Frank Calloway
Frank Calloway (born July 2, 1896 in Alabama) is a self-taught artist, mental patient, and possibly the world's oldest man.
Since being diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1952, he has been a full-time patient of the Alabama Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation. He currently resides in the Alice M. Kidd Nursing Facility at the Bryce State Mental Hospital in Tuscaloosa.
While he had always done some drawing, his prolific output as an artist dates only from the time he took an art class in the 1980s. Some of his colorful drawings, most of which portray the rural South of his youth, were part of a 2007 exhibit at the Kentuck Center for the Arts in Northport and a 2008 exhibit at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. In addition to colorful drawings, Calloway also fills notebooks and the margins of his work with numeric series' and tables.
The state of Alabama records his birth date as July 2, 1896, which would make him the nation's oldest living man. The Inglewood, California-based Gerontology Research Group, which tracks the age of supercentenarians, disputes the state's data and presumes that he was born in the mid-1910s based on other evidence.
References
- Alabama Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation (July 2, 2008) "Bryce campus resident and Alabama artist Frank Calloway is 112 years old today!." press release
- "At 112, artist still going strong" (July 20, 2008) CNN.com
- Hunter, Desiree (December 30, 2008) "Tuscaloosa resident may be oldest man in nation." Tuscaloosa News
- "Frank Calloway." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 4 Jan 2009, 19:19 UTC. 4 Jan 2009 [1]
External links
- Birmingham News Photo Gallery of Frank Calloway at work in 2008
- Photos of Calloway's art by Mark Barry at the American Visionary Art Museum, via Flickr.com