Hawkins Bolden

1914-2005 · Memphis, Tennessee, USA

Blind since the age of eight, he built a garden full of faces entirely by touch: scarecrows with hubcap heads and punched-tin eyes that could see off the birds.

The life

Bolden was born in 1914 in the Bailey’s Bottom section of Memphis, an identical twin. A childhood baseball accident left him with seizures, and at eight he lost his sight; he later said he looked at the sun and his eyes went dark. He and his twin brother Monroe taught themselves to wire the family home for electricity and build radios from wire and coat hangers, and Bolden followed St Louis Cardinals baseball on the radio all his life. Around 1965 he began making figures for his backyard vegetable patch, calling them scarecrows at a niece’s suggestion, and kept building them at the same Memphis house until his death in 2005.

The work

Assemblage figures and heads made from pots, plastic bottles, tin cans, hubcaps, licence plates, chairs and carpet scraps, joined with wire and nails, everything judged by feel: I know when I can make something by how it feels, he said. Holes punched for eyes, tongues of carpet, some pieces effectively self-portraits. The work is held by the American Folk Art Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the High Museum of Art.

Why we love them

Every sculpture is a face he could never see and got right anyway. The purest argument in art that vision and eyesight are different things.

Go deeper

• Hawkins Bolden at the Outsider Art Fair
• Hawkins Bolden on Wikipedia
• Souls Grown Deep Foundation
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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