ENDANGERED SPIRITS: ART FROM JAMAICA, HAITI, CUBA, IRAN AND THE SOUTHERN UNITED STATES

(JULY 9 - SEPTEMBER 5, 2026)

The Surrealists were drawn to the Art Brut collection of Jean Dubuffet because in those creations they saw many of the qualities and intentions they were trying to incorporate into their own work by intellectual and deliberate means. The common ground and cultural viewpoints in their minds included depictions of the occult, tarot cards, dreams, madness, spiritualism (including mediumship), universal personal freedom, visionary world building, automatic writing, children’s art, art perceived as ethnographic, among others.

Art history has had no problem accepting the Art Brut influences and inspirations of the Surrealists. But as with the cultural artists who created the “tribal” works that influenced the earlier and later primitivist modernists, it was the Western mainstream art world that received the attention and art world legitimacy rather than the creations of those who did the inspiring. The importance of the sources was made secondary. This has not changed much to this day, and this sad anomaly became the underlying motivation for our Proto-Surrealism concentration.

The Non-mainstream artists of Art Brut and beyond were and are making their work independently of the infrastructure of the art world canon. They were never a movement. They had no manifestos other than the raw powers of their very individual voices. The Surrealists were cerebrally motivated to tap into the Art Brut world. The Proto-Surreal artists (this is a description, not a definition) were already focusing on their own creations, following no dialog with mainstream art history in their processes. For the most part they created for themselves, for the spirits, or for the moral, physical and spiritual balance of their cultural communities. The work is outside time and art history. Their art was used as source material for a Western influenced art movement, and, except for Dubuffet and a few likeminded others, they were excluded from the world arena through neglect and the ever-present hegemonies of art world gentrification of non-Western cultures.

The creation of this art has never stopped. It is still the real Surreal. It is still copied and exploited and excluded from the academic roundtables of world art. Its truths remain ancient and universal and simultaneously Contemporary.

For these people making art is different on many levels from the way schooled members of the art world canon choose to make it. It isn’t just a question of being self-taught or trained. Hilma af Klint was trained after all. It isn’t about being institutionalized or neurologically divergent. They make art because it is another way to maintain the more difficult darker art of staying alive in difficult times. They make art because it is a way of connecting with the timelessness of their deep cultural sources. Yet most of the Proto-Surrealists lived and live under entirely other circumstances because of their marginal modes of survival in the world. This exhibition attempts to show those differences.

Much of the art of Art Brut and ‘self-taught’ global artists comes from, or circles around, some sort of spiritual intent. This is not necessarily religious. It most often involves personal practice. That word spiritual is wide open. It can range from pride in one’s own land of birth (the actual land) given by the ancestors, to specific groups of people or cultural gatekeepers, or by a visionary participatory experience in other realms of paranormal consciousness. It also needn’t be spiritual though many parameters coincide. Wilfredo Lam said:

The artists I am speaking of make work from within the root cultures of the world. They are from the old neighborhood where we live, not part of the uber-colonial, or white supremacist overclasses, not part of the religions of wealth, not part of the forced cultural separation of art and life but still wrapped in the folkways of the original cores of Life. Wrapped but not trapped.

Unfortunately, a terrible and worldwide violent and relentless gentrification is taking place. It goes beyond colonialism. It changes names more than a chameleon changes colors. We see it in the bombing of the island where ancient lifeways are considered vital, that were already in danger of manmade corrosive erosion, we see it time and time again in the building of highways through communities of color deemed expendable. We see it when evangelists destroy the chosen spiritualities of impoverished peoples. It doesn’t stop. By regarding this art seriously we grant it witness. By taking these artists seriously we say their names.

This exhibition shows how the political and social hardships as well as specific survival struggles become sources for the work. We are taking the points put forward by recent exhibitions like Surrealism and Magic (Peggy Guggenheim Collection and Museum Barberini, 2022-23), Surrealism Beyond Borders (Metropolitan Museum of Art and Tate Modern, 2021-2022), and Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists since 1940 (Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth, 2024). They present a more complete and accurate universal perspective which more correctly reflects them as artists who are Contemporary but not intentionally part of the mainstream art world. This is not a time capsule. This work is everywhere today. These artists are working in the same ways they and the countless generations before them always have. They were the Surrealists before the Surrealists, they are our Oneiric Warriors.

Throughout much of its history this art has been disrespected even in the art world by titles that force critical attention to look the other way by calling it naïve, primitive, or outsider. These words cause the critical and uncritical eye to skip right over it as being outside the purview of serious real art or mainstream art with condescending sobriquets. Racism and classism meld with these words to keep the ideas of survival and protest encapsulated in the work away from the public eye.

The work in this exhibition does not have to justify its legitimacy or purpose. It is raw like Coltrane or Pharoah or Sun Ra or Fela Kuti can be raw. And like those makers the artists have agency in how they choose to express themselves. It is a mistake to regard this art as art of the mentally ill or neurologically divergent. It is more likely to be art that is caused by the stress and outside manifestations of the struggle for survival that led to that state of PTSD. Look at the first post WWI wave of art brut artists under the gaze of PTSD, then called shell shock. The art did not cause the madness. The art is the individuals’ language to express the pain and horror of an otherwise indescribable experience that pushed them over the brink into madness. The art is a map of the unspeakable.

This exhibition is the fourth chapter in our explorations of the concept of Proto-Surreal. The first (presented at the 2026 Outsider Art Fair) identified much of the work of art Brut and non-mainstream artists as being the actual field of sources for the intellectual goals of the Surrealist movement. Many of the surrealists were aware of this. It is time to recognize these artists who often worked in obscurity and received little or no critical credit for the masterworks they produced.

The exhibition includes works by Jesse Aaron, Jamshid Aminfar, Alirez Asbahi (CC), Errol Lloyd Atherton, Vincent Atherton, Ali Azizi, Clotaire Bazile, Hawkins Bolden, Everald Brown, Leonard Daley, Ras Dizzy, Ralph Griffin, Guyodo, Bessie Harvey, Carlos Javier Garcia Huergo, Woody Joseph, Davood Koochaki, Love Leonce, Georges Liautaud, Jim McDowell, Errol McKenzie, Sister Gertrude Morgan, J.B. Murray, Antoine Oleyant, Andre Pierre, Kevin Sampson, O.L. Samuels, Mary T. Smith, Robert St. Brice, James “Son Ford” Thomas, Bill Traylor, Gerard Valcin, and Joseph Yoakum.

For further information please contact us at info@cavinmorris.com or call us at 212-226-3768.