• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer

Small Museum of Folk Art

Siler City, NC

  • Events
  • Collections
    • Artists
  • Education
    • Online Activity Bank
    • Glossary of Folk Art Terms
    • Bibliography
  • Support
  • Blog
  • About
    • What’s the Small Museum?
    • Community
    • Press
    • Contact Us
Earl Simmons
Born: 1940 (Mississippi)

Earl Wayne Simmons

About the Artist

As a child, Earl Wayne Simmons made his own toys from scraps of cardboard, jar lids, and bottlecaps, sometimes using a Coca Cola bottle as a hammer. In the early 1980s, he began to build his home and “Art Shop,” constructed from scrap lumber, aluminum tubing, reflectors and other found materials, in his hometown of Bovina, Mississippi. The Art Shop burned in 2002 and again in 2012. Today, Earl is hard at work rebuilding. (Detour Art)

More Information:

Earl sells his art through the Attic Gallery in Vicksburg.

Where Else Can You Find His Work?

Mobile Museum of Art
Old Capitol Museum of Mississippi History
African American Museum (Dallas, TX)
Saint James Place Folk Art Museum, Robersonville, NC

Publications and Press:

Detour Art

Southern Foodways Alliance

Spaces Archive

Vicksburg Post

Earl’s Art Shop: Building Art with Earl Simmons, (University Press of Mississippi, 2005), by Stephen Flinn Young and D.C. Young

Only in Mississippi, (Quail Ridge Press, 1993), by Lorraine Redd and Jack Davis

Light of the Spirit: Portraits of Southern Outsider Artists, (University Press of Mississippi, 1998), by Karekin Goekjian and Robert Peacock

Exhibitions:

Folk Art from the Collection of Sally M. Griffiths, Art Museum of Southeast Texas, January 14-April 10, 1994, Curator: Andree M. Hymel, catalog

Wind in My Hair, American Visionary Art Museum, October 12, 1996-April 21, 1997, Guest Curator: Susanne Theis

Self-Taught, Outsider and Visionary Art from the collection of Richard Gasperi, Ogden Museum of Southern Art,
October 4, 2014 – February 22, 2015

Location of Earl’s Art Shop:

Footer

Supported by a Grassroots Arts Grant from

The Small Museum of Folk Art
219 East Street
Pittsboro, NC 27312
919-642-3866
smallmuseumfolkart@gmail.com

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • YouTube

Copyright © 2023 Small Museum of Folk Art · All Rights Reserved · Website by Tomatillo Design