[Read Jeff Huebner’s 2000 story “Has Anyone Seen Clyde Angel?”]
In November 2008, online research led Marcus to a Connecticut gallery that specializes in outsider artists—people whose idiosyncratic work betrays little or no influence from the mainstream art world. He liked what he saw and called the dealer, Beverly Kaye. They got to talking, Marcus says, about “this fascination with the freedom of the artist, with the artist as a free spirit,” and Kaye asked him if he’d heard about Clyde Angel. He hadn’t. “So she tells me the story . . . “
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Pardee didn’t return calls for my 2000 Reader story, but this past May she was more forthcoming. She confirms that Willits first told her in late 1993 that he was teaching a vagrant how to weld and make art at his workshop in Camanche, Iowa, a suburb of Clinton 35 miles up the Mississippi from Davenport. She didn’t think the story was that strange: in all her years of traveling midwestern back roads in search of undiscovered artists, Pardee says, “I had seen a lot of Clyde-like itinerant men walking the highway.” And Britt, in north central Iowa, is home of the annual National Hobo Convention. Once, seeing a likely candidate ambling along a road in Iowa, she rolled down her car window and asked if his name was Clyde. It wasn’t.
The relationship “evolved in a very natural and credible way,” says Pardee. “Skip was getting to know Clyde at the same time and would relay messages to me. He always acted as the representative in the contract [and] payments, and in the delivery of the artwork. Everything I knew about Clyde was relayed to me via Skip or through letters from Clyde.” One letter said Angel was born on Beaver Island, just off the bank of the Mississippi in Clinton, and other sources claim he was born in 1957. That information has become part of his biography, circulated in museum and gallery publications as well as several folk- and outsider-art guidebooks.
In 2000, Saslow told me that many collectors were drawn to the work’s rough charm and clever use of discarded materials, and that it was selling “very well.” She also noted that preserving Angel’s privacy was “part of the deal” with Willits, who periodically brought her pieces in his pickup truck.
Skip Willits and I exchanged letters and had a brief phone conversation in the late 1990s, but he wouldn’t make himself available for an interview. Neither he nor his father was home when I knocked on their doors in Camanche in 2000. Skip’s wife at the time, Terri, an attorney, told me outside their house that he was at his studio, but that he didn’t want anyone to know where it was.
The following year—almost simultaneously with its inclusion in a yearlong survey exhibition, “Treasures of the Soul: Who Is Rich,” at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore—Angel’s work was banned from the prestigious New York Outsider Art Fair because of questions raised by my story regarding the artist’s self-taught status, identity, and use of welding equipment.
Opens Fri 10/16, 5-8 PM. Through 12/1: Tue-Fri 11-6, Sat 11-5, Judy A. Saslow Gallery, 300 W. Superior, 312-943-0530, jsaslowgallery.com.
