The Collection

Johnny Culver is a self-taught visionary artist born in 1960 in Sparta, Georgia, where he was raised on a plantation outside town by his mother, grandmother, twin brother, and three younger siblings, and where he continues to live and work today. At age seven, he was diagnosed with Blount's disease, which required him to wear leg braces through much of his schooling; in his teens, he attended a rehabilitation center for handicapped adults in Milledgeville before relocating to a related facility in Augusta, where he trained as a commercial chef.

Culver did not begin making art until 1980, at age twenty, while living in Atlanta and working at a fishing supply shop. Following a breakup and what he has described as a nervous breakdown, he returned to Sparta and began drawing on a piece of cardboard he found at work — an act that offered him a sense of relief and set off an intensive, self-sustaining art practice he has continued for more than four decades. Working first in red, blue, and black ink and later across paintings, painted objects, and large sheets of paper, Culver developed increasingly intricate, densely patterned compositions of interlocking geometric forms.

Culver, who had no formal art training, attributes his work to a spiritual and visionary source, describing his drawings as messages from the future and depictions of life after death; he has said that his artistic gift stems from having been born with a caul, which in the folk tradition of his community is understood to confer special spiritual sight. His grandmother's craftwork — quilting, basket weaving, and making beauty products from materials she gathered from the swamp — was an early influence on his intuitive approach to composition. His work has been exhibited in the American Folk Art Museum's group exhibition Approaching Abstraction and at Ricco/Maresca Gallery in New York.