The Shadow of Death in America: Securing the Shadow Over the past several years, a surprising niche interest in the arts has turned mainstream in America: death and the end of life. A topic once shielded by the taboo of privacy, this most intimate of experiences has become the subject of thriving discussion. The New […]

Throughout the year, the work of Bessemer, Alabama born artist Ronald Lockett has been touring the country. The exhibition, Fever Within, is the first major retrospective of Lockett’s work. Lockett used the discarded tin scraps and steel that littered his post-industrial environment and transformed them into monumental works of beauty. His works express both his […]

For many people, 2016 was a year of tumultuous and often disappointing surprises. Self-taught and outsider art often found itself as a contrarian to this trend. 2016 brought some major spotlights, notable developments, and significant losses. Below are our picks for top 6 self-taught and outsider art stories of 2016. 1) A Record Setting Christie’s […]

In the back corner of Latitude Arts, a shared creative space deep in a Lexington, Kentucky industrial complex, Jessie Dunahoo is hard at work. Dunahoo is eighty-four. He sports a sturdy flannel, Liberty denim overalls, and a sewing needle balanced between his lips. For the past few years, three days a week and six hours […]

Saint EOM was a self-proclaimed psychic who told fortunes for a living. But when it came to the future of Pasaquan, his flamboyantly sculpted, rainbow-hued compound in rural Georgia, his predictions depended on his mood. On some occasions he confidently declared the place would one day become a spiritual center, attracting followers of the new […]

Hiroyuki Doi’s work is an exercise in meditation as much as it is a topography exorcising grief. Each work is an exaltation of depth: meditative and obsessive while occupying a manic space that swells toward a calm. The five Doi works in the group exhibition, “Escape Routes,” currently on view at the John Michael Kohler […]

Time. This word was by far the most intently discussed, illuminated, and expanded upon throughout Prison Folk a panel discussion accompanying “Post Black Folk Art in America: 1930-1980-2016,” the current exhibition (through January 8, 2017) at Chicago’s Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, curated by artist and former director of the South Side […]

LaVon WIlliams was not the first in his family to become a woodcarver. His half-brother, David Wright, first exposed Williams to the craft by carving some of the toys that Williams would play with as a child, including one a Williams’ favorite toys— a replica of the Apollo. Wright was in turn inspired by their […]

November 12-13 marks the second installment of the bi-annual Slotin Folk Art Auction hosted in Buford, GA. For 23 years The Slotin festivals and auctions have been keystone avenues for bringing awareness of outsider art to the public. The annual Slotin Folk Fest that’s been held since the fair’s inception was discontinued this year due […]

Why do we create? The answers are as varied as humans themselves. An active police officer journaling his cases. A recluse documenting his hallucinogenic visions. A blind man building magnificent sculptures in his backyard to scare away the birds from his plants. At the Outsider Art Fair in Paris, the common unifier is, undeniably, an […]

Alma Thomas was the first African-American woman to be featured in the White House art collection; the first African-American woman to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art; the first person to graduate from Howard University with a degree in Fine Art. As an artist who achieved unprecedented success in the […]

Three self-taught contemporary artists on the relationship that they have with their work and connection to art Artistic practice and the relationship that artists foster with their work is canonically seeded with the markings of ritual, catharsis, spirituality and catharsis. For many artists, the connection that’s developed in the process makes it difficult for them […]