Elizabeth Driscoll Smith

This dissertation examines the ways artist-environment builders complicate the turn toward place in American postwar art. In it, I argue that the built environments of Roger Brown (1941–97), Ulysses Davis (1913–90), Sam Doyle (1906–85), and Tressa “Grandma” Prisbrey (1896–1988) are grounded in histories of American regionalism and the emergence of the Interstate Highway System, the rise of amateur craft, and placemaking strategies of the Civil Rights Movement and Second Wave Feminism. Artist-built environments were central to evolving ideas around place and placemaking in American art, yet they have remained separate from histories of site specificity, institutional critique, and alternative spaces.

The artist-environment builders of this project oriented their practices to new and expanding modes of transportation in the mid- to late twentieth-century United States. In centering mobility and movement as central tenets of their work, my project challenges the ways nomenclatures of folk, self-taught, and outsider have been used to imply insularity. While Brown considered the mythological capacities of the American South in his Alabama, Illinois, and California environments, Doyle drew on the legacy of the “Gullah Highway” to envision his home and outdoor gallery on St. Helena Island, South Carolina. Prisbrey’s construction of a home studio in Simi Valley, California, intersected with the feminist aims of the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles, while Davis’s woodcarving studio and barbershop in Savannah, Georgia, established a protective environment for Black history during Jim Crow-era segregation.