Tom Patterson and artist Bernard Schatz aka L-15, Charlottesville, Virginia, 1993. Photo by Lynne Ingram.
...is a writer and independent curator based in the American South. He is the author of St. EOM in The Land of Pasaquan (Jargon Society, 1987/University of Georgia Press, 2018) and Howard Finster: Stranger from Another World, (Abbeville Press, 1989)—each in collaboration with the artist—as well as Folk Art: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Watson-Guptill Publications, New York, 2001). His writings have appeared in Afterimage, American Ceramics, American Craft, Aperture, ARTnews, Art Papers, BOMB, Folk Art, New Art Examiner, Public Art Review, and Raw Vision—the London-based international journal of outsider art, of which he is a former U.S. editor.
After at least one esteemed colleague, having been regaled with stories of my past, insisted I ought to write a memoir and goaded me repeatedly about it, I decided to take up the challenge. Writing “the story of my life” wasn't the idea. Instead, I set out to write an account of my twenties - the decade I spent stumbling and experimenting and failing and succeeding to invent my adult, professional, social self, the mask of personal identity I wear. The project took on a life of its own and became a dominant theme for the better part of a decade, during which I've gone at it steadily although in necessarily piecemeal fashion, working around intermittent writing assignments, copy deadlines, curatorial projects, and other obligations undertaken for income-generating purposes.
In the latter connection, the memoir project has been a spare-time endeavor pursued for entirely personal, creative reasons, without the benefit of a publisher's advance. The only financial support for the project to date has been a $2,500 grant from my local arts council (a Duke Energy Artist Project Fellowship from the Arts Council of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County). In order to best serve the narrative, I have extended the timeline into my early thirties, but otherwise I've adhered to the original idea. Two chapters have been previewed in regional literary journals - “Reconstituting Black Mountain” in Appalachian Journal, and “The Convivial Anarchists” in St. Andrews Review.
Download Part One of the Memoir here.
From 1979 to 1984 he was director of Atlanta-based Pynyon Press. A former editor of North Carolina's monthly Arts Journal (1988-1990), he was a longtime visual-art columnist for daily newspapers in North Carolina-the Charlotte Observer from 1992 to 1998, and the Winston-Salem Journal from 1988 to 2022. Since 1985 he has curated or cocurated exhibitions for the American Visionary Art Museum (Baltimore), the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (Winston-Salem), Virginia Commonwealth University's Anderson Gallery (Richmond), the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning (Queens, NY), the Terra Museum of American Art (Chicago), the Gregg Museum of Art and Design (Raleigh), and the Center on Contemporary Art (Seattle).
Tom Patterson and artist Bernard Schatz aka L-15, Charlottesville, Virginia, 1993. Photo by Lynne Ingram.
In addition to his books on St. EOM and Howard Finster, Patterson is the author of “Contemporary Folk Art: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum” (Watson-Guptill Publications, New York, 2001) and several exhibition catalogs. Since the early 1980s his writings have appeared in art magazines including afterimage, American Ceramics, American Craft, Aperture, ARTnews, Art Papers, BOMB, Folk Art, New Art Examiner, Public Art Review and Raw Vision.