Terry has lived in Austin Texas, since 1981 and in Marfa Texas, since 1996. He's a native of Mississippi, an avid collector of Southern self-taught art, the majority of his collection being the mud sculptures of Burgess Dulaney. He spent a great deal of time making trips to Mississippi to visit Dulaney starting in the mid 1990's and has collected and documented information from the artist as well as from family and personal friends of the artist.
Terry Nowell wrote the body of the catalogue “Mississippi Mud - The Creative Life of Burgess Dulaney” which was used in October 2003 in St. Louis for the Retrospective showing of Dulaney’s sculptures.
Burgess Dulaney was born 16 December 1914 just outside Fulton Mississippi and continued to live on the family property his entire 86 years, dying there 27 June 2001. He spent his life farming simple subsistence crops and had no formal art training, no schooling and never learned to read or write.
He began to fashion clay or “mud” gathered from the local surroundings, into a seemingly unending menagerie of human busts, human-like forms, animals and fantasy creatures ranging in size from about that of a soda can to basketball size and larger. His work bears much resemblance to Pre-Columbian pottery, though Dulaney had never traveled or studied such art forms.
The unfired clay figures were mostly made of solid clay throughout, although he made some vessel-like pieces which were hollow and thin walled. Many of the pieces had marbles added for eyes, and all were dried slowly outdoors or during colder times brought inside to dry near the wood stove. Dulaney attended to the pieces meticulously during the drying period to insure any cracks in the clay would be mended allowing for amazing strong bonds in the clay.
The clay or “mud”, as it was referred to by Dulaney, was dug from 3 separate pits near his home. A high concentration of iron in some of this clay, causes darkening of the clay over time, adding a great patina to the older works.
He experimented briefly with cement and concrete mix, fashioning some much taller human like forms and ghostly concrete face tablets weighing 40 -50 lbs each.
He began giving the sculptures to local merchants and friends around his home in the mid-late 1970’s which led to the discovery of his work.
Collections are held at Department of Archives - Mississippi State Historical Museum, Jackson Mississippi, The Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson Mississippi and The Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont Texas, Museum of American Folk Art, New York.
Publications:
“Baking in the Sun: Visionary Images from the South” 1987 - University of Southwestern Louisiana
“Contemporary American Folk Art - A Collector’s Guide” 1996 - Chuck and Jan Rosenak
“Raw Vision” - Journal of Intuitive and Visionary Art #19 - 1997 - Wilfrid Wood, London England
“Light of the Spirit - Portraits of Southern Outsider Artists” - 1998 - Karekin Goekjian
“Mississippi Mud - The Creative Life of Burgess Dulaney” - 2003 - Terry Nowell
Exhibits:
“Old Friends, New Faces: Folk Images From the Deep South” 1993-1994
“Baking in the Sun: Visionary Images From the South” 1987
“Mississippi Mud: The Creative Life of Burgess Dulaney” 2003 - Center of Contempary Art, St. Louis MO
This wonderful piece (11" X 12" X 9") is now being featured in an exhibition at the Milwaukee Museum of Art.
