Born in 1958, Renée Stout grew up in the East Liberty section of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was a working-class neighborhood; her grandfathers worked in steel mills, her father is a truck driver and mechanic. Art pervaded her upbringing. As a youngster Renée took art classes on Saturday mornings at the Carnegie Museum of Art, where she remembers being particularly impressed by an nkisi nkondi, a sculpture from Central Africa. An nkisi is a “power figure” traditional to the Kongo and related peoples of Zaire; created with materials believed to be medicinal, the spirit of an nkisi can be called upon to right wrongs or punish evildoers. This convergence of the material with the spiritual has influenced Renée’s art throughout her career.
There were other early influences as well. Her mother’s brother, Jesse Owens (named for the African American athlete who triumphed at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin), was a painter who used any available surface for a canvas. Her grandfather was a musician as well as a steelworker, and often entertained friends and neighbors at his home. The evocative emotion of music – blues music in particular – underscores and influences Renée’s work.
In 1980 Renée Stout graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. Her work, primarily photo-realist paintings, was exhibited locally for several years. In 1984 she accepted an appointment as with the Afro-American Artists in Residency Program at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, and she moved away from Pennsylvania for the first time. On her own and living in modest circumstances, Renée examined her life and the forces that shaped it. She moved to Washington, DC in 1985 and her art changed. Instead of making paintings she began to create mixed media sculptures. She began to draw on a number of African and African American traditions, including the use of roots and oils for healing, protective writing, and the positive influence of ancestors.
Renée’s complex and evocative sculptures were included in group exhibitions at museums large and small up and down the East coast, and her reputation grew. In 1993 the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, hosted a solo exhibition entitled “Astonishment and Power: Kongo Minkisi and the Art of Renée Stout.” Her sculptures have been added to the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art. A traveling exhibition, “Dear Robert, I’ll See You at the Crossroads,” circulated throughout the United States in 1995.
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