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An Inside Look at Outsider Art

 

NOTABLE OUTSIDER ARTISTS

  • Nek Chand (b. 1924) is an Indian artist, famous for building the Rock Garden of Chandigarh, a forty acre (160,000 m2) sculpture garden in the city of Chandigarh, India.
  • Ferdinand Cheval (1836–1924) was a country postman in Hauterives, south of Lyon, France. Motivated by a dream, he spent 33 years constructing the Palais Ideal. Half organic building, half massive sculpture, it was constructed from stones collected on his postal round, held together with chicken wire, cement, and lime.
  • Felipe Jesus Consalvos (1891–c.1960) was a Cuban-American cigar roller and artist, known for his posthumously-discovered body of art work based on the vernacular tradition of cigar band collage.
  • Henry Darger (1892–1973) was a solitary man who was orphaned and institutionalized as a child. In the privacy of his small north side Chicago apartment, he produced over 35,000 pages of text and hundreds of large scale illustrations, including maps, collaged photos, and watercolors that depict the heroic struggles of his child characters, "the Vivian Girls" engaged in activities such as battle scenes combining imagery of the US Civil War with the presence of fanciful monsters.
  • Francis E. Dec (1926–1996) was a disbarred U.S. lawyer in 1959 who spent thirty years of his life in isolation mailing increasingly paranoid handwritten rants (which sometimes include drawings) to the media.
  • Charles A.A. Dellschau (1830–1923) born in Prussia, Dellschau emigrated to the US and in his 70's secluded himself in an attic and over the course of 20 years created 12 large scale books filled with mixed media watercolors depicting the inventions of the Sonora Aero Club, chronicling the birth of the age of aviation . It is unknown if his subject was factual, a fictionalization or a delusion.
  • Madge Gill (1882–1961), was an English mediumistic artist who made thousands of drawings "guided" by a spirit she called "Myrninerest" (my inner rest).
  • Paul Gösch (1885–1940), a schizophrenic German artist and architect murdered by the Nazis in their euthanasia campaign.
  • James Hampton (1909–1964) was an African-American janitor who secretly built a large assemblage of religious art from scavenged materials.
  • Vojislav Jakic (1932–2003), a Serbian artist who spent most of his life in a small town of Despotovac producing up to five meters large drawings evoking the memories of his own life, his obsessions with death, and reflections on art. In his works abstraction is mixed with graphic signs and writings.
  • Alexander Lobanov (1924–2003) was a deaf and autistically withdrawn Russian known for detailed and self-aggrandizing self-portraits: paintings, photographs and quilts, which usually include images of large guns.
  • Helen Martins (1897–1976) transformed the house she inherited from her parents in Nieu-Bethesda, South Africa, into a fantastical environment decorated with crushed glass and cement sculptures. The house is known as The Owl House.
  • Tarcisio Merati (1934–1995), an Italian artist, was confined to a psychiatric hospital for most of his adult life during which time he produced a vast amount of drawings (several dream toys, bird on nest etc), text and musical composition.
  • The Philadelphia Wireman, a creator of wire sculptures. Nothing is known of his (or her) identity and he (or she) is presumed deceased.
  • Martín Ramírez (1895–1963), a Mexican outsider artist who spent most of his adult life institutionalized in a California mental hospital (he had been diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic). He developed an elaborate iconography featuring repeating shapes mixed with images of trains and Mexican folk figures.
  • Achilles Rizzoli (1896–1981) was employed as an architectural draftsman. He lived with his mother near San Francisco, California. After his death, a huge collection of elaborate drawings were discovered, many in the form of maps and architectural renderings that described a highly personal fantasy exposition, including portraits of his mother as a neo-baroque building.
  • Judith Scott (1943–2005) was born deaf and with Down Syndrome. After being institutionalized for 35 years she attended Creative Growth Art Center (a center for artists with disabilities in Oakland, CA) and went on to become an internationally-renowned fiber art sculptor.
  • Miroslav Tichý (b. 1926) is a photographer who took thousands of surreptitious pictures of women in his hometown of Kyjov in the Czech Republic, using homemade cameras constructed of cardboard tubes, tin cans and other at-hand materials.
  • Willem Van Genk (1927–2005) is the best known Dutch representative of outsider art. He was considered schizophrenic and autistic, and made drawings in view from above of stations and wirings, European cities, busses and trolleys, zeppelins and bombers. He also created 300 intricately decorated rain coats.
  • Wesley Willis (1963-2003), a schizophrenic musician and artist from Chicago, known for his prolific (and bizarre) musical recordings as well as his hundreds of colored ink-pen drawings of Chicago land and street-scapes. Many of his drawings appear as covers to his albums. Although Willis was poor and often dependent of the charity of friends for housing, his drawings now sell for thousands of dollars apiece.
  • Scotti Wilson (1928–1972) (born Louis Freeman), emigrated from Scotland to Canada and opened a second-hand clothes store, found fame when his casual doodlings were noted for their dream-like character.
  • Adolf Wölfli (1864–1930), a Swiss artist, was confined to a psychiatric hospital for most of his adult life during which time he produced a vast amount of drawings, text and musical composition. Wölfli was the first well-known "outsider artist," and he remains closely associated with the label.
  • Kiyoshi Yamashita (1922–1971) was a Japanese graphic artist who spent much of his life wandering as a vagabond through Japan. He has been considered an autistic savant.
  • Joseph Yoakum (1890–1972), an African-American artist who spent his last years producing a vast quantity of sinuous, surreal landscapes based on both real and imagined travels.