MIAMI, FLA.- Mitchell-Innes & Nash announced their return to the Miami Design District with a winter exhibition space. The first exhibition is a group show featuring early work by Eddie Martinez alongside work by nine outsider, self-taught and American art brut artists that Martinez collects or is otherwise inspired by: Hawkins Bolden, Freddie Brice, David Butler, Willie Jinks, Joe Light, Laura Craig McNellis, Ike Morgan, Mary T. Smith and Billy White.

Taken together, the exhibition emphasizes a set of shared formal mannerisms between the artists: flatness rather than a sense of perspective, a graphic line rather than finely wrought draughtsmanship. The works contain a sense of speed, immediacy and improvisation. Repeated figures assume a symbolic, spiritual or totemic quality.

Eddie Martinez has become known for work that joins together painting and drawing, abstraction and representation in non-traditional ways. The twenty-one works on paper and five paintings in this exhibition date from 2005 to 2009, introducing early forms of Martinez’s personal iconography that continue to populate his practice today: tabletops, blockheads, sleeping men, flowerpots and birds.

For Martinez, drawing has been a daily practice for over two decades. From quick and loose black and white compositions in Sharpie; dense and energetic tabletops with objects from edge-to-edge; minimal portraits punctuated by gobs of abstract paint and linseed oil, this selection of early works on paper can be seen as a microcosm for the large-scale paintings for which he is best known for today.

Freddie Brice’s (1920-1998) plywood panel paintings are rendered mostly in black and white with a sense of spontaneity and economy of line. Using wide brushes and house paint, these works depict animals, clocks, watches and a shoe, each form punctuated by polka dots. The graphic simplicity of Brice’s works has inspired artists such as Donald Baechler, Joe Bradley and Chris Martin along with Martinez. Brice was born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1920 and moved to Harlem at age 9. He took up painting in his sixties through workshops at a senior center on the Upper West Side on New York and ritually painted his shoes and hat while making his paintings. His work was exhibited in “Art’s Mouth” at Artists Space in 1991 and resides in the permanent collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Milwaukee Art Museum.




Mary T. Smith (1904-1995) painted portraits of friends, neighbors and farm animals from her daily life on planks of wood or sheets of corrugated iron. Inspired by billboard signs, Smith mostly worked outdoors and would place her paintings on the roof of her house for drivers passing by. Born in Copiah County, Mississippi, a hearing impairment affected Smith’s ability to verbally communicate throughout her life and she found an outlet in painting and drawing. Today her work can be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

Billy White (b. 1962) makes highly expressive figurative paintings as well as ceramic sculptures of friends or heroes from popular culture. Often working with a limited color palette, White’s portraits are sincere and direct and offer no hierarchical distinction between fiction and reality. The characters of White’s paintings range from Eddie Murphy to Vincent van Gogh, from Fred Flinstone to Elvis Presley. White works out of the NIAD Center for Art and Disabilities in Richmond, California.

Hawkins Bolden (1914-2005) was a self-taught artist who lived his entire life in Memphis, Tennessee. Bolden’s totem-like sculptures initially served as scarecrows to a small garden he tended in the backyard of his family home. Bolden began making these constructions in 1965 relying only on his sense of touch (he was blinded by an accident at age seven), using objects found in the Memphis streets: tin cans, hubcaps, license plates and other discarded materials from the neighborhood. Over the course of many decades, Bolden created a dense outdoor environment of sculptures displaying his innate sense of the power of an object. In Bolden’s hands, a garden hose is separated from its ongoing function. It is now a tongue, or an ear, for one of his garden protectors.

Willie Jinks (1921-2012) began making art in his retirement in Atlanta, Georgia in his early 70s. Like Bolden, Jinks collected discarded materials from his neighborhood: scrapplywood, old doors, bicycle wheels, toys and anything else that caught his eye for use in his Hobby Shop. The Hobby Shop started as a small backyard shed but quickly evolved into a large-scale outdoor environment.

Ike Morgan (b. 1958) is a prolific and well-known outsider artist who began making art in secrecy at the Austin State Hospital while a long-term patient. Using colored pencils, paint, cardboard and found paper, Morgan’s colorful portraits of people and birds are vibrant, joyful and at times comical.

David Butler (1898-1997) used hammered and cut roofing tin to create colorful and imaginative animals, people, dragons, mermaids and angels inspired by images from his dreams. His figures were part of an elaborate yard installation which he began creating in southern Louisiana in the late 1960’s.