Posted: October 20, 2022 by webmaster

Rodney Bode Exhibition

October 21 – November 23

Rodney Bode is an American painter and sculptor whose life and art have remained outside the boundaries of culture. Born in 1941, and having lived most of his adult life in rural Idaho and South Dakota, Bode is an outsider artist whose vast collection of paintings and sculpture were only recently discovered after his institutionalization in the South Dakota state psychiatric hospital where he is being treated for schizoaffective disorder and vascular dementia.

“The work is very sophisticated, very competent,” says Lynn Verschoor, retired director of the South Dakota Art Museum. “These are really just exciting paintings; they’re good paintings. They’re nothing like you see in South Dakota. People here just don’t paint like this. And the sculptures are fabulous, well balanced. Of course,” she adds, “people are interested in the story, too.”

The label ‘Outsider Art’ created by Jean Dubuffet in the 1940s, certainly describes Rod Bode’s prolific collections of paintings and sculpture. Created in the sparse rural areas in Idaho and the plains of western South Dakota, unseen by the public, Bode’s “self-taught” creations were certainly “produced beyond the boundaries of the mainstream art world.”