Joe Massey

Joe Massey was an African-American artist and poet who became known for the works he created in prison. Joseph Cyrus Massey was born in Texas in 1895. He was later convicted for two separate murders and was sent to life in prision at Columbus, Ohio in 1939. It was at the penitentiary where he made these blue ink drawings on letter-size paper. Massey’s cartoonish and sincere style foretells the smooth-limbed figures of Keith Haring with the stream-of-consciousness or poetic writing that accompanied the similarly loose style of Basquiat. His drawings feature pared down human figures (usually with their mouths agape), dogs, horses, and other animals – sometimes the figures and animals coming together into a friendly chimeric blob. Massey gained recognition when Charles Henri Ford, fellow artist and poet, published Massey’s drawings and poems in the 1940s in a popular Surrealist magazine, View. Although the ethics of Outsider Art are always being contested, during the 40s Outsider Art was praised by Surrealists as an egoless application of art and by others for escaping the traps of studio pedagogy. Massey’s confidence in his lines and forms is a gift that only comes from either the expertise or naivety of the artist. After Massey’s debut in View, the collection of 40 drawings remains on view by presentation. He was later released in 1965 after years on parole and not much is known about his life after prison.