On My Way: The Arts of Sarah Albritton (review)

Folklorists are sometimes leery of the work of visionary or memory painters. While others—art historians, art dealers, curators—on occasion have labeled such artists as "folk," folklorists have found them too idiosyncratic for the term, reserving it for more communal, more traditional (as folklorists understand the word) aesthetic contexts. Thus it can be interesting from a folk studies perspective when folklorists look at the creations of and even work with such a painter. The current exhibit of the paintings of Sarah Albritton, which is touring five venues in Louisiana and Texas (as well as the substantial catalog for the exhibition) offers an opportunity for noting what is in part a folkloristic approach to an outsider artist. That is hardly the only reason for looking at Albritton's powerful work, but it is a perspective that adds an intriguing note for folklorists.

Susan Roach, the folklorist cocurator of the exhibit, along with painter and professor of art Peter Jones, both Louisiana Tech University faculty members, first met Albritton when Roach was researching a folklife survey of Louisiana's north central region and

Albritton was recommended as a valuable contact. Roach initially documented her as a practitioner of traditional foodways, first recording information on her dewberry jam making (including its aesthetic dimension). With Roach's collaboration, Albritton appeared at the folklife pavilion of the Louisiana World Exposition in New Orleans in 1984 and at the Smithsonian-produced Festival of American Folklife in 1985, demonstrating "preparing biscuits and jelly, black-eyed peas, hot water cornbread, chicken and dumplings, and tea cakes." [exhibit catalog]

She continued her festival involvement as a regular at the Louisiana Folklife Festival and at the Black Arts Festival in Atlanta. In the exhibit catalog Roach notes how folklorists and performers developed a sort of symbiotic repertoire of presentation at these festivals (a process of performance that no doubt has played a role in the work of other folklorists and that is worth further comment and study). Then Albritton "began to tell her stories" during festival appearances and wound up participating in the Louisiana Storytelling Project, a major collecting project initiated by the Louisiana Folklife Program initially undertaken in festival contexts. (Two of her fictive stories appear in Swapping Stories: Folktales from Louisiana, edited by Carl Lindahl, Maida Owens, and C. Renee Harviston [University Press of Mississippi, 1998], which came out of the Storytelling Project.) In 1987 Albritton opened a restaurant in Ruston, La., called Sarah's Kitchen, where she has continued to produce plate lunches which include such traditional Louisiana/Southern foods as red beans and rice, chicken and dumplings, and candied yams.

All of this is to say that Roach originally worked with Albritton in the folklorists' familiar context of practitioner/performer of recognizably traditional forms—food and storytelling (and also yard art and the Christmas display of lights and structures that Albritton began to construct outside the restaurant). Sarah Albritton, like many other talented folk artists, is a multidimensional person and in her expressive life does not limit herself to folk genres. The publicity her restaurant received from local and national media made her something of a Ruston celebrity, and in 1993, at Roach's suggestion, she was invited to be one of the local celebrities to do paintings for an arts council fundraiser. The painting she did of her restaurant's interior proved to be highly popular. This experience has since led her to do more paintings that have become even more popular and are, of course, the focus of the current exhibition. When she was in her thirties (she was born in 1936) she wrote a 200-page autobiography, Poor Black Girl, and even earlier she was writing...