The Art of
Frank Calloway
A self-taught artist working with crayon, colored markers, and pencil on butcher paper, Frank Calloway (1915-2014) drew long flowing scenes of locomotives, trucks, trolleys, tractors, fanciful farmhouses, and multi-colored horses and cows grazing on blue, green, or purple grass.
Frank Calloway was born in Montgomery, Alabama. Orphaned at age 11, he left school and spent forty years as a laborer doing farm chores, laying railroad tracks, digging ditches, hauling logs, and cutting lumber. Found wandering in Montgomery in 1952, he was admitted to Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa, the state’s main psychiatric facility. He enjoyed doing outdoor chores on the 200-acre grounds, but when the practice of putting patients to work was ended in the 1970s, he languished. His caregivers encouraged him to try drawing, and he began spending entire days at a table by a window creating detailed rural scenes on long scrolls of butcher paper.
Most of Frank Calloway’s early artworks were discarded, given away, or sold for a few dollars apiece to pay for his materials. But in the decade before his death in 2014, his imaginative scrolls were featured in exhibitions at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, the Kentuck Museum and Gallery in Northport, Alabama, and the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore.
This website is the first to show the more than 60 artworks by Frank Calloway that his caregivers at Bryce Hospital saved. He did not title his work. The titles that have been added here reflect the composition of each scroll. Descriptions have also been included of the shorter scrolls, but new details are discovered with each viewing.
You are invited to send your description of a medium-length scroll and to question or correct any present title or description of a scroll.
Frank Calloway photographed in 2008.
“Folk Art, Outsider Art, Visionary Art: The Extraordinary Scrolls of Frank Calloway,” a one-hour and fifteen-minute presentation by Alan Blum, MD, can be viewed in the illustrated Bibliography section.