Radcliffe Bailey

Growing up in Atlanta, he frequented the High Museum of Art, where his mother, a schoolteacher, introduced him to artists like James Van Der Zee and Jacob Lawrence. She encouraged his interest in art, giving him pencils and paper for drawing. As an undergraduate student, he found himself pulled toward large, outdoor sculptures and worked as an assistant to Melvin Edwards on an installation. He saw his art as an opportunity to honor his family and drew inspiration from a family photo album given to him by his grandmother.

As the artist says,

“I’ve always been concerned that art history—which we like to say is ‘art mystery’—never really talks about all people, just a certain group of people. It was always limiting, and I was always curious about what [those other groups] were doing.”

Since his initial training as a sculptor, Bailey has experimented with painting and mixed media, though he continues to utilize a sculptural approach. He often incorporates found objects from his past into his compositions, such as tintypes of his ancestors, piano keys, and Georgia red clay. His inspiration frequently stems from his upbringing and life in Southern United States, specifically in Atlanta and its church culture and Civil War roads and gravestones remnants. Bringing together individual experience and collective consciousness, Bailey infuses historical materials with present-day currency.

Bailey earned his BFA from Atlanta College of Art. His work is included in numerous collections, such as those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, and Smithsonian Institution. His work first entered the Studio Museum’s collection in 2015.

Artist Statement:

Though I was trained as a sculptor, I am also a painter, and work experimentally across many media. Starting in 2003, I began to make what I call “medicine cabinet sculptures,” accumulative works that combine sculpture and painting, inspired conceptually by Kongo minkisi. I’ve always liked to draw, and in recent years, I’ve started making small works on paper, watercolors and gouaches inspired by Indian miniatures. I like to modify found objects to make 3-D works and to create large-scale, multi-sensory installations that are kinetic and that incorporate sound and smell.

I believe that by making things that are very personal they become universal. I am first and foremost an artist, a person of this world, and an artist of African descent who grew up in the South and has chosen to continue to live and work in the South. My art is about history and the mystery of history. Scientists, preachers, tricksters, they are my muses. I am also very much influenced by musicians, poets, inventers, and practitioners, by people like George Washington Carver and the recently-deceased Charleston blacksmith, Philip Simmons.

While I am influenced by historic figures that have transformed and changed the world, I am also influenced by family members, by my mother, my children, and my grandparents. My mother was quietly creating experiences for me to make art when I was a child. She was my first art teacher and is, today, my most important critic. She introduced me to museums at a young age, allowing for my first encounters with African art, with the art of James van der Zee and Jacob Lawrence, for example. Talking about my grandparents, while what they made may have had nothing to do with making art, I admired, for instance, how my grandmother made a quilt for someone who was sick and how my grandfather made bird houses, always in close communication and in-tune with nature.

Take a look at Bailey’s CV.