Lassiter lived entirely alone and became agoraphobic. He never read books or newspapers and only occasionally left his little Manhattan apartment. He absorbed how people reacted to the city’s contrasting energies — from its moral chaos and cacophony of 42nd Street to the languorous figures on benches in Central Park. Returning to his studio, he became a deep diver forging into the unconscious as he focused intently upon his art. “For the type of work I do,” he said, “you have to be alone, to think alone — You have to just observe and capture that inner source.” In 1956, curators from the Museum of Modern Art were the first to recognize his work and featured it in a contemporary drawings exhibition. In addition to MoMA, his works can be now found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Lassiter was obsessed with creating figures, which are so spontaneous in their story-telling that recognizing their masterful control requires careful contemplation. We soon become engaged in his delightful game of discovery and quickly find his joy, whimsy, and celebration of life. The ensemble, like prehistoric glyphs on a cave wall, appear woven with a narrative magic that seems to embody the essence not only of his own life experience but that of all of us. He referred to the process as his “stream of consciousness” where there is “no external control.”