Fri 1/27 @ 5PM
It’s too easy to view Akron artist Miller Horns, who died in 2012 at the age of 63, as an “outsider” artist because of a folk/popular culture strain in his art and because he was African-American and his work was filled with references to the ordinary life of black people in northeast Ohio.
Only he wasn’t. He had a degree from the Cleveland Institute of Art and a sophisticated grasp of various media, especially his distinctive use of electrostatic and thermal color transfer prints of both drawn and photographed images.
Although he wasn’t very well-known in his lifetime (he spent the last 16 years of his life focused on a project commemorating a vanished black entertainment district in downtown Akron), his work is archived at the Artists Archives of the Western Reserve which is mounting a major show of his work called The Electrostatic Man: The Art of Miller Horns. It opens with a campus-wide reception today from 5-8pm.
artistsarchives/the-electrostatic-man-the-art-of-miller-horns/