1914 - 2005

Hawkins Bolden

Memphis, Tennessee
    About
    Hawkins Bolden Insight
    By:
    William Arnett

    Hawkins Bolden and his identical twin, Monroe, were born September 10, 1914, in the Bailey’s Bottom section of Memphis. As his late sister, Elizabeth Williams, told it, “Daddy was a Creole man from Middleton, Tennessee; Mama was an Indian lady from Alabama. Her daddy came as a slave from Africa and married this Indian lady after he was set free. Daddy and Mama had relatives from down in Georgia who talked Geechee (an African American dialect spoken along the Atlantic coast).”

    As a child, Hawkins wanted only to play baseball. Professional baseball existed in Memphis, and major league baseball was up the river in St. Louis, with two teams, the Cardinals and the Browns. Hawkins was a seven-year-old catcher, playing at home and in the streets and in vacant lots scattered throughout the rows of small wooden shacks. One day, with Hawkins catching and brother Monroe at-bat, a pitch was thrown high and outside, and catcher Hawkins, crouching, assuming Monroe would not swing, stood up to receive it. But Monroe did swing, and the bat missed the pitch and connected with Hawkins Bolden’s head.

    Soon after, Hawkins began to suffer seizures. Elizabeth recalled that when he was taken for medical treatment, “the doctors said he had epilepsy and that his brain had grew too large for his skull. They said we Boldens have Indian skulls. See, Indians got small skulls, and they said Hawkins’s skull couldn’t hold his brain. They drilled a hole in his skull.”

    The seizures continued, and one day, when Hawkins was eight, he collapsed to the ground, landed on his back, and stared up at the sun. He never saw again. “I couldn’t stop looking at the sun,” he says. “I just looked and my eyes went dark. I never did see nothing after that. I can feel things. I know the sunshine. I can feel the heat.”

    In 1930, sixteen-year-old Hawkins moved to a small house in midtown Memphis with his family, including brothers Monroe and Clarence, and sisters Elizabeth, Lula, and Rosetta. (Hawkins and his older sister Elizabeth, the last survivors of the family, lived together in that same house for almost seventy years.) Bolden has sensed the changes that have taken place around him, as his quiet residential neighborhood has become incorporated into the expanded commercial center of downtown Memphis:

    There used to be a big field over here where I found stuff. Then they went and built a big building on it. I used to find stuff in the streets, and in the alleys, where people throwed it away. People don’t throw nothing away no more. Everything is worth money now. I can’t go in the streets; too many cars now.

    The garbage men used to give me stuff ‘cause they knowed I would make use of it. They don’t give me nothing no more. I used to get the children around here to find me stuff. They won’t do that now. They ain’t got time.

    The Bolden house had no electricity at first, but the resourceful teenage twins remedied that. Years later, Elizabeth remembered, “Hawkins and Monroe ran electricity into the house theirselves. Hawkins couldn’t see, but Monroe taught him how to help. I don’t know how they did it. Monroe taught Hawkins how to make a radio, too. Hawkins been making radios ever since.” Indeed, Hawkins Bolden has been making radios on his own since brother Monroe left to join the navy at age eighteen. All he says he needs is wire, a crystal, and a coat hanger. Bolden has listened to every St. Louis Cardinals game for as long as he remembers, and likes to talk about Stan Musial, Bob Gibson, Ozzie Smith, and other stars of the past fifty years. When he is not listening to baseball games, he is likely to be listening to gospel music. In the old days, his homemade radios picked up Havana, Cuba.

    Like most artists, Bolden has made things all his life: “Oh, I made kites, I made tom walkers–leg stilts–out of poles and tin cans–my daddy taught me to do a lot of them things–skate trucks. Later on I made toys for my nieces and nephews.” Elizabeth said,

    He made—I called it a truck—he got some baseboards, some wheels, and he would pull it in the alley, and across the street, going that way, and I’d be coming this way, and when the light would come on red, Hawkins would stop, and when the cars would stop, Hawkins would pull that thing this way, and I would say to myself, “I know he can see, I am not convinced he can’t see!” But he couldn’t see at all. He just always knowed things, see or not.

    What other things has Hawkins Bolden made? What are the totem-like guardian figures that for three decades have lined his fences and have adorned his backyard? Or the smaller, masklike objects interspersed among Bolden’s anthropomorphic sentinels? Or the unidentifiable assemblages made of whatever Hawkins Bolden’s fingers have happened upon and picked up, then wrapped with wire, added scraps of sidewalk flotsam and rotting alleyway jetsam, the resulting accumulations strangely resembling the minkisi of the Kongo peoples, literally their “medicine of the gods”? “I started making faces and things out of stuff I found, probably about 1965. One of my nieces said, ‘Put them in your garden to keep the birds out.’ So I guess you can call them things scarecrows.”

    Bolden’s yard art is made of whatever littered the Memphis streets and alleys: plastic milk bottles, tin cans, hubcaps, automobile license plates, chitlin’ buckets, and other discards, broken or nonfunctional, from the neighborhood–wagons, chairs, Christmas light extension cords, radio wire, teapots, saucepans, toys. Most of his works, perhaps all, are representational. . . . barely. Human faces and bodies. Some are self-portraits. A hairy growth on his face near his mouth is represented on some of the faces he makes, created of artificial Christmas tree pine needles, a patch of shag carpet, or whatever else fits the role. “I use shoe soles and hose pipes and carpet pieces to make tongues,” he says. If there is any color or written inscription on an object, it is totally coincidental: “Sometimes I feel words on something, but I don’t know what it is. I don’t ask nobody about it or about color, neither. I don’t worry about color. I know when I can make something by how it feels.”

    His “studio” is unique among artists’ studios. Bolden collects his materials and tosses them into the dark, damp crawl space beneath his house. To retrieve them for use when he is inspired to create, he walks, stooped, on all fours, his right hand reaching–swinging–along the dirt floor until he grasps the components that he requires. He then hammers, cuts, twists, attaches and bends materials into his scarecrows–or whatever they are.

    A visitor once asked Bolden what he has in mind when he makes a piece for the yard, suggesting that surely he has a reason for doing all this. “Yes sir, I do!” He says emphatically. “The birds be thinking something going to get them. They get scared. They stay away.”

    Artist Lonnie Holley, who has visited Hawkins Bolden on two occasions, offers this interpretation:

    After losing his sight, he searched to hear. He is always looking for the sound to please his spirit. He is a constant listener, reaching to receive the right material to catch the perfect sound. . . . The blow of the bat still rings in his ears. . . . When a man have cried over something, and when a man have toiled over something and been conducted by the spirit of what he’s used to hearing, the different sounds he makes in the quiet of himself, the different things that he hear from within that quietness of himself, allow him to create the perfect, that others can receive. He does that so that others can see. Why fear what is within ourselves? He was not trying to frighten the bird away. He was trying to attract it, so he could hear its beautiful sound.

    Souls Grown Deep Like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South

    Souls Grown Deep Like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South

    A wide-ranging survey of Black art in the American South, from Thornton Dial and Nellie Mae Rowe to the quilters of Gee’s Bend For generations, Black artists from the American South have forged a unique art tradition. Working in near isolation from established practices, they have created masterpieces in clay, driftwood, roots, soil, and recycled and cast-off objects that articulate America's painful past--the inhuman practice of enslavement, the cruel segregationist policies of the Jim Crow era and institutionalized racism. Their works respond to issues ranging from economic inequality, oppression and social marginalization to sexuality, the influence of place and ancestral memory.
    Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art, Vol. 2

    Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art, Vol. 2

    Completing the two-volume set, "Souls Grown Deep, Vol. 2" takes the visual and historical presentation of the first volume to a richer level, offering an even broader array of artistic styles and media. Breaking away from the stereotypes that identity folk art and the South with rural, isolated, static and agrarian ways of life, these pages unveil an art that embodies social change and continues to flourish at the dawn of a new century.
    Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art, Vol. 1

    Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art, Vol. 1

    The African American culture of the South has produced many of the twentieth century’s most innovative art forms. Widely appreciated for its music—from the blues and jazz, to gospel, soul, rock ‘n’ roll—the region has also played host to a less visible but equally important visual art tradition.

    Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South

    Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South

    Royal Academy of Arts
    March 17, 2023 to June 18, 2023
    For generations, Black artists from the American South have forged a unique art tradition. Working in near isolation from established practices, they have created masterpieces that articulate America’s painful past – the inhuman practice of enslavement, the cruel segregationist policies of the Jim Crow era, and institutionalised racism. Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers brings together sculpture, paintings, reliefs, drawings, and quilts, most of which will be seen in the UK and Europe for the first time. It will also feature the celebrated quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend, Alabama and the neighbouring communities of Rehoboth and Alberta.
    Called to Create: Black Artists of the American South

    Called to Create: Black Artists of the American South

    National Gallery of Art
    September 18, 2022 to December 31, 2023

    In 2020, the National Gallery acquired 40 sculptures, assemblages, paintings, reliefs, quilts, and drawings from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, and several related gifts have recently entered the collection as well. Enjoy these inventive works, including nine Gee’s Bend quilts, and learn the remarkable stories of their making and makers.

    We Will Walk – Art and Resistance in the American South

    We Will Walk – Art and Resistance in the American South

    Turner Contemporary
    February 7, 2020 to September 6, 2020

    We Will Walk – Art and Resistance in the American South is the first exhibition of its kind in the UK and reveals a little-known history shaped by the Civil Rights period in the 1950s and 60s. It will bring together sculptural assemblages, paintings and quilts by more than 20 African American artists from Alabama and surrounding states.

    Souls Grown Deep: Artists of the African American South

    Souls Grown Deep: Artists of the African American South

    Philadelphia Museum of Art
    June 8, 2019 to September 2, 2019

    The Philadelphia Museum of Art presents Souls Grown Deep: Artists of the African American South, an exhibition including paintings, sculptures, and quilts that celebrates the recent acquisition of 24 works from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation.

    Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art of the South

    Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art of the South

    Michael C. Carlos Museum at City Hall East
    June 29 - November 3, 1996
    "Souls Grown Deep: African-American Vernacular Art of the South," a groundbreaking exhibition of over 450 artworks by some 30 contemporary artists, highlighting a significant artistic tradition that has risen in concert with the Civil Rights Movement. This exhibition presents an art form that is universal in its appeal and currency yet highly individuated in its origins within the African-American South.

    Hawkins Bolden

    This video was shot in the summer of 1981 in Memphis, Tennessee in Hawkins Bolden's backyard. It is the earliest known documentation of Hawkins Bolden and his work.

    MAKE

    Scott Ogden and Malcolm Hearn's documentary, "MAKE," is about four artists on the furthest fringes of our society. Isolated by their disabilities, they find a voice and try to make sense of a world that shuns them, through incredible works of art.