Sam Doyle

All Artists: 

Portrait

About the artist

1906–1985, lived and worked on St. Helena Island, South Carolina

Sam Doyle fashioned his uniquely-styled personal portraits and tributes with evangelical enthusiasm, blending ancestral Gullah lore and his devout Baptist faith into a rich multicultural impasto.
     As a youth, Doyle attended Penn School, established in 1862 to provide educational and vocational skills to newly liberated slaves. It was during his formative years at Penn that he first received encouragement for his artistry and learned the value of history.
     By 1927, bridges linked St. Helena to nearby Beaufort. Doyle, like many of his peers, found employment there. During his off-island residency he married and fathered three children. In 1943, heeding Gullah tradition, he moved his family to St. Helena. The family settled into a modest two-story house nestled on a few acres of ancestral farmland. Doyle commuted to his job in Beaufort and his wife did the best she could to cope with rural life.
     Though the demands of full-time employment and the parenting of three children left little time for creative pursuits, he still made things for his family: clever root sculptures, adorned utilitarian objects, drawings, and paintings.  
     After nearly twenty years, Doyle's marriage dissolved. He moved into a separate structure on the same property and lived there, quite uncomfortably, for several years until his teenage children graduated from high school and then moved north with their mother.
     Following his retirement in the late 1960s, Doyle fully committed to painting the history of his beloved Gullah community and more generally African-American advancement. Over the next decade his museum-like exhibition evolved into the "St. Helena Out Door Art Gallery" where haints and saints rubbed rusty shoulders and shared the boughs of Spanish moss laden oak trees with other celebrated figures, both famous and infamous.
     Visitors encountered public personas such as Abraham Lincoln, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Joe Louis, Ray Charles, Jackie Robinson, and Elvis Presley and local luminaries like Food Stamp, He/She, Mr. Fool, Mrs. Fool, Ramblin' Rose, Rockin' Mary, and root doctors Crow, Buzzard, Eagle, Hawk, and Bug. Serial projects such as "First" (achievements) and "Penn" (school) presented pictorial histories to young residents and mainlanders alike.
     Doyle’s artwork brought him much acclaim, particularly after his inclusion in the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s seminal 1982 exhibition Black Folk Art in America 1930–1980. Curated by Jane Livingston, the Washington, D.C. event was Doyle’s only excursion away from his home state. He had the sublime pleasure of seeing his artworks formally presented and shaking the hand of First Lady Nancy Reagan.
     Aficionados traveled from around the world to view Doyle’s outdoor history lesson. He commemorated many of their visits by painting their hometowns or countries of origin on a 4 x 8 ft. plywood panel and he amended his gallery sign, adding "Nation Wide" parenthetically to emphasize its broad appeal.
     As evidenced by his “Visitors” sign, Doyle’s influence is far and wide. The late Neo-expressionist Jean-Michel Basquiat once traded some of his own artworks to a gallery owner for a few of Doyle’s and noted contemporary master Ed Ruscha paid posthumous tribute to the artist with his painting Where Are You Going, Man? (For Sam Doyle), 1985. The work now resides in the collection of Eli Broad.
     Examples of Doyle's expressive work are held in important private and museum collections worldwide and have been selected for many exhibitions.

—©Gordon W. Bailey

Above: Sam Doyle, 1983, Collection of Gordon W. Bailey

 

Bibliography

 

Arnett, William, and Paul Arnett, eds. Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art from the South, Volume 1. Atlanta, Georgia: Tinwood Books in association with Schomburg Center for Research in Black Cultures, New York, 2000.
 
Art Outsider et Folk Art des Collections de Chicago. Paris: Halle Saint Pierre, 1998.
 
Bailey, Gordon W. "Haints and Saints" Raw Vision, no. 61 (Winter 2007): 28–35.
 
Bailey, Gordon W. "Sam Doyle: No More" Raw Classics, Raw Vision, no. 42 (Spring 2003): 59.
 
Daise, Ronald. Reminiscences of Sea Island Heritage. Orangeburg, SC: Sandlapper Publishing, 1986.

Glen, Isabella C. Life on St. Helena Island. New York: Carlton Press, 1980.
Grosvesnor, Vertamae. “Interview with Sam Doyle.” Horizons. National Public Radio, July 25, 1984.
 
Gundaker, Grey, ed. Keep Your Head to the Sky: Interpreting African American Home Ground. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998.
 
Kraskin, Sandra. Black History and Artistry: Work by Self-Taught Painters and Sculptors from the Blanchard-Hill Collection. New York: Baruch College/CUNY, 1993.
 
Kuyk, Betty M. African Voices in the African American Heritage. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003.
 
LaRoche, Louanne, ed. Sam Doyle (1906–1985). ArtRandom, no. 18. Kyoto, Japan: Kyoto Shoin, 1989.
 
Let It Shine: Self-Taught Art from the T. Marshall Hahn Collection. Atlanta, GA: High Museum of Art, in association with the University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, MS, 2001.
 
Livingston, Jane, and John Beardsley. Black Folk Art in America: 1930–1980. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi/Center for the Study of Southern Culture for the Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1982.
 
Local Heroes: Paintings and Sculpture by Sam Doyle. Altanta, GA: High Museum of Art, 2000.
 
MacGaffey, Wyatt. Art and Healing of the Bakongo Commented by Themselves. Stockholm: Folkens Museum, Etnografiska, 1991.
 
Outside the Mainstream: Folk Art in Our Time. Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 1988.
 
Penn Community Services. Oral History Project. Penn Center Historical Collection, Frogmore, SC, 1971–1974. Reel tapes. (Sam Doyle, April, 1974)
 
Perry, Regenia A. “Sam Doyle: St. Helena Island’s Native Son.” Raw Vision, no. 23 (Summer 1998): 28–35.
 
Perry, Regenia A. What It Is: Black American Folk Art from the Collection of Regenia Perry. Richmond, VA: Virginia Commonwealth University, 1982.
 
Peterkin, Julia. Roll Jordan Roll. New York: R.O. Ballou, 1933.
 
Powell, Richard J. Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997.
 
Russell, Charles, ed. Self-Taught Art: The Culture and Aesthetics of American Vernacular Art. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001.
 
Thompson, Robert Farris, and Joseph Cornet. The Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1981.
 
Trechsel, Gail Andrews, ed. Pictured in My Mind: Contemporary American Self-taught Art from the Collection of Kurt Gitter and Alice Rae-Yelen. Birmingham, AL: Birmingham Museum of Art, in association with University Press of Mississippi, 1995.
 
Turner, Lorenzo Dow. Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect. 1949. Reprint, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974.
 
Wilson, Charles R., and William Ferris. Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.
 

Artwork


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