Latest news with #OutsiderArtFair
Yahoo
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
At NYC art show, St. Paul artists with disabilities take international stage
Lucy Picasso was in her element. She was showing her paintings at the Outsider Art Fair, a high-profile international exhibition in New York City this February. Big-name curators, gallerists and critics were there; Susan Sarandon, Steve Buscemi and David Byrne reportedly stopped by. And Lucy Picasso was chatting away, giving out buttons with her artwork, selling original paintings and signing autographs. She and four other local artists were featured in the exhibition thanks to Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts, a St. Paul program that serves artists with disabilities, including Lucy Picasso. Art by Scott Sorensen, Carl Clark, Janice Essick and Matt Zimdars was also shown at the fair. (Lucy Picasso's birth name, Louann Johnson, went out the window years ago in favor of tributes to comedian Lucille Ball and the Cubist master.) Interact, founded in 1996, is a progressive art studio, part of a national movement of nonprofits dedicated to supporting artists with disabilities in building careers in the arts. Many staff members at the organization are both professional art instructors and disability support professionals, said Interact executive director Joseph Price. More broadly, the model aims to challenge perceptions of disability and the societal roles people with disabilities can hold. 'We believe that our artists are just as able and capable of creating great works of art as any professional, and we want to keep focused on the idea that our artistic standard is no different than any other professional artistic standard,' Price said. Take Lucy Picasso herself, for instance. Today she is, by any metric, a successful full-time professional artist. Fifteen years ago, she was working in downtown Minneapolis, vacuuming carpets at a furniture store. It was not until she joined Interact that she discovered her artistic talent, her sister Debb Masterson said — and without Interact, she, like others with intellectual disabilities, might still find herself stuck doing rote jobs like stuffing envelopes or taking out garbage. 'I don't want to do that, that's boring!' Lucy Picasso said, sitting next to Masterson. 'Or clean toilets, or wash floors, or put paper towels in the paper towel holder. Who wants to do that? There's lots of artwork I would like to do. That's my passion.' 'It's really transformed her life,' Masterson added. 'Without Interact, who knows what she'd be doing.' For the Outsider Art Fair, Lucy Picasso, Sorenson, their families and Interact staff including Price were in New York for about a week. And they made time for tourist stops at the Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building and plenty of art museums, Lucy Picasso and Masterson said. 'I really loved New York,' Lucy Picasso said. 'All the different museums and paintings really inspired me.' Interact's presence at this year's Outsider Art Fair is the result of more than a decade of effort, Price said. The show is extremely competitive and the organization has applied many times previously, he said; for this year's successful bid, Interact enlisted the help of guest curator and noted artist Lauren dela Roche. Besides generating potentially transformative buzz about the artists themselves, Price said the experience reinforces Interact's central message to both its roster of artists and the wider public: Creative, fulfilling careers in professional art are within reach for people with disabilities, too. 'Beyond the daily support that our folks need, they also deserve a life that is interesting and vital and where they get to call the shots,' Price said. 'We belong, and our artists belong, in a national conversation — an international conversation — when it comes to art collection and galleries.' Made in St. Paul: Portraits of Old Hollywood by oil painter Richard Abraham Meet the tattoo artists who have created a movement among Timberwolves fans Kennedy Center events scheduled for LGBTQ+ pride celebration have been canceled, organizers say PHOTOS: Pope Francis' image is everywhere as the Catholic faithful mourn him with art and thanks Hidden in Eagan office building, new Hagen Hus Gallery is a world art tour
New York Times
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Galleries, and Collectors, See Chances to Connect at Frieze New York
Andrew Edlin Gallery has been operating since 2001 in New York City, with a particular specialty in self-taught makers. One, for instance, the American outsider artist Henry Darger (1892-1973), has works in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago; Andrew Edlin has represented his estate since 2006. Given its location and reputation, then, why would the gallery need a booth at Frieze New York, too? 'There's no getting around it,' Edlin said. 'More people will see a work at a fair in three or four days than will come into your gallery in 10 years.' Hence his participation in Frieze New York, running at the Shed from May 8 to 11 with 67 galleries, including first-time exhibitors King's Leap of New York; Lodovico Corsini of Brussels; and Voloshyn Gallery of Miami and Kyiv, Ukraine. 'In so many ways, it's a mandatory part of the art ecosystem,' said Edlin, who has an even deeper investment in fairs than other dealers, since he is also the owner of the Outsider Art Fair, which takes place in late winter in New York. 'I understand when people say they're doing fewer fairs,' Edlin said, referring to a sentiment among some dealers. 'It's not always the most dignified way to present an exhibition, but kudos to them if they are able to pass on such an opportunity.' As an example of the power of the Frieze platform, Edlin pointed to last year's edition of the fair, when he showed a work by Beverly Buchanan (1940-2015), the pastel 'Dataw Island, S.C.' (1993). Buchanan grew up in South Carolina and explored Southern traditions in her paintings and sculptures. The noted collector Agnes Gund, a life trustee of the Museum of Modern Art, bought the work after seeing it at Frieze's V.I.P. preview in 2024. 'She gave it to MoMA,' Edlin said of the work, which went on view in the fall and is still on the walls. 'The most prominent place in the art world. It doesn't get much better than that.' This year, Edlin's booth will have works by several artists including the self-taught painters Abraham Lincoln Walker (1921-1993) and Frank Walter (1926-2009), who were roughly contemporaries. The latter artist, who lived in Antigua, is represented by the undated oil 'Untitled (Figure Clasping Bottle),' among other works. Gund was not the only one buying last year; another collector was Kim Manocherian, who lives in Manhattan and has a large contemporary trove particularly stocked with work by women artists like the pastel specialist Paula Rego (1935-2022), who worked in London. Manocherian said she purchased the Nate Lowman oil 'Aira's Ovenbird' (2024) from David Zwirner gallery at Frieze New York last year. 'I can't help myself,' she said of the temptations of a fair in her own city; she said she has been to every edition of the fair. 'It's hard for me to look at art without buying it — I usually pray I don't see something I like.' Manocherian also patronizes other fairs including Frieze London; Art Basel's editions in Miami Beach and Paris; and Zona Maco in Mexico City. Though open to impulse, she is strategic, too. Manocherian corresponds with galleries before the event, since dealers will email top clients a sneak peek at their offerings, and the chance to put something on hold or buy it in advance. 'Most of the time I know what I'm buying before I get there,' she said. That suits dealers just fine. 'You have to presell as an insurance policy,' Edlin said. 'It takes a lot of the risk out.' Although locals like Manocherian are a big part of the fair's audience, last year Frieze New York had visitors from 66 countries. Christine Messineo, director of Frieze's New York and Los Angeles editions, said that for visitors, the famed Manhattan museum scene was a major motivating factor. 'That's one of the reasons people return to New York, they can't miss the spring shows,' said Messineo, returning to run her fourth edition of the fair. 'People come for the fair and also for these amazing institutions.' (Spring also brings one of the year's two heavily stocked auction seasons, with upcoming major sales of modern and contemporary art at Christie's, Sotheby's and Phillips.) Galleries at Frieze purposely highlight the museum presence of their artists. Messineo cited Hauser & Wirth's offerings by Amy Sherald and Rashid Johnson, both of whom have large surveys on view now, at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. 'These connections are what set us apart,' Messineo said. Another link between the fair and the museums is the Hudson, N.Y., artist Jennie C. Jones, who in April debuted a Roof Garden commission atop the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 'Ensemble,' a sonic installation that hums in the wind. Jones is represented in the booth of New York's Alexander Gray Associates by works that include the collage 'Met Standing' (2024), a work related to the museum project. The Gray presentation will also show pieces by the artist Donald Moffett, who lives in New York and works in several media. One of his sculptures on view at the fair, 'Lot 031419 (blue looks back at itself)' (2019), looks like a piece of bright blue coral; it will be hard for visitors to resist touching it. As it happens, Jones and Moffett are also friends. 'Both are interested in activating our senses,' Alexander Gray said. 'Both of them are quietly demanding that as viewers, we slow down.' The size of the fair at the Shed — smaller than the other Frieze editions in London, Los Angeles and Seoul, and smaller than most other major fairs — is one of its defining characteristics. Gray noted that the Shed can fit fewer booths than the event's original tent, on Randall's Island, could. 'The size is not by design, it's by circumstance,' said Gray, a veteran exhibitor at the fair who is also on the Frieze London selection committee (which decides what galleries get booths). But he added that the limitations reflect a reality of the local art world. 'For New York to be home to the most competitive fair makes sense in a way,' he said. The fellow exhibitor Angelina Volk, a director of the London gallery Emalin, called it a 'manageable size.' She added, 'It's selective and concentrated. People go and they can actually see everything.' Now in its third year as an exhibitor, Emalin has always done a shared booth at the fair and is doing so again, this time partnering with Apalazzo Gallery of Brescia, Italy. Among the works on hand will be paintings by the Polish artist Karol Palczak, one of several Eastern European artists that Emalin shows. Palczak makes paintings based on videos, including 'Gnijaca osmiornica,' 2025, an oil depicting an octopus. 'The moving image is the source material for the paintings,' Volk said. 'He feels something essential is captured that he wants to reproduce in a painting.' Another collaborative dealer showing at the fair is Lucy Chadwick, who founded the gallery Champ Lacombe in Biarritz, France, in 2021 ('It's a Covid baby,' she said) and then expanded to her hometown, London, last fall. She will share a booth with New York's Company Gallery in the Focus section, which is dedicated to younger galleries and is organized this year by the curator and writer Lumi Tan. The booth is a solo presentation of the painter Stefania Batoeva, who lives and works in Paris. Her work straddles the line between figuration and abstraction, as seen in the oil 'Triple Portrait' (2025). Chadwick formerly lived and worked in New York. 'New York is one of the undeniable epicenters of the creative community,' she said, noting that the current political and economic turmoil made fairs even more important. 'When we're in a moment of instability, it feels nice to seek out one community and be together,' she said. 'We can engage in real conversations.'
New York Times
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Nine Artists Who Shine at the 2025 Outsider Art Fair
The Outsider Art Fair, which opens to the public Thursday evening, can sometimes feel like a rock 'n' roll junk shop, full of chaos and noise. But this year's edition of the fair, at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Manhattan, is more like an uptown antique store — stocked with treasures but a little bit staid. Still, it remains a comparative bargain at only $35 for entry, and its 66 exhibitors range from one end of this increasingly diffuse genre to the other. At Creativity Explored (C3) in San Francisco, more than a hundred developmentally disabled adults spend 40 hours a week making art like Antonio Benjamin's cheeky nudes. The Chelsea gallery BravinLee Programs (D21), appearing here for the first time, has brought artists chosen for their outsider-like aesthetic — what the gallerist John Lee calls 'Outsiderisme.' As usual, there's also a booth of donated works being sold to benefit God's Love We Deliver (B4), and if you can't make it in person, you can catch at least some of the action in an online viewing room. Consider this list of notable works a starting point. Drawings by Aloïse Corbaz and Martín Ramírez Two of the most prominent galleries showing outsider art have come this year with selections from two of the genre's most prominent collections. Fleisher/Ollman's booth, hosting a small fraction of the art that Audrey Heckler left behind when she died last year, includes a spectacular, unusually vibrant drawing by the maestro of obsessive train tunnels, Martín Ramírez (1895-1963). Among the rarities from the prolific collector Robert Greenberg at Ricco/Maresca is a colored pencil drawing of a group of women by Aloïse Corbaz (1886-1964), who worked for Kaiser Wilhelm II's chaplain before being hospitalized for schizophrenia. With their giant pursed lips and solid blue eyes, surrounded by color, her fairylike fashionable women are faintly alien but intensely alluring. 'Leave the Moon Alone!' After the closure of his New York gallery, Castellane, in 1966, the self-taught wood sculptor and printmaker William Kent (1919-2012) retreated to a dairy barn in Durham, Conn., and got a day job at a paper box factory. But he kept carving zippy, eccentric pop imagery into slabs of slate to make prints on paper and fabric. 'Leave the Moon Alone!' (1964), which features buxom Greek gods, phallic rockets and a speckled green orb, in this case on a brown paisley background, expresses Kent's environmentalist objections to the space program in a way that's completely straightforward but irresistibly idiosyncratic. 'Remember Sisters, We Sisters Are Married to Truth and Freedom, Not Married to Fear and Lies' The Milwaukee collagist Della Wells worked with Anne Marie Grgich, an artist, and Sandy Jo Combes, a seamstress, to make this nearly 10-foot-tall American flag quilt, on which a watchful young woman and a debonair, man-sized rooster, both surrounded by portraits of Black women activists, stand at the altar. The piece features golden medallions, a large silver insect, tiny beads, a spray of yellow flowers, and both a real suit, courtesy of Grgich's husband, and a real wedding dress, from her mother, but I wouldn't quite call it exuberant. It is, but it's also defiant, as if to say, 'We're not going anywhere.' Untitled Drawing by Pudlo Pudlat In this undated colored pencil drawing by the Inuit sculptor and painter Pudlo Pudlat (1916-1992), a sinuous ship decorated with a broad yellow stripe rides on the crest of a green wave, helmed by what looks like a gray and brown bird with a taciturn black beak. It's an extraordinary composition: The wave bulges under the prow, as if they're crossing the page together, while the avian captain looks toward the empty upper corner, serenely confident that his company of elegant pencil lines can fill any amount of unmarked space. Untitled Photographs by Morton Bartlett Morton Bartlett (1909-1992) spent his life in Boston sculpting anatomically correct boys and girls in plaster, at close to life-size, in order to dress them up, pose them and immortalize them in black-and-white photos. The photos here are posthumous prints, which may be less exciting than originals — but the images themselves remain spectacular. When the warmth and precision of Bartlett's sculpture meets the dry whimsy of his camera, the results are as subtle and expressive as any art I know. Forced to choose one, from among all the melancholy debutantes and ballerinas, I'd recommend the dismayed young woman with flowers in her hair, strong cheekbones and a string bow tie. 'The Many Colors of Your Balloon and My Balloon' The so-called Batuan style of painting dates back to the 1930s, when artists in this Balinese village began rendering traditional motifs with Western materials. The contemporary painter I Made Griyawan has gone one step further, integrating aspects of Western art like a distinct horizon line — or, in his delightful acrylic painting, 'The Many Colors of Your Balloon and My Balloon' (2008), the bald, primary yellows and greens of four dozen-odd latex balloons floating merrily above a group of cavorting children. But don't worry — the repetitive, textile-like pattern of gray-blue waves and exaggerated clusters of palm leaves and red flowers will transport you to Bali all the same. Untitled Mask by Zimar In a strong presentation of Brazilian works from 1950 to the present, curated for the fair by Mateus Nunes, the piece that really caught my eye was this speckled, bumpy, reddish mask. A lizardlike, bicycle-seat-shaped face consisting of crushed plastic helmets and stone with huge jagged white teeth, which an artist known by the mononym Zimar uses in musical performances, the piece has an understated but surprisingly substantial presence. It feels almost as if it were discovered rather than made. 'Le Roi' One beautiful thing about a small clay figure like this bust of a king by Gérard Cambon, a retired office worker in southern France, is the way finger marks effortlessly translate into larger bodily gestures. The kink in His Majesty's nose is exactly the size and shape of a pressed-in thumb — but also exactly the curve a nose might take on after being broken. Combine this with the seedy glamour of bits of metallic garbage — like the bottle caps printed with faces in another piece nearby — and what you get is a charming cast of players ready for the next great Claymation epic. Outsider Art Fair Thursday evening through Sunday, Metropolitan Pavilion, 125 West 18th Street, Manhattan; 212-337-3338,
New York Times
15-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Visionary Artworks Plumb the Mysteries of Creativity
Scott Kerr, a fifth-generation art dealer in St. Louis, didn't know what to expect last year as he was crossing the Mississippi River into East St. Louis, a once vibrant city in Illinois with a large Black population that never recovered economically after the civil unrest of the 1960s. Kerr was responding to an unsolicited email from a man named Lincoln Walker, who was hoping to get an appraisal of paintings by his father, Abraham Lincoln Walker, a house painter by trade who died in 1993. He had spent his spare hours during his last three decades in his basement, consumed with making art. The younger Walker, 62, an auto mechanic who goes by Link, guided Kerr to a tractor-trailer on his property. There, he opened up the back doors to reveal a trove of more than 800 artworks filling racks and stacked deep on the floor. 'I was just mesmerized by what I saw,' Kerr said of the dark, phantasmagoric paintings, many with abstracted faces and forms materializing out of flowing evanescent brushstrokes and textured surfaces. 'As soon as I looked at it, I was very confident that this was a major body of work.' So far, many in the art world seem to concur. Last November, at the Art Dealers Association of America's Art Show in New York, Andrew Edlin, a specialist in self-taught artists, organized a presentation of Walker's work. (Kerr, whose gallery McCaughen & Burr, now represents Walker's estate, has teamed up with Edlin.) Edlin's booth sold out, he said, with paintings bought by prominent collectors including Beth Rudin DeWoody, founder of the Bunker Artspace in West Palm Beach, Fla.; the New Museum board president, James Keith Brown; and the artist Brian Donnelly (a.k.a. KAWS). Walker's first solo New York gallery show opens Feb. 22 at the Andrew Edlin Gallery, with about two dozen paintings priced from $10,000 to $85,000. Several more works by the artist will be at the Outsider Art Fair, which Edlin owns, from Feb. 27 to March 2 at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Manhattan. During a preview of Walker's paintings at his gallery, Edlin described one untitled 1980 canvas as a cross between the work of the Surrealist Max Ernst and the Romantic painter and poet William Blake. 'I don't know if that's hell or purgatory,' Edlin said. He believes that Walker must have looked at other artists as he was teaching himself to paint, comparing some of his neighborhood scenes of Black life to expressive figurative painters such as Benny Andrews and Ernie Barnes, and Walker's more desolate landscapes to Surrealists like Giorgio de Chirico and Salvador Dalí. Yet Walker's influences remain largely unknown. 'There's this inherent mystery about the work of a lot of 'outsider' artists that get discovered posthumously because they didn't necessarily write or talk about it and aren't around to tell people about it,' Edlin said. He noted that it's typical for someone other than the artist to get such work into the public eye, citing the stories of two acclaimed self-taught artists. Henry Darger's landlord rescued his work and Martín Ramírez's psychiatrist shared his. Edlin acknowledged that the term 'outsider art' is controversial, with many in the art world rejecting the differentiation between trained and untrained artists. 'The nomenclature is very loaded politically,' said Maxwell Anderson, president of the Souls Grown Deep foundation, which promotes Black artists from the American South. 'When you look at our website, you won't find the following phrases: 'self-taught,' 'outsider,' 'vernacular.' We just want it to be seen as art.' But Edlin believes that the outsider art category does have a distinct culture. Such artists working hermetically 'don't have career aspiration, it's just not part of the equation,' Edlin said. 'I've always felt like there's something to being un-self-conscious that is liberating in the creative process. They're creating their own worlds.' Walker certainly never sought attention for his paintings. 'He never cared if anybody ever saw one of them; that was just not his thing,' said Link, who was adopted by Walker and his wife, Dorothy, as an infant and inherited his father's work when his mother died in 2013. Link said he carefully stored the paintings for years, but after he almost died during the coronavirus pandemic, he decided it was time to do something with them. He said he sent inquiries out to the art world, and Kerr was the only one to respond. 'My mom wanted to get his paintings out there,' Link said. 'We all knew how good he was. I want to make his name great.' Dorothy Walker, who was a social worker, had some of her husband's paintings exhibited at a street fair and at a local gallery in the mid-1970s — and, according to Link, would yell at her husband when he didn't show up for these events. In 1995, with the help of Lou Brock, a baseball Hall-of-Famer whose wife was close to Dorothy through their church, she got Walker a posthumous retrospective at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. A 1995 article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about the exhibition noted that Dorothy showed some of her husband's paintings in 1974 in Seattle, where they were critiqued by Jacob Lawrence, arguably the most famous Black artist at that time. (Link said an uncle on his mother's side was a professor at the University of Washington, where Lawrence taught, but doesn't know if his father ever met Lawrence.) There was also a 2013 show of Walker's work at 10th Street Gallery, in St. Louis, Mo. Born in 1921 in Henderson, Ky., Abraham Lincoln Walker moved in his youth to live with his aunt and uncle in East St. Louis, which was once home to creative luminaries including Josephine Baker, Ike and Tina Turner, and Katherine Dunham. In the 1995 article, Dorothy said that as a child, her husband had been an evangelical inspirational speaker at the Church of God in Christ in Mounds, Ill. Link said he could remember his father going to church only once. 'But he was real religious,' Link said. 'I'd come downstairs, he'd be on his knees praying. Some of his paintings might be what he pictured as the afterworld, as hell or heaven.' Walker had a thriving house-painting and wallpapering business, and first tried making art in the early 1960s, when Dorothy asked him to bring home a catalog of murals. When she selected a tree with apple blossoms to hang over the living room couch, Walker balked at the $25 price, instead painting the image himself. 'He had the ability to look at something and duplicate it, if he wanted to,' Link said. He would play in the basement while his father painted before and after work and all weekend long, listening to Bill Cosby on 8-track or jazz albums by Count Basie or Miles Davis, a contemporary of Walker's who was also raised in East St. Louis, just blocks from the Walkers' home. On lunch breaks from work, Walker would drive around the neighborhood with his sketch pad, often drawing one of the abandoned burned-out houses there. Link said that his father never went to an art museum, though he did keep the family's set of encyclopedias in his work space — a possible source for early works from the 1960s, where Walker was learning the fundamentals of anatomy and composition and experimenting with styles such as Cubism. By the 1970s, Walker had developed his own moody palette and dystopian style of painting narratives unfolding around him. These scenes became increasingly psychedelic and abstract in the 1980s, in works where he moved paint across his canvases in huge swaths. Link said he used putty knives, all kinds of brushes, newspaper, plastic wrappers — whatever was at hand. Walker quit smoking and drinking after the sudden death of a close friend, Link said, and subsisted mainly on juiced vegetables for the last 15 years of his life. According to his wife's account, Walker would fast periodically, and then would have visions. 'As he progresses more to abstraction, I think he's referencing a response to a spirit world,' Kerr said. 'From three feet away you would think a painting is a complete abstraction, until you get up on it and there are just a thousand different faces in the work.' Massimiliano Gioni, artistic director at the New Museum, said he was struck by how Walker used 'frottage,' a technique of rubbing a textured surface and teasing out imagery within the pattern. It has a long history in art, most famously with the Surrealists, including Ernst, who said he was inspired by Leonardo da Vinci. 'Did Walker just develop it on his own? Maybe. Did he learn it? Probably,' Gioni said. 'With the great self-taught artists, you are always confronted with this strange phenomenon that they had a knowledge of art and techniques. It suggests they were certainly less isolated than we think.' Beth Marcus, who lives in Boston and collects contemporary and self-taught artists, bought two Walker works in November. What really interested her were the large brushstrokes in his later works that looked like they had been applied with house painting tools. 'It reminded me of Gerhard Richter and Ed Clark,' she said, 'who used squeegees in their work.' Walker's relationship with reality and fantasy fascinates Katherine Jentleson, senior curator of American art and curator of folk and self-taught art at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. 'My favorite of his paintings have abstracted human forms emerging from almost geologic matter, like continents breaking apart and something very cosmic,' she said. Jentleson has committed to acquiring at least one painting for the High Museum from Walker's exhibition at Edlin. While a lot self-taught artists she exhibits had exposure to canonical art, whether through museums or magazines or television, she said that in terms of scholarship, 'I think we have to be more broad in what we think of as being relevant influence on their art.' Many experiences in Walker's life could have had 'an interesting bearing on the lyrical quality of his brushstrokes or otherworldly realms he appears to be dipping into,' Jentleson said. 'Very rarely is an artist, especially in the latter half of the 20th century, truly going to be outside of culture, in the way that Jean Dubuffet imagined.' Dubuffet was the midcentury French artist who promoted the idea of 'art brut' as pure, naïve talent. For Donnelly, the artist who bought five of Walker's paintings, the works can stand on their own visual power without connecting all the art historical and biographical dots. 'I love learning about artists,' he said, 'but there's so much there in the painting, it's nice not to have it all laid out for you.'
