Since its inception, the fair has been pivotal in establishing the
importance and richness of 20th-, and now 21st-century, folk, outsider
and self-taught art and for virtually introducing greats like James Castle,
Morton Bartlett, George Widener and others to the public. But it has
had some ups and downs. Founded by Sanford Smith in 1993, it was first
held on the ground floor of the venerable Puck Building on Houston
Street, close by SoHo, then still heavy with art galleries. The Puck’s
quirky, irregular spaces seemed made for the oddities of outsider art,
but in 2008 the building became unavailable. For the next five years,
the fair was held on — or exiled to — an upper floor of a generic office
building on 34th Street, where it did not flourish.
Last year the 34th Street space shut down, and Andrew Edlin, an art
dealer and fair participant since 2004, urged Mr. Smith to move the fair
to Chelsea. Shortly thereafter Mr. Edlin offered to buy it, and a deal
was struck. With Mr. Smith staying on as a consultant, some new
exhibitors were attracted, and others weeded out. Voilà: the 2013
Outsider Art Fair, transformed.
With its generous booths and wide aisles, the 21st incarnation has a
big-fair feeling. But with 40 participants, it does not exhaust. Art,
dealers and visitors all can breathe. The rooftop is kitted out with a
large heated tent where snacks are available and panel discussions
staged. (The program, which looks interesting, has been organized by
Valérie Rousseau, an art historian and curator who is married to Mr.
Edlin and has recently joined the staff of the American Folk Art
Museum.)
This year’s fair offers a dizzying array of outstanding things to see
and some impressive new names. Established artists — Bill Traylor, Martín Ramírez,
Adolf Wölfli, Joseph Yoakum, John Kane, Sister Gertrude Morgan, Sam
Doyle and Mr. Widener — dominate the booths of Ricco/Maresca, Dean
Jensen, St. Etienne and Carl Hammer, which also has five canes with
expressively carved and inlaid handles made by an artist known only as
Stick Dog Bob for members of a Black Power group in Chicago during the
1960s. St. Etienne has papered the upper tiers of its walls with a
fascinating timeline about the emergence of outsider art and self-taught
art and their European counterpart, Art Brut.
Du Marche, a newcomer from Lausanne, Switzerland, has devoted most of
its space to Alöise Corbaz (1886-1964), the great Swiss outsider, known
for her nearly fluorescent colors and voluptuous figures. You can
immerse yourself in the art of Haiti, Jamaica and other Caribbean
locales at Pan American Art Projects, Bonheur and Bourbon-Lally, where
bright sequined voodoo banners are piled high on tables.
It adds to the show’s clarity that nearly a quarter of the booths
feature just one artist. Gary Snyder is surveying the work of the
painter Janet Sobel (1894-1968), who worked in several modes of
peasant-art-flavored figuration and also made dripped abstractions
before Jackson Pollock. Luise Ross has the colorful, carefully captioned
crayon drawings of Gayleen Aiken (1934-2005), a Vermont outsider, and a
cluster of 26 nearly life-size bucktoothed people in painted cutout
cardboard called the Raimbilli Cousins, that Aiken made to keep her
company. Kinz-Tillou has devoted its space to the work of Winfred
Rembert, a self-taught artist born in 1945, who creates vivid family
portraits and scenes of chain gangs working in cotton fields by applying
dye to large sheets of carved and tooled leather. C. Grimaldis, a
Baltimore dealer, has returned for the third year with the wonderful
paintings of Giorgos Rigas, 92, whose populous scenes of life in the
Greek mountain village of his childhood are every bit as good as Grandma
Moses’ work.
As before, the fair suggests that the line between outsider and insider
art becomes blurrier with each passing year. At Ames you can marvel at
the exquisite, dreamlike collage drawings of Deborah Barrett,
which suggest a blend of Jim Nutt and Lynda Barry, as well as the more
naïve renderings, mostly of people in urban settings, by Esther Hamerman
(1886-1977).
At Mr. Edlin’s booth the self-taught wizard Brent Green, known in the
regular art world for stop-action animations and installation works of a
Southern Gothic ambience, contributes a loose-limbed hanging sculpture
in carved and painted wood: “Angel With Listening Machine.” Laura
Steward, a new participant from Santa Fe, N.M., is displaying numerous
round and square coins made of silver or melted pennies, by Thomas
Ashcraft, a self-taught astronomer, for use in other realities. Also
here, a life-size woman fashioned from coyote skin turned inside out (or
not, when hair is needed) by Erika Wanenmacher, a practicing witch who
claims that it is a spell.
At the same time the fair also gives glimpses of just how limitless the
outsider realm remains. Several little-known or virtually unknown
artists make very strong impressions, none more so than Renaldo Kuhler,
81, presented in a special exhibition, whose dense drawings portray an
imagined world, Rocaterrania, complete with its own alphabet. At Henry
Boxer, note the delicate reimaginings of Cambridge University drawn by
John Devlin, a Canadian artist, who had a nervous breakdown there as a
young divinity student, and the hybrid creatures, rendered in chain-mail
patterns of ballpoint pen by Mehrdad Rashidi, an Iranian artist living in Europe.
At Cavin-Morris the intricate drawings of M’onma, a Japanese man in his
60s, consist of layers of gossamer images that resemble ghostly tattoos
and must be among the gentlest expressions of the horror vacui ever
made. Don’t miss the amazing hand-built pots, decorated with sinuous
reliefs of animals and figures, by Georgia Blizzard (1919-2002), at
Tanner-Hill.
Two new wood carvers stand out: John Byam, a maker of small but rough
everyday objects and weapons sprinkled with sawdust at Edlin; and, at
Lindsay, Stephen Sabo (1903-2002), who made variously painted miniature
tableaus, reliefs and individual sculptures of animals and birds. Chris
Byrne, a newcomer from Dallas, is presenting the spookily realistic
heads of Frank Bender (1941-2011), a self-taught forensic sculptor who
helped solve cold-case crimes by intuiting how perpetrators and
disappeared victims alike might look years later. The heads are
displayed with relevant news clippings.
What else? Plenty. The works by Japanese outsiders at Yukiko Koide
Presents include the entrancing abstract drawings of Eiichi Shibata, an
autistic artist inspired by soap and bubbles. At Institute 193, a
nonprofit gallery and publisher from Lexington, Ky., notice should be
taken of the pieced-together panoramic photographs of Albert Moser, the
tumultuous ballpoint pen drawings of Beverly Baker, and much else.
There are the displays brought by dealers of contemporary art who handle
outsider material in a limited way: at Vito Schnabel, the eerie
paintings of candles on old windows by Vahakn Arslanian; at Feature, the
calligraphylike drawings of the Kowa people of central India, who have
no written language; and at Laurel Gitlen and Sorry We’re Closed (a
Brussels gallery), the latest drawings from Michael Patterson-Carver,
depicting extremely orderly protests with people carrying signs.
This fair has rarely made a better case for itself, for the field of
artistic activity whose depth it only hints at and for the increasing
futility of cordoning off that field from the rest of today’s art.
Roberta Smith
Source: New York Times
* Thanks Katerina S. for the article and photo!
** See also Γιώργος Ρήγας: Ένας αυτοδίδακτος Έλληνας στη Νέα Υόρκη
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