McNellis, Popsicle ManArt of Laura McNellis featured at Nashville Public Library
The works of nationally renowned artist Laura Craig McNellis will be displayed in the Courtyard Gallery of the Nashville Public Library, 615 Church Street, Oct. 10 through Dec. 31, in an exhibit co-sponsored by the Library and the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center.
“Laura’s work is amazing,” said Pat Levitt, Ph.D., Vanderbilt Kennedy Center director. “Since brain development and disorders like schizophrenia are my own area of research, I know well that persons with developmental brain disorders sometimes have unique creative gifts. Their art gives us fresh views of the world, and makes us aware of how limiting our assumptions sometimes are about what persons with disabilities can contribute.”
McNellis was born in Nashville in 1957 and has developmental disabilities and autism, although this latter diagnosis was not made until she was an adult. She now lives in North Carolina where she is part of the Studio XI/Signature Home.
McNellis has been painting with tempera and watercolor since early childhood. Her work is an eloquent expression of emotional depth and provides a vivid record of her powers of observation. Her depiction of the persons, objects, and events she encounters everyday makes it clear that she sees a different world, though in no way reduced, and that she has the ability to describe that world in a powerful and beautiful way.
Since 1992, McNellis’s work has been represented by the Ricco/MarescGallery in New York City, which is regarded as one of the finest venues of Outsider and Self-Taught art in the country. In 1993, the gallery mounted a one-woman show of her work, which led to national and international recognition in the world of self-taught art, including gallery shows and museum exhibitions. Discussions of McNellis and her work appear in American Self-Taught, by Frank Maresca and Roger Ricco (Knopf, 1993) and in Contemporary American Folk Art: A Collector’s Guide, by Chuck and Jan Rosenak (Abbeville Press, 1996).
Eleven of McNellis’s paintings are on permanent display at the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland, a museum founded in the 1940s by the French artist and sculptor Jean Dubuffet. Many of her paintings have been purchased by private collectors in Europe and the United States.
The Vanderbilt Kennedy Center is a national center for research on development and disabilities. For information on this exhibit and other exhibits in its series “Arts and Disabilities,” contact Elise McMillan, 615-343-2540.