Date unknown

Untitled (Shed interior with drawings, constructions, books, and objects)

American, 1899 - 1977

James Castle was deaf from birth and never learned to read, write, sign, or speak. He lived on his family's farm in a remote part of Idaho, about fifty miles from Boise. Unable to work, he spent all of his time on his drawings, which he made out of found materials. He flattened matchboxes and scraped the wax off cardboard grocery cartons to create drawing surfaces and used soot, saliva, and a sharpened stick as materials. Here he depicts a room with his own drawings and constructions hung on the walls, and with books and packets of collected ephemera neatly arranged on the floor. In Castle's deeply silent, poetic, and powerfully observed world, small but significant objects are set out in a purposeful order that the artist arrived at without benefit of language or of verbal human interaction.