Haints and heroes

Like all good folk art, you can’t know Sam Doyle’s work without knowing the time and place that spawned it. The 70 paintings and sculptures that comprise the Local Heroes exhibit at the High’s Folk Art and Photography Galleries are documentaries in miniature, each one insisting that the most makeshift and rough-hewn materials are not only adequate but ideal tools with which to tell a visual story.

The artist may have been unaware of the lasting aesthetic and historical implications of his work; in documentary footage he claims he doesn’t even know what a folk artist is. But Doyle has gained posthumous momentum as a leader in outsider art.

The exhibit, which folk art curator Lynne Spriggs researched for two years, is the largest solo show of the artist’s work. Although Doyle created and displayed most of his sculpture and painting outdoors in his “Nationwide Outdoor Art Gallery,” aka his front yard, this generous sample of his canon provides a sharper picture of the boundless story Doyle’s images tell. His work is as organically inspired by the people and landscape of South Carolina’s St. Helena Island as it is by the meta-narrative of lordly post-colonial cultural sensibilities. St. Helena is home to the Gullah culture, which is a blend of West African, Christian, European and early American slave traditions, most of which, as unspeakable as they were poignant and identity-shaping, are guilelessly expressed in Doyle’s extemporaneous compositions, rendered from enamel house paint.

With a self-professed aversion to canvas, Doyle created his works using readily available materials. He painted on discarded scraps of roofing tin, medicine cabinets and Masonite. Most of his wood sculptures are coated in tar, which serves a dual purpose of creating natural art as well as preserving the wood beneath.

In crude, bold and primitive but affecting strokes, Doyle’s paintings tell the story of a place and culture that is both trapped and exalted by miscellany. Because of its isolation, St. Helena, one of hundreds of coastal Sea Islands that extend from South Carolina to Florida, was home to pre-Emancipation Proclamation free slaves, and for hundreds of years without interruption, the island was an enclave for ersatz African culture. Transplanted and diluted but still strong enough to know from whence they came, the island denizens trace their lineage to the coast of Sierra Leone.

But Doyle’s subjects by no means fixate on the African influence of the island. The artist chose a motley assortment of cultural ambassadors to represent his work and the Gullah people. Tacked on to the roster of significant Gullah figureheads that represent his “First Blacks” series of the island’s first doctors, embalmers, midwives and barbers, Doyle also immortalized Jackie Robinson, Ray Charles, Elvis Presley, O.J. Simpson, Uncle Remus and a submissive Uncle Tom. Spriggs says that because Doyle claimed to “know” each of the people he painted, his subjects easily slip into an Everyman interpretation.

Doyle even claimed intimate familiarity with the spirits or “haints” that continue to vex the populace of St. Helena. Spriggs says Doyle often used the word “natural” in conversation as if supernatural intrusions upon real life were ordinary occurrences. In “Old Hag” Doyle depicts a particularly alarming image in soft pastels of a female succubus-like deity who descends on men and women during sleep to straddle and ride their faces until suffocation. Spriggs says that most Afro-Caribbean diaspora cultures have a version of Old Hag, who persists in lore as a reminder of the horrors, atrocities and fears that linger in nightmare from days of slavery.

The exhibit also pays homage to Doyle’s interest in St. Helena’s liminal residents. He painted caricatures of the island’s androgynous figures such as “Miss Boy,” “Bull Dagger” — a “He-She,” or what Doyle sometimes called a “Double-Dip” — and “Miss Kill De,” a bloody portrait of a St. Helena woman who committed suicide. Although some of his work appears glibly comic, Doyle was deeply influenced by religion and spirituality. And much like the Gullah language itself, all of Doyle’s work is primed for double entendre and myriad interpretation.

Doyle grew up and lived his entire life near the Wallace community, which was named after a former plantation owner and is most likely the plantation on which Doyle’s grandfather was enslaved. Haunting reminders of slavery and bondage linger ephemerally or palpably over each work and serve as fodder for what must have been Doyle’s call to act: to remember where he came from.

Local Heroes: Paintings and Sculpture by Sam Doyle continues through Oct. 14 at the High Museum of Art’s Folk Art and Photography Galleries, Georgia Pacific Center, 133 Peachtree St. Admission free. 404-733-4444.