Intuitive Assemblies: Black Self-Taught Art and Its Collectors

Dotted across the globe are artists who have created works out of intuitive feeling. With an innate urgency, they have used the materials accessible to them to birth improvisational and profound artworks. 

For Black artists in this terrain lies a tradition of making things from what one has. For those whose ancestors were in the transatlantic slave trade, their entire geographies have been shaped by that tradition. This mode of making is a throughline in the works of Jamaican Intuitives and Southern self-taught artists. 

Jamaican and Southern self-taught artists emerged in their respective landscapes through collectors and curators. This project by 2024 Reporting Fellow Jordan Barrant looks into Southern self-taught artists, Jamaican Intuitives, their collectors, and the questions of artwork conservation, legacy continuation, and how to preserve and honor artwork deeply rooted in and connected with intuition and spirit.