Outside-In

Over the course of the next decade outsider art began to enjoy widespread recognition and support from galleries and museums willing to contest the orthodoxy of the academy. In America, groundbreaking exhibitions such Naives and Visionaries at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (1974) and Outsider Art in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art (1979) introduced a curious public to the country’s vast range of self-taught artists existing beyond the boundaries of mainstream tradition. In Europe, exhibits such as the 1979 Outsiders, held at London’s Hayward Gallery and co-curated by Roger Cardinal and the collector Victor Musgrave, in conjunction with the Arts Council of Great Britain, helped cultivate the public’s growing taste for the eccentricities of outsider art. In the accompanying exhibition catalog for Outsiders, Joanna Drew, then the Acting Director for the Arts Council, dramatically declared her city “invaded, at [its] own invitation, by outsiders” (Cardinal and Musgrave 1979:7). True to these words, the popularity of outsider art continued to swell, permeating the boundaries of those cultural institutions from which it had long been bared.

Lent as much newfound credibility by the activities of the art market as the interests of scholars and artists searching for fresh insights into the nature of the creative impulse, outsider activity quickly gained a legion of dedicated enthusiasts and conservationists. Generally regarded as a fragile and tenuous phenomenon under constant threat of sterilization through mainstream appropriation (resonance of Dubuffet’s conservasionist rhetoric continues to permeate the discourse to this day), outsider art was quickly tagged as a rarefied commodity, justifying a flurry of collecting activity throughout the 1980s, particularly in the United States where the work of artists such as Bill Traylor (1854-1947) and Martin Ramirez quickly acquired rarefied status, fetching prices at auction on a par with the work of well known contemporary artists.

During the 1990s many private collections in possession of outsider art made their public debuts, including the Anthony Petullo Collection of Self-Taught and Outsider Art at the Milwaukee Art Museum (1993), the Collection of Dr. Kurt Gitter and Alice Rae Yellen at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama (1995), and the Musgrave-Kinley Outsider Art Collection at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (1998). Several museums dedicated to the representation of outsider forms appeared at this time as well, chief among them the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore and the Contemporary Center at the American Folk Art Museum in New York. In addition to these new venues, high-profile museums such as the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art, the Pompidou Center and the High Museum in Atlanta sought to include sterling examples of the genre in their permanent collections.

As for current trends in the field of outsider art, new waves of interest are constantly reinvigorating critical and aesthetic assessments of the genre. At odds with historically pervasive doubts surrounding the sustainability of an outsider voice in the face of increasing cultural homogeny, many innovative organizations invested in the promotion of marginalized art-making are actively engaged in furthering the discourse surrounding the very notion of ‘outsiderness’. Periodicals such as Raw Vision, and groups akin to the Chicago-based Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art are working to increase visibility and public awareness by showcasing classic examples of outsider production alongside contemporary instances from around the world. In addition, many recent publications attempt to address the forging of a systematic critical approach to a well-defined outsider aesthetic (Weld 2001). Others concern themselves with ethical issues raised by collection and curatorial practices that serve, either intentionally or inadvertently, to perpetuate the social and cultural isolation of the individual (ten Berge 2000:87-89). Taken together, this wealth of recent resources serves as ongoing acknowledgment of the underlining premise of outsider art: as long as dominant cultural assumptions are present and actively intersecting the process of creativity, there will always be a marginalized, but no less important faction of individuals deeply inspired by the persistence of inner voice and driven to create by the overwhelming urgency of individual expression.

Posted by admin on April 6th, 2007 | Filed in outsider art | Comment now »

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