🐎🎡🏰
In one of the drawings discovered in a well-worn album, fished out of the trash in 1970 by a teenager in Springfield, Missouri, portrays a wide-eyed woman points to a bouquet of flowers below the words “ECTLECTRC PENCIL.” It’s one of 283 hand-numbered sketches in crayon and pencil on ledger paper from State Hospital No. 3 in Nevada, Missouri, stitched together in the portfolio. When the boy, then an adult, finally sold the album in 2006, the unknown artist acquired the nickname “the Electric Pencil,” and the typos assumed to be the result of dyslexia.
Now in its 24th edition, the Outsider Art Fair has found a new home this year at the Metropolitan Pavilion, currently filled with the fair’s largest number of exhibitors yet. Of the 64 galleries participating from seven different countries, 24 are first-time exhibitors, with a large number of dealers who represent self-taught artists arriving from the nearby Lower East Side. The resulting presentation is incredibly diverse and sprawling. Most booths feature walls hung with artworks and shelves or pedestals covered with curios; you won’t find any sleek light boxes, digital screens, or colossal sculptures that make for easy Instagram fodder here. Rather, the fair is dominated by works that suggest a dedication to handicraft or an intimate fixation on a subject. This attention to detail — tantamount to a reverence — is what makes much of the fair’s art so intriguing and, simply, great.
The Personal Passions and Detailed Devotions of the Outsider Art Fair
The term “Outsider Art,” coined in 1972 by writer Roger Cardinal, has plenty of critics. Used to describe art created by marginalized people outside the mainstream art establishment, some say the term is stigmatizing. And it’s arguably been overused, applied to anyone from work by psychiatric patients to prison inmates to any vaguely eccentric self-taught artist, leading some to question what “outsider artist” even means.
Rhode Island’s Newest Gallery Champions Artists With Disabilities
The 24th annual Outsider Art Fair opens in New York on January 21, and never before has the scope of what might qualify as — or, more precisely, of what is being called — outsider art seemed so diverse or vast.
Outsider Art Fair Preview: Discoveries, Surprises, and an Expanded Vision
Prussian immigrant Charles A.A. Dellschau spent most of his life in Houston working as a butcher; when he retired in 1899 at the age of 68, he turned his attention skywards and devoted himself to an entirely different endeavor: designing airships and charting the development of flight. For 23 years, he fervently produced almost 2,500 drawings of detailed, fantastical contraptions he compiled in at least 12 large, hand-bound manuscripts that remained in his family home for decades following his death in 1923. Today, the works are scattered between museums and private collections; 23 pages — all double-sided — are currently on view in Charles Dellschau (1830–1923): American Visionary at Stephen Romano Gallery, revealing the rich world of an aviation enthusiast who never flew himself but devoted decades to kindling boundless visions of flight.
Following India’s independence in 1947, architect Le Corbusier was recruited to design Chandigarh, the country’s first planned modern metropolis. Alongside, in secret, another builder had a very different vision in concrete. From 1957 onward, Nek Chand constructed the Rock Garden of Chandigarh, with animals and human figures cobbled together from broken glass, rebar, ceramic shards, electronic parts, and other trash, much of it from construction sites. Despite trespassing with his artwork on government land, the people of Chandigarh rallied for Chand’s art environment and it opened to the public in 1976.
Rubin Museum Honors Nek Chand, Visionary Artist who Built Paradise from Debris
This week Boise, Idaho, took ownership of the late self-taught artist James Castle’s longtime home, which will be restored into a cultural facility commemorating his life and offering residency and exhibition space to local and national artists. The small compound of simple houses surrounded by towering trees will be the state’s only publicly-accessible site dedicated to the life of an artist. It’s here that, from 1931 to 1977, Castle created many of his resourceful assemblages with found paper from advertisements and food packaging, often using sticks to draw with soot and spit on their surfaces, creating a distinct visual language that was the deaf artist’s main form of communication
Self-Taught Artist James Castle’s Home Will Become a Cultural Center
A common misconception about so-called “outsider art” is that all of the people who make it are either cut off from the world (because they’re crazy) or dead. And so, a common concern in discussions of the outsider art market is exploitation. Are dealers taking advantage of artists who are alive but disabled or exploiting the estates of those who were once mentally ill and are now deceased? “Today’s new art market stars are either dead, mentally impaired, or can barely speak for themselves,” critic Christian Viveros-Faune oncewrote in the Village Voice.
In the first major retrospective of her sculptural bundles of yarn and found objects, the late Judith Scott is celebrated not just for having found a way to creatively express herself late in life, after being institutionalized with Down syndrome and undiagnosed deafness; instead, the Brooklyn Museum’s Judith Scott: Bound and Unbound honors her powerful, tactile acts of making in two galleries of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.