Displaying items by tag: henry darger

A groundbreaking exhibition originated by the American Folk Art Museum is on view from May 13 through August 17, 2014, at the Museum (2 Lincoln Square) before it embarks on a six-city US tour through early 2017. Self - Taught Genius: Treasures from the American Folk Art Museum posits an original premise that considers the changing implications of self-taught in the United States from a deeply entrenched and widespread culture of self-education in the early national period to its usage today to describe artists working outside the art historical canon and often in isolated circumstances. A fully-illustrated color catalog with essays by the curators, published by the American Folk Art Museum and Marquand Books, accompanies the exhibition. A website about the exhibition can be found at www.selftaughtgenius.org.

“This exhibition serves as a landmark,” commented Anne-Imelda Radice, Ph.D., Executive Director, “by locating the genesis of a field that has grown and become even more complex than ever before, and by clarifying its scope and substance. Self - Taught Genius: Treasures from the American Folk Art Museum provides new insight into the critical role of artists all-too-often overlooked.”

The Outsider Art Fair, a 21-year-old, New York-based event dedicated to self-taught artists and avant-garde artworks, will take on Paris this fall. The inaugural edition of the fair in Paris will be held from October 24-27, 2013 at Hotel Le A, a boutique hotel near the Grand Palais. Founded by Sanford Smith, the fair was acquired by Wide Open Arts in 2012 and will coincide with FIAC, France’s leading contemporary art fair.

Outsider Art, known as Art Brut in France, has played a significant role in French art. The French painter Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) coined the term Art Brut in response to America’s recognition of outsider art. Groundbreaking outsider art exhibitions have also been held at renowned French institutions including the Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Halle Saint Pierre, Foundation Cartier, and Palais de Tokyo.

Paris’ Outsider Art Fair will welcome galleries from across the globe and works by iconic outsider artists such as Henry Darger (1892-1973), Martín Ramírez (1895-1963), Bill Traylor (1854-1949), and Joseph Yoakum (1889-1972) will be presented.

The American Folk Art Museum barely avoided extinction last year when it was forced to sell its ill-suited building on West 53rd Street in Manhattan and retreat to its much smaller branch space at 2 Lincoln Square. Now it is modestly spreading it wings and trying to set more of its great collection before the public by collaborating with other institutions.

It has, for example, lent 14 works to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for its new American Wing galleries. Another fruit of this approach is the exuberant and wide-ranging “Compass: Folk Art in Four Directions,” a dense exhibition of nearly 200 works shoehorned into four galleries in the early-19th-century row houses that are now the home of the South Street Seaport Museum.