WASHINGTON, DC.- James Castle (1899–1977) was one of the most enigmatic American artists of the 20th century. For nearly seven decades, he created an expansive body of complex and layered work while living in rural Idaho without access to traditional written language. His artworks represent a highly personal way of navigating his world.

“Untitled: The Art of James Castle,” organized by Nicholas R. Bell, the Fleur and Charles Bresler Senior Curator of American Craft and Decorative Art, will be on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum from Sept. 26 through Feb. 1, 2015.

The exhibition celebrates a major acquisition in 2013 of 54 pieces by Castle; the entire acquisition is on view in the exhibition, and the museum now holds one of the largest collections of Castle’s work. The acquisition was made possible by the James Castle Collection and Archive and the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment.

“James Castle’s drawings and paintings confirm that art offers a fundamental way to know ourselves,” said Betsy Broun, The Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “He worked for decades in the rural west, surrounded by family but with little experience beyond his community and with no formal art training. But his discerning eye found subjects all around, creating an extended portrait of his world.”

Castle devoted himself daily to intensive art-making using materials gathered around his rural Idaho home, including packaging, advertisements, string and soot. The resulting farm scenes, interiors, stylized people, constructions and charts of words and symbols comprise an elaborate and unmistakable representation of his everyday life and surroundings.

Castle’s artworks—all untitled and undated—served as the primary means of reflection and expression for an artist who was born profoundly deaf, without a conventional way to communicate with others.

“At once inviting and inscrutable, Castle’s art gives us access to a world navigated without language, though not the key to unlock it,” said Bell. “Ultimately, grappling with these drawings reveals the limits of our understanding as well as one artist’s extraordinary vision of the ordinary.”

Since Castle’s work first came to light in the 1950s, much attention has focused on the unusual circumstances of his life. Although Castle lived in a geographically remote area, he was exposed to mainstream culture in childhood when his parents served as postmasters of Garden Valley, Idaho. As he developed his art, mass mailings and other printed materials provided Castle with a window on the world, as well as examples of design and the materials to create. This exhibition moves beyond biography to appreciate the remarkable quality of Castle’s vision and to question how the works themselves elucidate the artist’s world.