AVAM’s permanent collection contains more than 4,000 works kept in climatized storage and rotated through the museum’s permanent collection gallery, an assemblage including all of the major self-schooled, intuitive outsider artists: Reverend Howard Finster (Georgia), Purvis Young (Florida), Martin Ramírez (Mexico), Albert Louden (Britain), Ted Gordon (California), Minnie Evans (Georgia), Judith Scott (California) and James Harold Jennings (North Carolina).

Hoffberger’s next goal is to transport each Baltimore exhibition to a West Coast venue in Los Angeles, to feature art “From Sea to Shining Sea.” She says, “This would enable us to tour our mega-exhibitions and better capture the creative richness of all the West Coast scientists, writers, humorists in each new exhibition.”

“What is really exciting about the space in AVAM is how it allows you to become intimate with the artwork in a profound way,” says Guha Shankar, folklife specialist at the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. “The works on display give a concrete shape to impermanent things such as dreams, imagination and vision.”

 

Bennard Perlman is a Baltimore-based author and artist who recently had his 77th one-man show.

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American Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore
410.244.1900 avam.org