masses use to pry poppy seeds from teeth. Hilsee invoked that piece as he was pondering another, featuring child-like choo-choo crayon drawings with mathematical calculations on the bottom.
Is it art? Is it mental illness? Either way, it's the latest exhibit at the museum of "self-taught and intuitive artistry."
The murals are the work of Frank Calloway, an Alabama psych patient said to be 112 years old. (There's no birth certificate, but when he was deemed "disoriented" and institutionalized 56 years ago, his age was recorded as 56.)
The artist's bio on the museum gallery wall reads like a HIPAA violation: "He rocks back and forth, spontaneously reciting his 18-times table, multiplying the number with three-digit figures (18 x 111 is 1,998, 18 x 112 is 2,016 ...) like an incantation deeply comforting to him."
Decades into Calloway's institutionalization, art therapy was introduced, and the former laborer with a third-grade education draws six or seven hours a day at his Tuscaloosa, Ala., psychiatric nursing home.
His work was first displayed seven years ago, when Alabama's mental health department held a show. Two years ago, the Kentucky Museum in Northport, Ala. exhibited his murals. A psychiatrist who'd spotted his work there brought it to the attention of the Baltimore museum.
Calloway made the trip from Tuscaloosa for Friday's AVAM opening. He traveled with an entourage that included a nurse and the head of his nursing home. It was his first plane ride.
As he was rolled around the gallery in his wheelchair Friday morning, Calloway was asked all sorts of questions. About the ride. About how it felt to hit the museum big-time. To be honest, I couldn't understand a word he said, but he seemed to be enjoying himself. He didn't look a day over 90.
The museum will display his work for the next year. Calloway, however, should be back in Tuscaloosa today. The artist only had a 72-hour pass.
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