Finding beauty in the cast-off or the offbeat, eclectic collectors are redefining aesthetic value — on their own terms. Continue reading
The Extraordinary Ordinary
Outsider & Folk Art
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Features From Previous Issues
American Beauties
The folk-art feeding frenzy may be over, but the best is holding its own, and collectors are making some intriguing discoveries. Continue reading
Mesoamerican Art: Exploring the Mayan Apocalypse Through Art Objects
A comprehensive gathering of Mesoamerican art objects reveals how a religious myth expressed itself—and perpetuated itself—through trade. Continue reading
Street Artist
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. Continue reading
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
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. Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
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.” Continue reading
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. Continue reading