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Visionary Leon Kennedy drawing self-portrait. TIME LAPSE
Leon Kennedy (b. 1945, Houston, Texas) In 1997 the Smithsonian Institution purchased the most significant artworks from the renowned Rosenak collection, including a 1995 bed-sheet painted with numerous figures by African American spiritual visionary Leon Kennedy. The 1997 Folk Art Messenger Vol. 10, No.3, reported the acquisition, involving millions of dollars, makes the The National Museum of American Art the world's preeminent repository for American self-taught art. "It is our desire to see them as part of the history of 20th-century American art," said Chuck Rosenak. Mentioning Kennedy, the article goes on to note these works were the first American collection exhibited at the Collection de l'Art Brut in Switzerland, which "testifies to its quality and uniqueness." This Leon Kennedy masterwork now resides at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, while photos of Kennedy and other materials are stored at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Leon Kennedy, featured in the Rosenak's cornerstone book Contemporary American Folk Art (Abbeville, 1996), uses mixed media on found objects to paint ecstatic visions, memory paintings, and urban life portraits and cityscapes. Kennedy is referenced in Betty-Carol Sellen's important survey, Self Taught, Outsider, and Folk Art. In 2006 two of Kennedy's paintings formed a major part of the yearlong exhibit at Baltimore's prestigious American Visionary Art Museum: Race, Class, Gender. The works travelled in 2007 to the Lowell Revolving Museum. A major one-man retrospective was exhibited at the Kings Gallery of the San Francisco Unitarian Universalist Church in 2004. In the 1990's, The House of Blues purchased several Kennedy paintings.

TIME LAPSE: Amazing Visionary Leon Kennedy draws self-portrait.