The Odd Duck of Antiguan Art, in His Ecstatic, Expressionist Glory

In “Frank Walter: To Capture a Soul,” a scavenger hunt of an exhibition at the Drawing Center in Manhattan, we find an aspect of so-called outsider art that is not easily conveyed in museums: compulsion.

Born in Antigua to mixed European and Black ancestry, Walter (1926-2009) at times managed the family sugar plantation, farmed in the Dominican Republic, ran photography and signage studios, worked in carpentry and framing, trained with the Royal Air Force in England,studied chemistry there and in 1971 ran for prime minister of his country.

And with mind-boggling voluminousness he recorded himself and his world: According to the Drawing Center, 468 hours of tape, 600 wooden sculptures, 1,000 drawings, 5,000 paintings and 50,000 pages of memoir and poetry fill his archive, now in Maryland.

Since representing Antigua and Barbuda at the 2017 Venice Biennale, curators have sought — rightly — to restore Walter to art history as a neglected expressionist who painted a quasi-imagined Caribbean world in bursts of color, on recycled surfaces that reflect an artist’s resourcefulness.

Claire Gilman and Isabella Kapur of the Drawing Center continue the revival. In consultation with the Walter specialist Barbara Paca, they have chosen the 220 small paintings, drawings and wooden sculptures. Walter rarely dated these works, and the titles are mainly curatorial. We also find a huge amount of archival and written material: poems, posters, notebooks and diagrams that we wouldn’t typically call art.