Trauma and Loss, Reflection and Hope: Selections from the Collection

Intuit invites you to reflect on our shared human experiences of suffering and loss—and the possibility of healing and hope—reflected in works made by artists across varied cultural and social contexts. Many of us have experienced hardships and trauma since March 2020, with the onset of the global pandemic and a climate of political divisiveness, set against a year of uprisings for justice for Black lives.

While these challenges continue, it is our hope to provide a space for each of us to be present, to sit with thoughts and emotions, to contemplate works of art, or to be inspired or fortified by the narratives of those who made them.

Featured in Trauma and Loss, Reflection and Hope are works by Eugene Andolsek, Emery Blagdon, Hiroyuki Doi, Lonnie Holley, Mr. Imagination, Kevin Sampson, Dr. Charles Smith, Betty Zakoian and Malcah Zeldis. Much about these artists and artworks on view is varied. These artists did not pursue a formal program of arts training or education but came to making work in a variety of ways—out of personal necessity; to process trauma or grief; to proclaim a message, after having a vision; or while in retirement. In Trauma and Loss, Reflection and Hope, we ask you to consider the artist as a person who made work in response to the times and circumstances in which they live or lived. Their different paths and the wide-ranging type of work they produced, over the course of their period of art making, reminds us that creativity is possible at any age, at any time, by anyone.

Kevin Sampson (American, b. 1954). Port Wine Stains (detail), 2007. Mixed media, 48 x 48 x 36 in. Collection of Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, gift of Cavin-Morris and Kevin Sampson, 2008.1. Photo © John Faier