Folk Art Is Packing Up!

Today is your last chance to view our traveling exhibit Contemporary Folk Art: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum at the Tampa Museum of Art in Florida.

If you make it in time, you can catch John William "Uncle Jack" Dey's painting Adam and Eve Leave Eden.

Even in his most serious religious paintings, Dey added a dash of his dry humor. In this garden paradise where all four seasons coexist, the angel of the Lord hands down an "eviction notice" to Adam and Eve.

Dey summarized their future life on a note pinned to the ground, "Gravy train gone. Adam settled down. Work hard in the barren land. Raise a family. Passed years befor [sic] Eve." The figures of Adam and Eve are based on Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel version of the story, which Dey may have seen in a reproduction.

Source: Lynda Roscoe Hartigan. Made with Passion: The Hemphill Folk Art Collection in the National Museum of American Art (Washington, D.C. and London: For the National Museum of American Art by the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990).

Pictured: John William ("Uncle Jack") Dey, 1912–78, Adam and Eve Leave Eden, 1973, model airplane enamel on fiberboard, 23 1/8 x 47 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr. and museum purchase made possible by Ralph Cross Johnson.