Joe Light

1934-2005 · Memphis, Tennessee, USA

He converted to Judaism in a prison cell, came home to Memphis, and turned his whole house and yard into one long, loud sermon in enamel paint.

The life

Light was born in Tennessee in 1934, worked farms as a boy and joined the army in 1951. Incarcerated for armed robbery in the 1960s, he had a religious awakening while listening to an Old Testament sermon and converted to Judaism, rejecting what he called the white man’s religion. Released in 1966, he married Rosie Lee in 1968 and raised a large family on Looney Street in North Memphis, where for 25 years his painted signs offered moral instruction to the whole neighbourhood. He saw himself as a fighter against ignorance, injustice and hypocrisy. He died in 2005.

The work

Enamel paint on found wood, plywood and shop-bought kitsch: he painted over flea-market pictures and commercial prints to make them say what he needed, a practice he called attachment art. Hobos, birdmen, rivers of hope and baptism, mountains and flowers, Old Testament conviction fused with American pop junk. His work is held by the American Folk Art Museum, the High Museum of Art and, through the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, the National Gallery of Art.

Why we love them

He treated the entire visual culture of America as a surface to be corrected. The overpainting is the message.

Go deeper

• Joe Light at the Outsider Art Fair
• Joe Light 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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