Among the most emblematic American outsider artists, James Castle (b. 1899; d. 1977) never learned to speak, read, or write and refused to be taught to communicate in any of the accepted forms of signing or finger spelling. Castle's eloquent means of expressing what he felt about the world around him in rural Idaho was through drawings. These expressions consisted of works on paper that he produced for nearly 70 years until his death in 1977. Drawing with a sharpstick dipped into a mix of soot and his own spit, he conjured the people and places he knew well with consistent interpretive sophistication and integrity. His family home, now called the James Castle House, is an important historical landmark and museum with a highly regarded Artist-in-Residence program.
Castle’s art has is included in, among others, the collection of The Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL), The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MA), The Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), The National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.), The Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia, PA), and The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY). He has been the subject of several solo exhibitions at galleries including David Zwirner (NY, 2022), Hirschl and Adler (NY, 2021), Adams and Ollman (OR, 2018), Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C., 2014), and was included in the seminal 2013 Venice Biennale exposition The Encyclopedic Palace.
