William L. Hawkins at CMA @ Hyperallergic
COLUMBUS, Ohio — The Columbus Museum of Art (CMA) has a real knack for presenting artists who not only have local connection and cache, but have gone relatively unnoticed by other major institutions. The work of William L. Hawkins has been gathered in unprecedented scope for his first major museum exhibition, William L. Hawkins: An Imaginative Geography, the joint effort of CMA and the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa. In many ways, Hawkins’s aesthetics represent the Platonic ideal of outsider art, so utterly definitive of the genre that to encounter his works feels like suddenly recalling a childhood memory. There is a sense, in looking at his bold and humorous paintings, of returning to something one has always known.