They're coloring outside the lines
It's called "outsider art"--even though it's inside museums worldwide. Even though it's displayed at tony galleries in New York and London. And even though it commands five and six figures for joltingly original (and sometimes downright odd) work that only a few years ago might not have garnered even $200. That is, if it was considered art at all.
The art ranges from the streamlined silhouette pencil drawings of the late Bill Traylor (born into slavery on an Alabama cotton plantation, he didn't start to draw until he was 84) to eye-poppingly bright splashes of house paint in the Ohio and Kentucky street scenes depicted by William Hawkins. From inventive, hard-to-categorize constructions and drawings by James Castle, an illiterate deaf man from rural Idaho who worked with coal and stove soot, string, and package wrappings, to the ethereal tombstone carvings of William Edmondson, a Tennessean who, at age 59, believed that God had called him to this vocation.
Bold bid. Inside or out, these self-taught artists are hot. In 2003, at Christie's auction house, a collector paid $95,600 for a work by Mexican-American Martin Ramirez, an itinerant worker and psychiatric hospital patient known for dizzying, Escher-like drawings. In another sign of the mainstreaming of outsider art, this past November, the nine-year-old American Visionary Art Museum--housed in a funky Baltimore neighborhood and devoted to outsider artists--doubled its size. And on this year's Oscar short list for best full-length documentary is Jessica Yu's In the Realms of the Unreal, which centers on perhaps the best-known outsider artist, Henry Darger. The reclusive Chicago janitor produced thousands of deceptively unsettling pastel watercolor collages based on his own apocalyptic epic.
Just how far out can outsider art go? Darger's 15,000-page illustrated novel depicts an ever escalating battle between forces of evil, represented by Confederate soldiers in mortarboard hats, vs. brave "ViviAn Girls" --perfectly coiffed kewpie dolls who, when nude, display mystifying, tiny penises. (So isolated was Darger, film director Yu speculates, that he may not have realized that males and females have a different anatomy.)
With such disparate styles and sensibilities, the only thing outsider artists have in common is what they didn't have: formal art training. Usually poor, living on the fringes of society, sometimes institutionalized in prisons or in psychiatric hospitals and generally uninfluenced by any art tradition or technique, they lived as outsiders in just about every sense of the word. Hence the term "outsider art," coined by critic Roger Cardinal in 1972.
But the phrase is problematic, and not just because the art world appears to have claimed these outsiders as their own. "Outsider art is not the most accurate term," notes Brooke Davis Anderson, director and curator of the contemporary center at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City. But, she adds, "it's certainly the most marketable" compared with other labels: self-taught, folk, intuitive, or visionary art.
The market for outsider art shows no signs of abating. As a gauge of its growth, when art fair producer Sanford Smith organized the first Outsider Art Fair in New York, in 1993, he doubted he would break even. He never lost a dime, he says, "and I made a nice profit." This year, 33 galleries will exhibit work at the 13th annual Outsider Art Fair in trendy SoHo in Manhattan, January 27-30. Judging from past attendance, 10,000-plus visitors are expected over the four-day run.
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