Born in Hayward, California, 1906; died 1999
Practiced at Creative Growth 1979-1999
Dwight Mackintosh began making artwork late in life, after spending over fifty-five years in institutions (interned at age 16). Upon his release at age 72, Mackintosh came to Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland and began a body of work that would make him a giant in the Outsider art world. Rendered in distinctive, kinetic line work, Mackintosh’s subject matter reflects his experiences, through events and objects, during a life of institutionalization. His drawings of orderly lines of boys, sometimes with genitalia exposed, buses that are empty or full, self-portraits of his own tonsillectomy: the work is characterized by repetitive flowing text and "x-ray" views of loosely drawn, yet tightly composed figures. This looping text is often illegible to the viewer, but is so essential to Mackintosh’s expression that it is sometimes the only visual element on the page. Mackintosh worked in the Creative Growth Studio until his death in 1999.
Identified by the well-known art historian John MacGregor as a great American Outsider Artist, Mackintosh's work has been exhibited internationally, including a retrospective exhibition at the Collection d’Art Brut in Lausanne, Fraenkel Gallery, Gavin Brown’s enterprise, Rena Bransten Gallery, and the Berkeley Art Museum. He is part of the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the American Folk Art Museum in New York, the Madmusée in Liège, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne.
MacGregor describes the power of Mackintosh’s drawings: “They represent the externalization of the artist’s internal reality. The consistent pictorial language in which the images are embodied is exclusively the product of internal necessity and of obsessive need to fill the blankness of paper with personal markings.”
-Creative Growth