Renée Stout

Photograph courtesy of Renee Stout

Portfolio of Artwork 971-976

Renée Stout is an alchemist who often imbues found objects with new power. Encounter one of her electrifying assemblages or installations, and its deepening charge will rapidly reorient you to the lusty mystery and heady magic of the African Diaspora, city life, and human longing.

from “’The Evidence of the Process’: An Interview with Artist Renée Stout” by Lisa Gail Collins, Transition 109 (2012)

Renée Stout was born 1958 in Johnson City, Kansas, and reared in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she received the BFA degree from Carnegie Mellon University. She has also received a number of awards and honors for the art she has created since she moved to Washington, DC, in 1985—for example, from Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Mid-Atlanta Art Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, as well as the 2012 Janet and Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize and the 2010 David Driskell Award from Atlanta’s High Museum. She has exhibited her work in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Russia, as well as across the USA in such art venues as the Smithsonian Institution (DC), Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Betty Rymer Gallery, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Art Museum, The LewAllen Gallery (Santa Fe, NM), Williams College Museum of Art (MA), Steinbaum Krauss Gallery in New York, and The Ogden Museum of New Orleans.

Renée Stout’s current artwork, which is often described as assemblage, includes photography, installation, painting, and mixed media sculpture, all of which are strongly informed by her personal history, African Diaspora cultural traditions, and West and Central African sculptural and sacred forms and traditions. Her artwork also distinguishes her from her contemporaries in its power, says the artist, to “encourage self-examination, self-empowerment and self-healing.” In her artist statement, Renée Stout comments that

The common thread running through bodies of my work of the past several years is the continuing need for self discovery and the need to understand and make sense of human motives and the way we relate and respond to each other.

The process of working out the many questions I have about the human condition directly through my work has been both cathartic and empowering. The alter ego Fatima Mayfield, a fictitious herbalist/fortuneteller, is the vehicle that allows me to role play in order to confront the issues, whether it’s romantic relationships, social ills, or financial woes, in a way that’s open, creative, and humorous.

As a visual artist, I choose to explore these ideas and concerns through the variety of media that’s available to me. Originally trained as a painter, I came to realize that my creative vision was so expansive it would be confining for me to limit myself to creating in one medium for my entire career. When an idea hits me, I immediately decide which materials will best allow me to make that idea tangible. As a result, my bodies of work have included paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, and photography. I see each one of my pieces as a fragment or installment in an ongoing narrative that’s my contribution to telling the story of who we are as a society at this point in time.

In “Roots, Rattles & Bones,” his introductory essay to Renée Stout’s Tales of the Conjure Woman, Mark Sloan argues that the work of the artist

Explores the contours of the African American experience and the existence of an underground system of African-derived folk beliefs as transmitted from slavery to the present. This system, known variously as Hoodoo or conjuring, has its origins in herbal medicine, root work, and a belief in the spiritual attributes of plants and animals.

Renée Stout, he further informs us,

has been exploring the conjuring cosmology through her art since the 1980s. Utilizing two alter egos, Madam Ching and Fatima Mayfield, Stout has managed to illuminate the contemporary Hoodoo landscape by presenting viewers with objects and images...