Outsider & Folk Art

Street Artist

Hans Krusi, Drawing on restaurants' paper napkins

In the Swiss mountains, Hans Krüsi found flowers to sell from his Zürich pushcart—and the inspiration to create a major body of outsider art.

At the Outsider Art Fair in New York this past February, a new artist made a much-heralded debut appearance. Of course, he wasn’t exactly new, considering that the drawings were obviously made before World War II, but his work had remained outside the Outsider scene until quite recently.

Fowl Most Fair

Bird decoys are America’s only completely original form of folk art, and they are avidly hunted by collectors across the country. By Sarah E. Fensom One night in the 1950s, Adele Earnest, Americana dealer, founding trustee of the American Folk Art Museum and author of the 1965 book The Art of the Decoy: American Bird [...]

A Well-Carved Life

By Ted Loos Remembering the folk artist and furniture craftsman Stephen Huneck. A time-honored trope in Western culture has it that creativity and depression go hand in hand, that artists are “born under the sign of Saturn.” Whether or not there really is such a thing as creative melancholy, artists from the Renaissance to today [...]

The New Outsiders

The late 1940s saw the first rumblings of appreciation for what is now called “Outsider” art—works created by nonacademically trained artists who operate apart from the cultural mainstream and its art-historical canon. In France, the artist Jean Dubuffet, the Surrealist leader André Breton and the art critic Michel Tapié celebrated visionary autodidacts, whose work they labeled “art brut,” or “raw art.”

Sketches of the Past

Born in Jamaica in 1794 into a well-to-do Sephardic-Jewish merchant family, Belisario spent part of his life in England and died in London in 1849. His major work is Sketches of Character, In Illustration of the Habits, Occupation and Costume of the Negro Population, in the Island of Jamaica, a series of lithographs of Jamaican slaves dressed up for a popular music-and-dance celebration, which the artist, who was based in Kingston, Jamaica’s capital, issued to subscribers in 1837 and 1838.