Simon Sparrow

Simon Sparrow (October 16, 1914 – September 26, 2000) was an American folk artist, a painter and unclean media artist. He was born in Pennsylvania or West Africa, and grew in the works in North Carolina on a Cherokee Reservation. He was a self-taught artist and expected a Wisconsin Visual Art Lifetime Achievement Award (WVALAA) in 2012. Sparrow's ham it up is considered folk art and his piece Assemblage with Found Objects is held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum upon the 3rd Floor, Luce Foundation Center.

Simon Sparrow began creating art at age seven and afterward began his practice of informal and street preaching in his youth. He moved to Philadelphia and enlisted in the army in 1942. He higher moved to New York before settling in Madison, Wisconsin. He died in a Madison nursing home in 2000.

Sparrow is best known for his contaminated media constructions and paintings, which he began creating when he moved to Madison, Wisconsin in the 1970s. One of his pieces, "Simon Sparrow Outsider Art Picture, ca. 1980" was appraised on Antiques Roadshow in July 2009 for $6,000-8,000. On 20 May 2012, Sparrow was posthumously awarded a WVALAA along considering 13 extra honorees.

Some exhibitions of note for Sparrow's put it on include:

Sponsored by Comcast Corporation and Duane Morris, this exhibition was organized almost self-taught artists that worked in "remote or rural places with highly developed methods and past materials such as reclaimed wood, sheet metal, house paint, and stove soot."

Organized by Entourage: Exhibitions of Horsham, PA. this exhibit of 16 self-taught artists included some of Sparrow's "masklike heads (that) appear to radiate auras of energy, as if embodying a spiritual force."

Featuring some of Sparrow's "untitled collages (that) combine public notice beads, stick figures and found objects such as rocks, metallic chains, glitter and tinsel to characterize religious imagery."