Heritage Hall Museum - Current Exhibits
August / September 2010
Selective Works from the folk art collection
of Frank Phillips
Tommy Moorehead and Heritage Hall
Frank Phillps and Others
Exhibit Description:
Selective works from the folk art collection of Frank Phillips, Tommy Moorehead and Heritage Hall:
Frank Phillips lives quietly in St. Clair County, an unassuming man with a bright smile hiding beneath a graying beard. He has no phone. He owns no car. Phillips says he is not an artist, but he loves art, especially folk art or as he prefers, "Outsider Art."
Outsider artists challenge what is normally thought of as art. Jimmie Lee Sudduth from Fayette Alabama paints his muted, simple depictions of Christ and log cabins with mud sweetened with sugar. Birmingham artist Lonnie Holley sculpts exquisite faces using sand from blast furnaces and creates art from "found objects" or junk as some people would say.
One of the highlights of Phillip's collection is a large assortment of paintings done by the late, internationally known, Montgomery artist Mose Tolliver. Other artist represented in his collection are Bernice Sims, Charlie Lucas, Lanier Meaders, Edwin Meaders, Jerry Brown, Howard Finster, Woody Long and Katherine Tucker Windham to name a few .
"I like all this because it's Southern," said Phillips pointing to an array of paintings and pottery he had arranged on his front porch. Phillips grew up in St. Clair County but has traveled widely including Paris and New York City, where he met and had his photo taken with Andy Warhol.
Phillips has led an interesting life. He has marched on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, attended George Wallace's funeral and received a master's degree in education in 1981 from Jacksonville State University. Like his art, Phillips may be considered an outsider looking in at the world, not with disdain but with a distant curiosity.
Frank Phillips Collection
Frank Phillips Collection