If you’ve perused The Huffington Post Arts & Culture page at all this week, you may have noticed the spread of outsider artists gracing the site. That’s because this weekend is the 23rd edition of the Outsider Art Fair, one of the rare and peculiar occasions when the art world gathers to celebrate and explore artists who, by and large, are unaware of the art world’s real, prickly existence.
Henry Darger, Jenny and Her Sisters are Nearly Run Down by Train…, n.d. Watercolor and pencil on paper 18 x 24 inches (45.7 x 61 cm)
There are various ways to make sense of outsider art as a genre. Roberta Smith calls it “a somewhat vague, catchall term for self-taught artists of any kind.” Lyle Rexer defines it as “the work of people who are institutionalized or psychologically compromised according to standard clinical norms” or “created under the conditions of a massively altered state of consciousness, product of an unquiet mind.” Jerry Saltz argues it doesn’t exist at all, except as a discriminatory boundary preventing untrained artists from their rightful places in the canon.
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Because of the simplicity of the message, outsider art is also refreshingly unpretentious. “You look at fairs like Scope or Pulse or the Armory show, and they’re all showing work that has been created in a vacuum where people paid attention to the artistic institution, where people pay attention to art historical practice, the chronology of development,” Hoffman said. “The Outsider Art Fair is more approachable. There’s a large percentage of the population who may not feel comfortable going to Frieze because they do not know the institution. Here, everyone is welcome.”
We should be careful about how we address, categorize and subconsciously idealize what’s known as outsider art. But when it comes to seeing it in person — as Hoffman is quick to point out — we should never hesitate.
The Outsider Art Fair runs from January 29 until February 1 at Center 548 in New York. See a preview below and let us know your thoughts in the comments.
