Melvin Way, outsider artist who depicted inner mysteries, dies at age 70

Melvin Way, whose hallucinatory diagrams, composed with ballpoint pens and markers on scraps of paper at homeless shelters in New York City, were collected by leading art museums around the world, died on February 4 at a hospital near his family’s home in Smoaks, S.C. a rural town northwest of Charleston. He was 70.

His mother, Flossie Lee Hubbard, said the cause was complications of a stroke.

Way, who turned out to be schizophrenic in his twenties, emerged into the world of outsider art – a label for works that originate outside the boundaries of the mainstream – from the basement of a notorious and violent homeless shelter on Wards Island.

There, in 1989, he began working with an instructor from a nonprofit organization that taught art in prisons and homeless shelters.

“When I first met him, he had over 200 drawings with him,” the instructor, Andrew Castrucci, said in an interview. “He always bought clothes with pockets. So he has about 200, 300 drawings, all wrapped in rubber bands, in his pockets. They are small and all covered with tape for protection. You had to see it.”

The works defied explanation — especially by Mr. Way, who was taking schizophrenia medications and also struggled with cocaine abuse. Some drawings, he said, depicted cancer prevention. Others were prescriptions for cocaine, LSD and caffeine. There were even treatments for herpes, rabies, pneumonia and scabies.

One day, Mr. Castrucci showed some of Mr. Way’s riddles to New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz. “I felt it,” Mr. Saltz wrote in 2015“as if I saw another kind of infinity, thoughts made visible, wild nerves, optical barnacles coming to hermetic life, delirium readable.”

For Mr. Saltz, it was irrelevant whether Mr. Way were even remotely logical or scientifically based. “It doesn’t matter to me whether Way copies these formulas or pulls them from his complicated memory, or even whether they are crazy,” he wrote.

Roberta Smith, the co-chief art critic of The New York Times, wrote in 2022 that Mr. Way ‘seems to map the energy of thought itself’.

In 1991 Mr.’s drawings appeared. Way in solo and group exhibitions, first in small galleries in New York and later in Paris, London and Prague. His works are now in the collections of the museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington and the Collection of the Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Because of Mr. Way’s mental illness, introductions to journalists and potential buyers can be challenging, Mr. Castrucci said. In interviews, Mr. Way sometimes said that he had previously been ‘Governor of Rockefeller’ and mayor of New York. The longer the interviews went on, the stranger they became.

Asked by Art et al., a global advocacy group, to explain his images, Mr. Way said replied: “It’s in the looking glass, the mirror. Like 22-7th is a big number in the universe. If they find out I went into the mirror via the computer and did this, it’s called physics, okay?’

Mr. Castrucci often acted as a kind of translator.

“Some people thought he was a little scary,” he said. “And I would say, ‘No, no. Don’t worry about what he says. Look at this work. He’s a genius. ”

Melvin Way was born on January 3, 1954 in Smoaks. His mother was a sharecropper. His father, Wilford Way Sr., was a machinist.

When Mr. Way was four, he moved to Brooklyn with his family. He excelled at school, especially in art, science and music. After high school, he worked as a machinist and musician and played bass in New York funk bands.

Mr. Way was an enthusiastic participant in the hazy LSD days of the 1960s and 1970s, relatives said. They suspect that heavy drinking preceded the psychiatric problems that began in his 20s. He disappeared into the streets of New York, bouncing between homeless shelters, psychiatric wards and prisons.

More than twenty years passed without anyone in his family hearing from him.

Mr. Castrucci, however, took care of him. To keep him out of trouble in shelters, Mr. Castrucci brought him supplies and books, including some on Leonardo da Vinci, whose notebooks with complicated formulas fascinated Mr. Way.

Mr. Castrucci had to beg social services not to place Mr. Way in psychiatric hospitals.

“I kept telling them that the man is not crazy, but a great artist,” Mr. Castrucci said. ‘He was very charming when you first met him. He was a really sensitive, beautiful guy.”

Mr. Way’s family eventually found him on Facebook. In 2015, he moved to South Carolina, where he lived with his mother until his death.

Along with his mother, his survivors include his siblings, Izell, Wilford, Carl, Jared and Stephanie Way and Landy and Gregory Jones.

Mr.’s pieces Way are sold by the Andrew Edlin Gallery in the Bowery, with the proceeds divided among Mr. Way’s family.

Mr. Edlin, the gallery’s owner, said that “some of the leading collectors are responding to his work. Some of them are board members of major museums.”

He added that some of Mr. Way have sold for over $10,000.

Looked at another way, their real value was keeping Mr. Way alive.

“These drawings were his therapy,” Mr. Castrucci said.

They kept him safe too.

“In the shelter system, people admired him,” Mr. Castrucci said. “His friends flocked to him and protected him because he was an artist.”