Art Against the Odds
By Susan Goldman Rubin
Crown
This is an interesting book for older kids about people who have created art in anonymity, often under difficult circumstances. They include Chicago janitor Henry Darger, an eccentric who grew up in an asylum for "feeble-minded" children and later, in secret, created a body of wondrous paintings and drawings that were discovered after his death in 1973; Mine Okubo, who made pen and ink drawings of things she saw in a Japanese internment camp during World War II; Helga Weissova, a teenager whose watercolors depicted life in the German concentration camps where she lived from 1941 to 1945; American slaves who sewed elaborate quilts in the years before the Civil War, as well as the descendents of slaves who make quilts "the old way" in Gee's Bend, Alabama; and Ronnie White, Arthur Keigney and Crystal Stimpson, prison inmates who made stark, revealing paintings of life behind bars. Their stories show that artistic expression produces flickers of defiance even in the most hellish places.
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