Chip Haggerty: Boy Meets World
Julia Seabrook Gallery brings Chip Haggerty – a brutish New England painter and reluctant outsider – in from the cold with his first ever New York City solo exhibition. The show opens April 20, 5-9 PM, at Julia Seabrook Gallery, 660 Franklin Ave., Crown Heights, Brooklyn. It runs through May 28.
Boy Meets World presents 49 paintings that touch on themes drawn from quotidian stresses – boredom, hunger, gravity – and presents everyday items anew – food, people, clothes pins, footwear. A list of herbs and spices for a recipe becomes a threat. Some Warholesque bananas become a decorative frieze. Collections of sunglasses and ballet slippers take on surprising relevance. There are scenes of skiers and snow from his adopted home in Vermont. But bowing to his New York City roots, Haggerty also includes Gotham cityscapes, traffic, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the subway, and Central Park.
Fischl and Salle Fight at Magoo's Mixed media on upcycled paper, 2022
“One of my earliest memories is standing on a stool at an old porcelain utility sink in murky fluorescence holding paint brushes under running water as a preschooler at City and Country in Greenwich Village in the late ‘50s. It took me six decades of wandering to get back to painting, but back to it I got,” said Haggerty.
Hipster Shoe, mixed media on upcycled paper, 2022
Like many artistic outsiders, Haggerty’s work harkens to that of French art brut pioneer Jean Dubuffet’s with its primary color palette, its reliance on experimental materials and techniques and its raw expressionism.
Spike, mixed media on upcycled paper, 2019
I Must Get Into The Whitney, mixed media on upcycled paper, 2023
Haggerty, an emerging self-taught, outsider artist, has been on a slow yet steady pace toward artistic realization since expanding his creative practice time and space allowed. Writing, painting and spoken word have all been part of Haggerty's artistic portfolio in recent years. Whether writing poetry, engaging with radio audiences or painting in his iconoclastic style, Haggerty consistently brings his humor, depth and passion to the task. Pulling from childhood experiences, parenting, work life, random social gatherings, literature and everyday encounters, Haggerty takes slices of the past and snapshots of the present and bakes them into foundation of each piece of work.
Black Car, mixed media on upcycled paper, 2021
300 CPW, mixed media on upcycled paper, 2023,
Curated by gallerist Nicole Abe Titus and Lutz Rath, the show also features works by others who made successful transitions from the world of outsider art to prominence in the fine art universe. Haggerty’s paintings will be complemented by works that resonate in style, substance or genesis including Henri Rousseau, Sister Gertrude Morgan, Howard Finster, Dubuffet, Clementine Hunter, Adolf Wölfli, Mose Tolliver and Henry Darger.
Clementine Hunter, Plantation
Moses Toliver, Doin the electric slide, Mixed Media on wood
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