Renee Stout (Artist) Wiki, Biography, Age, Husband, Family, Net Worth

Renée Stout is a recipient of the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award (2018), Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize (2012), David C. Driskell Prize (2010), a Joan Mitchell Award (2005), The Pollock Krasner Foundation Award (1991 & 1999), the Anonymous Was a Woman Award (1999), and The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (1993).

Combining vestigial African American customs and street culture with the theatrical and carnivalesque, Stout’s oeuvre consists of handmade assemblages, installations and tableaus, vibrant paintings, prints, and photographs – all of which are employed in the creation of complex narratives featuring characters conceived by the artist. Her artistic influences include Yoruba sculpture, and the nkisi (sacred objects) of the Central African Congo Basin, which she first saw at the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh in her youth.

Stout’s sculptural installations often include materials used in the practice of voodoo. Handmade potions, roots and herbs, found objects, bones, and feathers are combined with painted and sculptural elements. Not limited to ritualistic and fold references, Stout’s work suggests a diverse group of American artists as influences– the photorealist painter Richard Estes, sculptor Joseph Cornell, installation artist Edward Kienholz, and assemblage artist Betye Saar. Their impact is apparent in Stout’s use of trompe l’oeil painting, found-object tableaus, and handmade mechanical and totemic forms. Stout’s early experience as a professional sign painter and ongoing interest in handmade commercial signage comes through in various pieces as well.

Subsequently, these works became the subject of the traveling exhibition “Tales of the Conjure Woman”, originating at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in 2013. Stout then had a solo exhibition, “Funk Dreamscapes from the Invisible Parallel Universe” at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, WI in 2018, and “Church of the Crossroads: Renée Stout in the Belger Collection” at the Belger Center in Kansas City, MO also in 2018.

She has participated in numerous exhibitions including several exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. and at the De Beyerd Museum in the Netherlands. Her work is in numerous collections including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota; the Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan; and the Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland. Her awards include two Pollock Krasner Foundation Awards, The Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Regional Visual Arts Fellowship, a Tryon Center for Visual Arts Residency, and the Driskell Prize given by the High Museum of Art. In 2012 she was named the winner of 2012 Janet and Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize.

Renee Stout was a 2000 Artist-in-Residence at the Tryon Center for Visual Art in Charlotte, NC.

In 1993, Stout was the first African American to have a one-person exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art. Her exhibition was titled The Eyes of Understanding: Kongo Minkisi and The Art of Renee Stout.

After moving to Washington, D.C. in 1985, Stout was exposed to the gritty reality of urban drug use and racism–themes which she has incorporated into her work. Stout also explores her African-American heritage in her art. Through the African diaspora, as well as the world and her immediate environment, Stout finds the inspiration to create works that encourage self-examination, self-empowerment and self-healing, harnessing the belief systems of African peoples and their descendants.

Stout attended Carnegie-Mellon University, where she trained as a photo-realist painter. She graduated with a BFA in 1980, where she followed the realist style of Edward Hopper and Richard Estes. She then worked as a professional sign painter, exhibiting her skill by painting convincing images of textures such as glass, plastic and cardboard.

Renee Stout (born 1958) is an American sculptor and contemporary artist known for assemblage artworks dealing with her personal history and African-American heritage. Born in Kansas, raised in Pittsburgh, living in Washington, D.C., and strongly connected through her art to New Orleans, Stout has strong ties to multiple parts of the United States. Her art reflects this, with thematic interest in African diasporic culture throughout the United States. Stout was the first American artist to exhibit in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art.