This entry was taken directly from the “Museum of American Folk Art Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century American FOLK ART and ARTISTS,” by Chuck and Jan Rosenak.  (Abbeville Press, NYC, 1990).

 

Derek Webster—“To find something different, I go into the alleys.  Ideas come to me from the stuff others throw away.”  “I just do it my own way, I don’t want to do it like anybody else’s way.”

BIOGRAPHICAL DATA

Born April 26, 1934, Republic of Honduras.  Attended school through sixth grade, Belize.  Married Edith Piggee, December 2, 1971.  One daughter.  Now resides Chicago, Illinois.

GENERAL BACKGROUND

Derek Webster uses discarded materials and objects to create figures in energetic poses reminiscent of carnival dancers and masqueraders.

              When he was only a child, Webster’s family fled Honduras to escape a revolution.  They settled in Belize, where Webster grew up.  When he grew older, Webster spent two years working on banana boats, but by 1964 he divided he wanted a different kind of life.  He left the boat he was on when it docked in Florida, then immediately moved to Chicago. 

              In Chicago, Webster found employment as a janitor for the Michael Reese Hospital and worked there from 1964 to 1968.  For the next twenty years he worked for the Veliscol Company, and currently he is employed by the Ontario Center.

              In 1979 Webster bought a brick home in a working-class neighborhood on Chicago’s west side and began “fixing it up,” He placed colorful constructions on the front lawn and in the back because, he explains, “I like to look at something different.”

ARTISTIC BACKGROUND

“Art critics tell me that my art is African,” Derek Webster, who is Black, says, “but I don’t believe it.  I have a gift, and they [the figures] just come out of me.”  When he began decorating his home in 1979, he says, “Ideas came to me about how to decorate a yard.  I could see the figures in my mind.  I just went down in the basement and began making them.”

              In 1982 Paul Waggoner, who operated a gallery in Chicago, made a wrong turn while driving through the neighborhood and discovered Webster’s house with all its bright trappings.  He told art critics about the artist, and the Phylis Kind Gallery began to show his work.

SUBJECTS AND SOURCES

Webster makes brightly colored and highly decorated figurative assemblages.  Most appear to be carnival dancers, many of them women, and may derive from his memories of Carnival when he lied in Belize.  The artist has given them names like Old Man Sambo and Wild Lady.  Some of the sculptural figures have more than one face:  “I see faces all around, on elbows, fingers, and knees,” the artist declares, and so he includes them in his work. Sometimes Webster incorporates birdlike appendages on his human figures, and he also sculpts birds that look like they, too, are carnival participants.

MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES

The wood and basic materials for Webster’s assemblages come from Chicago’s alleys.  He nails and glues the wood into the shapes he wants, paints the figures with house paint and aluminum radiator paint, and decorates them with cast-off costume jewelry, broken watches, tokens, and all sorts of bright throwaways.  He then shellacs the finished products, partly to preserve them and partly to make them shine.

              The artist has completed about three hundred works, ranging in size from 12 inches high to an impressive 7 feet.

ARTISTIC RECOGNTION

Derek Webster’s highly decorated figures of black men and women are represented in most major collection of Chicago folk art.  The artist has not been well known outside the Chicago area, but in 1989 he was included in “Black Art—Ancestral Legacy:  The African Impulse in African-American Art” at the Dallas Museum of Art in Dallas, Texas.

Derek Webster :  Biography