I was surprised to come across a group of photographs of the outsider art masters Justin McCarthy and Elijah Pierce taken at their two-man show in 1972. At the time, there had been very few institutional exhibitions of this kind. Pierce had been "discovered" only a year earlier. McCarthy had been included in the "Seventeen Naive Painters" traveling show from the Museum of Modern Art in 1966.
Along with the artists, the set shows my mentor Sterling Strauser with Elijah Pierce. I believe others at the show could be indentified by any old timers reading this...and it is interesting to see who turned up for the opening. These pictures actually come from contact prints taken by an as yet unidentified photographer. The whole set is posted on the digital archive of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts along with numerous installation views. Beautiful and historic pictures! See the entire set on the PFAFA Archives page at the following
LINK
