Church of the crossroads: Renée stout in the belger collection
March 2, 2018 - january 4, 2019
at the Belger Arts Center
"Renée, you may be afraid of a lot of things, but I don’t think a blank sheet of paper is one of them. You have a lot to say – it flows through your work and touches us all. You’re right where you should be … the Crossroads."
- Dick Belger, 2000.
Renée Stout is one of the seven core artists who are represented in quantity in the Belger Collection. “Church of the Crossroads” contains nearly 100 artworks spanning Stout’s artistic output from the mid – 1980s into the early 2000s. Stout’s artwork explores spirituality, especially Vodou as practiced in New Orleans. At times Stout would create as an alter-ego, Fatima. In 2012 she told a writer for the Baltimore Fishbowl, “I feel that creating an alter-ego allows me to free myself from the constraints of my own persona. Early on in life we kind of get caught up in becoming the person our parents and society expect us to be, especially women. The Fatima character allows me to shed all of that and re-invent myself in order to make work that I feel is more true to who I actually am.”
