On our program tonight, a visit to the American full color Museum material witness, folk and self-taught artists at work.

The exhibit features nearly 150 works drawn from the museums extensive collection and explores how hard it is -- how artists from for centuries gathered toward certain media and methods.

This the first in a series of exhibits at the museum that will feature works that promote an expansive history of American art.

Featured artists include Jimmy Lee Sutton, M.R.I.

Phillips, Jesse Aaron, Minnie Evans, Judith Scott, and Ronnie Holly, who all work with a variety of mute cereals, included founded and collected everyday objects, sculpture, textiles and photography.

Material witness will be On View through October 29.

>> I'm broke, and I am the assistant curator at the folk Art Museum.

This is material witness artists at work.

Material witness focuses on the materials and the substances like clay, wood, rock, stone, metal that artists work with to make the objects that are in this Museum's collection.

I liked the idea of witness to materials because we have several works in the show and in our Museum's collection where the makers identity is unknown.

In the case of a group of so-called memory wears that are featured in the show, we have a selection of ceramic jugs and vessels that the maker has encrusted literally with hundreds of found objects, everything from skeleton keys to buttons from clinical campaigns to small figurines, objects like these have been found on gravesites on African-American graves in the southern U.S., but we don't know the makers identity.

I think about objects like these as witnessing that process of making and even holding the stories of their makers or the lives that they may have been documenting.

I was really drawn to opportunities to show multiple works by the same artists across their career, such as three carvings by the woodcarver Jesse Aaron.

Art making is a lot of work and many of the artists featured here work to other jobs full-time for most of their lives in many cases, other than full-time art making.

Work is an interwoven part of the stories behind all of these objects.

Material witness is organized into four areas.

The first theme is from the earth.

The focus is clay, stone and mineral pigments, so it was an opportunity to focus on portraiture and to think about what makes up paint.

This was a really exciting opportunity to put two works from our collection into conversation on the subject of portraiture.

One in 1815 oil painting by Am I Phillips, where the pigments that the artists used for the vibrant reds and greens are so outstanding against the relatively muted background, and that works in conversation with a self-portrait by the artist Jimmy who sourced his own pigments and mixed those together with binding agents that he also developed through a process of experimentation, using everything from clay that he was sourcing to berries, axle grease, coffee grinds, and this is a process of experimentation over time.

The second section is called matter in hand, and that's where I focused a lot on process.

We don't always take about full can self-taught artists having studio practices the same way we might think of an art school trained professional artists, say.

However, whenever and whatever under circumstances they created, I wanted to highlight how their practice evolved over time in that dialogue of relationship of exploring materials.

This is a work that the artist used entirely ballpoint pen and pencil to create this elaborate labyrinth and world and what she called filigree art.

It was excited to think about how just working with everyday materials that you might find around the house, ballpoint pens in different colors, they created this fantastical composition.

The third is a case study called all coming in lighting and it's about the history of photography and specifically hand tinted photos.

Here we put into conversation a group of 20th-century hand tinted 35mm photos with 19th-century tent type, all of which have been hand tinted.

So finally, the fourth section is called in the spirit.

That in the spirit section is focused on how artists work with materials and see them and use them as conduits for communing with spiritual realms, otherworldly realms in a process that's often transformative.

The process may begin with round objects and assembling and scavenging for different materials and bringing them together to create a work of art in which each part is transformed into a greater whole.

I hope the visitors will walk away with a sense of the amount of work that goes into not just making the given art object, but also evolving a practice over time of working with materials.

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