At this point you know “outsider art” when you see it. Made by someone self-taught or excluded from the mainstream — for whatever reason — it’s often obsessive, repetitive, brightly colored or composed of unusual materials. Once a challenge to the conventional canon, at this year’s 34th annual Outsider Art Fair, it’s starting to feel like just another marketing category.
As categories go, though, it’s a pretty elastic one, so the fair remains a bargain studded with genuine surprises. Its 68 galleries and nonprofits include international visitors, debut exhibitors and several over-the-top installations, like Shrine gallery’s exhibit of paintings by the artist Jon Serl (1894-1993) (A4), framed by reproduction wallpaper and the artist’s own battered easel, or the reconstructed store/home/studio of Susan Cianciolo (Run Store, A16).
There’s an atypical Martín Ramírez at Andrew Edlin Gallery (D17), peculiar 19th-century photo montages at Keith de Lellis Gallery (C10) and a group of exceptionally charming portrait paintings by a retired New England lawyer named Earle T. Merchant at Pulp (D23). And as always, of course, there’s the people watching. Here are some other highlights.
Tucker Contemporary Art (A1)
The artist Dominant Dansby, who lives in Newark, makes three-dimensional collages with paper and narrow lengths of wood. The paper is adorned with complicated knots and colorful swooshes, but Dansby cuts it into strips and tiny squares that he arranges in right angles, so that the results look like hyperactive mash-ups of satellite maps, architectural diagrams and Minecraft acid trips.
From the North (A2)
The West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative in Kinngait, Nunavut, Canada (formerly Cape Dorset), includes Canada’s oldest continuously operating print studio, Kinngait Studios. Along with contemporary Inuit sculptures, drawings and photographs, this exhibition includes Kenojuak Ashevak’s 1959 print “Rabbit Eating Seaweed,” in which a mottled blue animal nibbles at a plantlike shape that evokes cosmic explosions, and a masterfully crosshatched loon, printed by Mayoreak Ashoona with slate from a reclaimed pool table, could hang comfortably alongside any 19th-century Japanese woodblock print.
Chozick Family Art Gallery (A5)
Though the self-taught painter Elbert Joseph Perez still works at his father’s garage in upstate New York, he has exhibited quite a bit, and his canvases sizzle with the kind of unsettled and unsettling significance the Surrealists were going for. In “I Giveth and I Taketh Awayeth,” a porcelain clown figurine dangles a bunch of carrots in the sky, intensely asserting something — I’m not quite sure what — about death, desire, fear and the nature of meaning itself.
Art Sales & Research (A9)
The unhinged genius of Anne Brown may be the high point of the fair. Born in 1941, Brown makes jewelry and art out of petrified eels, fish eyeball casings, resin and photographs of her cat Babs. Several mixed-media boxes have the otherworldly but undeniable presence of waking dreams, while 13 coral and seashell figures seem to issue from a primordial realm beyond such distinctions as life and death or self and other. They also recall early works by David Smith.
The Gallery of Everything (A12)
An elaborate faux wooden fence is an on-the-nose but appropriate backing for a fresh hoard of paintings by the Gullah artist Sam Doyle (1906-1985), who made his front yard on Saint Helena Island, S.C. into an open-air art gallery. Using house paint on found tin and board, Doyle captured his subjects with piercing insight and overwhelming graphic confidence. These paintings are full of charming details, like a bleeding Christ’s uncomfortable expression or the little white conch shell that a local witch doctor named Dr. Bus used to talk to the spirit world.
Cavin-Morris Gallery (B8)
He started out making unconventional shadow puppets in East Java, Indonesia, but here Imam Sucahyo contributes a powerful bluish-green painting of the universal web of life. Next to that is a vaguely ear-shaped wood and mixed media construction by Jean Michel Dissake of Cameroon. Around the corner is a vibrating electric figure by Caroline Demangel, of France — and these are just the first three of the 18 powerful examples of what the gallery calls “Proto-Surrealism” in this group display.
Norman Brosterman (C11)
When the longtime WBLS DJ Raul Hardie died in 2025, he left a modest cache of paintings behind in his Upper West Side apartment. The 13 here, nearly everything the dealer Norman Brosterman could get hold of, are trippy, tropically colored undersea vistas and moonscapes rendered in a quasi-pointilism and ornamented with elaborately carved frames and unique mixed-media elements. At first I didn’t like them, but they took me from repulsion to love in a matter of minutes.
Galerie Kahn (D22)
Kashinath Chawan draws Hindu gods and heroes in ballpoint pen on found cardboard — when he has a lull in his job as a cobbler and shoeshine man in Bombay. What’s most striking about his artwork, apart from the stolid force of the silhouettes, is the way he builds up an impression of bulging muscles with striated lines that run parallel to the figures’ arms and legs. It shouldn’t work, but somehow it does.
Outsider Art Fair
Thursday evening through Sunday, Metropolitan Pavilion, 125 West 18th Street, Manhattan; 212-337-3338, outsiderartfair.com.
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