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, outsiderartfair.com.
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