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.
Prices reflect the popularity. When J Crist Gallery first exhibited works by James Castle at the Outsider Art Fair seven years ago, they sold for $400 to $10,000. Today, comparable Castle works are listed for $2,500 to $75,000. Still, at this year's fair, Smith says, "you can find quality art selling under $1,000, and the bulk of the work is under $5,000." "Compared to the contemporary art world, the work is affordable," says Selig Sacks, a board member of the American Folk Art Museum; his collection of outsider art covers the walls on every floor of his three-story Manhattan brownstone.
But outsider art isn't bound to appreciate. "You have to know what you're doing," says Joseph Jacobs, a former curator of American art at the Newark Museum and an author of the seventh edition of the iconic art history textbook, Janson's History of Art. "You have to know you've paid a good price and there is room for the work to move up." So buyers need to research the market--and the works they find appealing (box). "The great outsider artists do not conform to any type," Jacobs continues. "These artists are not making art for the eye of the art world or for any audience at all, for the most part." They created art out of their emotional needs. But as viewers, we judge it on its own merits.
Viewers connect with the artists as well, says American Visionary Art Museum founder and director Rebecca Hoffberger. Museumgoers "love the vibrancy and the stories" of the artists' often troubled and troubling lives. "People used to say a work of art should stand alone, but people care about the stories. It's going beyond the art as an object and understanding something about the maker as well. It adds another dimension."
You might even say learning about the artists brings us inside the outsiders.
The inside dope on outsider art
With 33 galleries exhibiting, the 13th annual Outsider Art Fair, January 27-30 in New York, offers a wide range of work. Information: sanfordsmith.com/out.html.
The fair is part of Outsider Art Week, during which the American Folk Art Museum (folkartmuseum.org) will host discussions and talks on the topic and give tours of its collection. The museum also houses the Henry Darger Study Center. In the Realms of the Unreal, the film about Darger (poster, at right), opened in select cities in December and is being released more widely this month.
Beyond New York, one of the best-known venues is Baltimore's American Visionary Art Museum (avam.org). The current exhibit, "Holy H2O: Fluid Universe," features myriad watery visions.
Also look for "Bill Traylor, William Edmondson, and the Modernist Impulse, " an exhibit from the University of Illinois's Krannert Art Museum; it will travel to the Birmingham (Ala.) Museum of Art (Feb. 1-April 3), Studio Museum in Harlem (April 20-June 26), and Houston's Menil Collection (July 22-Oct. 2).
An excellent source is the website for the art magazine Raw Vision: rawvision.com -Diane J. Cole
This story appears in the January 17, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.