Speak What You Want to Speak: The Artwork of Jesse Howard

Jesse Howard, Untitled (God Bless the Owl), 1956.

If you’re in St. Louis, seems like there’s an interesting exhibition over at the Contemporary Art Museum.

By all accounts, self-taught artist Jesse Howard was cantankerous. In middle of the last century, it wasn’t unusual to see hand-painted signs on country roads advertising a traveling fair or a farm sale. But Howard’s signs offered Bible verses. They proclaimed his anger at his neighbors and the government, and his disappointments with the world around him. “Every word I’m saying’s the truth,” the artist said of his work. “Every word.” … Speaking what he wanted to speak didn’t make life easy for Howard, but now at least people are listening.