Charles Keeling Lassiter was born in New York in 1926. He received a degree in sociology from Yale University and in art education from New York University. He also studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and the Brooklyn Museum Art School.
According to the Bountiful Davis Art Center (www.bdac.org/charles-lassiter):
Lassiter lived entirely alone and became agoraphobic. He never read books or newspapers and only occasionally left his little Manhattan apartment. He absorbed how people reacted to the city’s contrasting energies – from its moral chaos and cacophony of 42nd Street to the languorous figures on benches in Central Park. Returning to his studio, he became a deep diver forging into the unconscious as he focused intently upon his art. “For the type of work I do,” he said, “you have to be alone, to think alone – You have to just observe and capture that inner source.” In 1956, curators from the Museum of Modern Art were the first to recognize his work and featured it in a contemporary drawings exhibition. In addition to MoMA, his works can be now found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Charles Keeling Lassiter – Portraits: An Outsider Looking Inward will be on display through Wednesday, June 12, 2019. The works are on loan from the private collection of Stan Kaplan, Boca Raton, Florida.
The Charles H. MacNider Art Museum is free and open to the public during regular museum hours:
Museum Hours:
Tuesday, Thursday = 9 a.m. – 8 p.m.
Wednesday, Friday, Saturday = 9 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Sunday, Monday = Closed
