Texas Scene

Object Details

Date
1975
Artist
Jon Serl, born Olean, NY 1894-died Lake Elsinore, CA 1993
Exhibition Label
Jon Serl was born in upstate New York into a large family of itinerant vaudeville performers. He spent his youth performing and traveling, often playing female roles. He settled in the California desert south of Los Angeles and began an engagement with painting that consumed him for over forty years. Serl’s surreal imagery recalls his theatrical upbringing, flexible notions of family, views on gender binaries and fluid identities, and his own experience of low-income struggle and marginalization. Semi-narrative paintings like Texas Scene show a diverse array of characters, presented in a palette that favors emotion and psychological states of mind over realism. As the artist himself once explained, “You don’t see my paintings, you feel them.”
(We Are Made of Stories: Self-Taught Artists in the Robson Family Collection, 2022)
Topic
Figure group
Occupation\domestic\laundry
Landscape\Texas
See more items in
Smithsonian American Art Museum Collection
Department
Painting and Sculpture
Credit Line
Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Margaret Z. Robson Collection, Gift of John E. and Douglas O. Robson
Copyright
© 2000, Randall Morris
Data Source
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Object number
2016.38.68
Type
Painting
Folk Art
Restrictions & Rights
Usage conditions apply
Medium
oil on board
Dimensions
34 3/8 × 48 in. (87.3 × 121.9 cm)
GUID
http://n2t.net/ark:/65665/vk76e0ad06d-85da-47e1-bfd7-a12e2855570c
Record ID
saam_2016.38.68