Displaying items by tag: outsider art

After just one edition in Paris, the New York institution Outsider Art Fair (OAF) already feels at home in France—and it's no surprise. Paris, home turf of art brut father Jean Dubuffet, is natural territory for the genre. These days outsider art is supported year-round by galleries and institutions like the Halle Saint Pierre and such foundations as Bruno Decharme's abcd (art brut connaissance & diffusion) and Antoine de Galbert's La Maison Rouge. The art world's current frenzy of interest in the genre─epitomized by Massimiliano Gioni's "Encyclopedic Palace" exhibition at the 2013 Venice Biennale─doesn't hurt either. No wonder OAF is settling in so well.

The self-taught artist Ralph Fasanella (1914-97), born in the Bronx to Italian immigrants, believed that painting could be a form of labor advocacy. He worked as an ice delivery man, a truck driver, a gas station owner and a union organizer, all the while developing his colorful and detailed scenes of working-class life (as in “Family Supper,” which shows his mother, a garment worker, taking her second shift at a crowded dinner table). He also made historical paintings, like the mid-1970s series of canvases documenting the 1912 “Bread and Roses” strike in Lawrence, Mass.

For the entirety of its 21-year run, the Outsider Art Fair has been held during the winter months. This year, the show, which highlights Outsider, Self-Taught, and Folk Art, will take place in the spring, from May 8 through May 11 at Chelsea’s Center 548, the former home of the Dia Art Foundation in New York City. The show will coincide with the New York edition of the Frieze Art Fair.

Eleven galleries who have been with the Outsider Art Fair since the first show will return this year including American Primitive, Ricco/Maresca, Marion Harris, and Carl Hammer. In total, 46 exhibitors from around the globe will participate in the 2014 Outsider Art Fair.

Founded by Sanford Smith, the Outsider Art Fair was acquired by Wide Open Arts in 2012. Since its inception, the Outsider Art Fair has been dedicated to showcasing works by artists who have been obscured, neglected, or overlooked.

On March 29-30, over 800 works from Academy Award-Winning Director Jonathan Demme’s art collection will be sold during an auction at Material Culture in Philadelphia. For 27 years, Demme has collected self-taught art by contemporary Jamaican intuitive painters and Haitian and American outsider artists. The 1,050-lot sale spans from the 1940s through present day.

After acquiring a small painting by the Haitian painter Wilson Bigaud in 1986, Demme made the first of many trips to Haiti. The director learned Creole, befriended many local artists, and became a regular at the Centre d’Art, which showcased some of Haiti’s greatest artistic masterpieces. In 1997, Demme curated “Island on Fire,” an exhibition in Manhattan that featured over 100 Haitian paintings from his collection.

A weeklong auction preview will be held at Material Culture from March 22-29. Haitian paintings and sculpture will be displayed by region, alongside works by American self-taught artists such as Purvis Young, Minnie Evans, and Walter Ellison. Demme’s collection also includes Americana wood carvings, tramp art, weathervanes, and canes. 

The American Folk Art Museum in New York is currently presenting the exhibition Bill Traylor: Drawings from the Collections of the High Museum of Art and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. The show features over 60 drawings by the self-taught artist Bill Traylor (1854-1949), many of which have never traveled past the southeastern United States. The exhibition is complemented by Traylor in Motion: Wonders from New York Collections, which includes additional works on loan from private collections.

Traylor, one of the most significant outsider artists, was born into slavery on an Alabama plantation. Following emancipation, his family farmed on the plantation until the 1930s. In 1939, Traylor moved to Montgomery and spent much of his time drawings images of the people he saw on the street and scenes pulled from his memory illustrating his time spent on the farm. Over the course of four years, Traylor produced between 1,200 and 1,500 drawings.

While he garnered little recognition as an artist during his lifetime, Traylor began to gain notoriety during the 1970s thanks to his friend, Charles Shannon, the foremost champion his work. The R.H. Oosterom Gallery in New York mounted the first significant exhibition of Traylor’s work, which led to nearly fort solo shows and hundreds of group exhibitions. Traylor’s drawings now reside in major public collections including that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. The High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Montgomery Museum of Art in Alabama hold the largest public collections of Traylor’s drawings.

Bill Traylor: Drawings from the Collections of the High Museum of Art and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts will be on view at the American Folk Art Museum through September 22, 2013.

The Outsider Art Fair, a 21-year-old, New York-based event dedicated to self-taught artists and avant-garde artworks, will take on Paris this fall. The inaugural edition of the fair in Paris will be held from October 24-27, 2013 at Hotel Le A, a boutique hotel near the Grand Palais. Founded by Sanford Smith, the fair was acquired by Wide Open Arts in 2012 and will coincide with FIAC, France’s leading contemporary art fair.

Outsider Art, known as Art Brut in France, has played a significant role in French art. The French painter Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) coined the term Art Brut in response to America’s recognition of outsider art. Groundbreaking outsider art exhibitions have also been held at renowned French institutions including the Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Halle Saint Pierre, Foundation Cartier, and Palais de Tokyo.

Paris’ Outsider Art Fair will welcome galleries from across the globe and works by iconic outsider artists such as Henry Darger (1892-1973), Martín Ramírez (1895-1963), Bill Traylor (1854-1949), and Joseph Yoakum (1889-1972) will be presented.

For more than thirty years, Philadelphians Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz––he is a lawyer, she is a ceramicist––have been drawn to the work of self-taught artists, individuals who are not trained in art schools, do not earn a living as artists, and who, for the most part, have limited or no connection to the mainstream art world with its dealers, galleries, collectors, critics, schools, and museums. During those three decades the couple has formed one of the finest collections of American outsider art in private hands. Intending that a wider public should eventually enjoy these works, they have made a promised gift of most of them to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This generous donation is celebrated by an exhibition, “Great and Mighty Things”: Outsider Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection.

Great and Mighty Things: Outsider Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection presents over 200 objects from one of the country’s most remarkable collections of works by American self-taught artists. On view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through June 9, 2013, Great and Mighty Things includes drawings, paintings, sculptures, and other objects by 27 artists who created their oeuvres outside of the mainstream modern and contemporary art worlds.

Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz, who have spent over 30 years assembling their collection, will donate the works in the exhibition to the museum. The exhibition and gift include works by prominent outsider artists such as Martín Ramírez (1895-1963), Howard Finster (1916-2001), Purvis Young (1943-2010), and Bill Traylor (1854-1949) and spans from the 1930s to 2010. The Bonovitz’s generous donation will greatly enhance the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s collection as well as help to establish the institution as one of the primary centers for the study of American outsider art.

Outsider Art, which is known for its raw and out-of-the-ordinary beauty, has become a global phenomenon in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Once considered the art of the mentally insane, Outsider Art now holds a prominent place next to modern and contemporary art while maintaining its individual identity.

Hirschl & Adler Modern Gallery is showing the recently discovered work by Outsider artist James
Edward Deeds, Jr. in an exhibition featuring thirty drawings created during a forty-five year period when Deeds was a mental patient in State Hospital No. 3 in Nevada, Missouri. His handbound album of 140 double-sided drawings was given to his family in 1970 when he was discharged. Accidentally discarded by movers, the book was rescued from a trash heap by a boy who kept it for forty years. The only clue to the artist’s identity was the hospital’s stationary and it took extensive forensic research to identify the maker as Mr. Deeds. Deeds’ life story, images, and 18-minute documentary can be found at www.electricpencildrawings.com/index.html. This March, a larger selection of sixty to eighty drawings will debut at the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland, the premier showcase for Outsider art.

The Electric Pencil will be on view through February 9, 2013 at The Crown Building, 730 Fifth Avenue, NYC. For information call 212.535.8810 or visit www.hirschlandadler.com.

The American Folk Art Museum barely avoided extinction last year when it was forced to sell its ill-suited building on West 53rd Street in Manhattan and retreat to its much smaller branch space at 2 Lincoln Square. Now it is modestly spreading it wings and trying to set more of its great collection before the public by collaborating with other institutions.

It has, for example, lent 14 works to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for its new American Wing galleries. Another fruit of this approach is the exuberant and wide-ranging “Compass: Folk Art in Four Directions,” a dense exhibition of nearly 200 works shoehorned into four galleries in the early-19th-century row houses that are now the home of the South Street Seaport Museum.