Outsider Art Fair 2005 - Artists, Exhibitors...

Outsider Art Fair 2005

Metropolitan Pavilion, New York

February 27 - March 2, 2025

Aloïse Corbaz (1886 - 1964)

Untitled (Figures with Blue Eyes) - Double Sided, ca. 1950s

Colored pencil on paper 

Courtesy Ricco Maresca Gallery 

Bill Traylor (1854 - 1949) 

Figures, Construction, Black, Brown and Red, 1939/42

Pencil, poster paint on cardboard 

Courtesy of Fleisher Ollman Gallery 

Adolf Wölfli (1864 - 1930) 

New Yorker Haven, 1925

Colored pencil and graphite on paper 

Courtesy Ricco Maresca Gallery

The 33rd edition of Outsider Art Fair (OAF), the premier fair dedicated to Self-Taught Art, art brut, and Outsider Art, features 66 exhibitors from 40 cities in 9 countries at the Metropolitan Pavilion.

Visitors to the fair can expect to see art by acknowledged masters such as Henry Darger (1892–1973), William Edmondson (1874–1951), Augustin Lesage (1876–1954), Judith Scott (1943-2005), and Bill Traylor (1854-1949), as well as works by living artists such as Noviadi Angkasapura, JJ Cromer, Shuvinai Ashoona, M’onma, Julian Martin, Margot, Dan Miller and Leopold Strobl.

OAF 2025 welcomes back renowned dealers like Fleisher/Ollman Gallery (Philadelphia), which will be devoting its entire presentation to works from the estate of long-time American Folk Art Museum board member Audrey B. Heckler. It will include examples by James Castle (1899-1977), Sam Doyle (1906-1985), Howard Finster (1916-2001), Martín Ramírez (1895-1963), and Bill Traylor. Ricco/Maresca Gallery (New York) will present works from the collection of advertising pioneer Robert M. Greenberg. Built over more than 40 years, this collection holds superb works by Darger, Traylor, and Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930), among others. Aarne Anton/Nexus Singularity (New York), Cavin-Morris Gallery (New York), Marion Harris (Connecticut and New York), all of whom have exhibited with OAF since its founding, make their returns, and after a five-year hiatus, original exhibitor Henry Boxer (London) will also be on hand.

Chico da Silva (1910 - 1985) 

Bichos 

Courtesy Simões de Assis and Estudio em Obra.

Conceição dos Bugres (1914 - 1984)

Untitled 

Courtesy Galerie Estação and João Libertato

Outsider Art Fair 2005's Curated Space, Follow My Moves, will be an exhibit of Self-Taught art from Brazil, curated by São Paulo-based Mateus Nunes, and will feature works by renowned artists such as Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato (1900–1995), Chico da Silva (1910–1985), Conceição dos Bugres (1914-1984), and Maria Lira Marques (b. 1945).

Other booth highlights include paintings by Maurice Sullins (1910–1995) at Hana Pietri (Chicago), paintings by manga artist Takashi Nemoto at Akio Nagasawa Gallery (Tokyo), and works from Canadian Arctic and by other contemporary Inuit artists at Feheley Fine Arts (Toronto). Zürcher Gallery will feature a solo show of drawings by American poet Ted Joans (1928-2003) and James Barron will exhibit the work of Janet Sobel (1893–1968), whose abstract paintings were championed by Peggy Guggenheim in the 1940s and were recently featured in a solo exhibition at Houston’s Menil Collection.

OAF 2025 will welcome eighteen first-time exhibitors, including Akio Nagasawa Gallery (Tokyo), BravinLee Programs (New York), Court Tree Collective (Brooklyn), Diamond (New York), Espacio KB (Bogota), Elza Kayal Gallery (New York), The FolkArtwork Collective (Des Moines, Iowa), Hughes at Olsen (Sydney, Australia), Interact Center for Visual & Performing Arts (St. Paul, MN), Gallery jones (Vancouver), Galerie Kahn (Ars-en-Ré, France), Keith De Lellis Gallery (New York), Modesti Perdriolle Gallery (Brussels), Claire Oliver Gallery (New York), Pan American Art Projects (Miami), Peninsula Art Space (New York), Plataforma ArtBase (Mexico City), and Van Der Plaas (New York).

“The 2025 Outsider Art Fair is a testament to the rich diversity of our field, and as always, embraces art from the fringes,” said Andrew Edlin, the fair’s owner. “As the art world continues to catch on to the power of the work our exhibitors have been championing for decades, a new generation of OAF dealers is discovering artists who will become part of the canon in years to come.”

OUTSIDER ART FAIR 2025 EXHIBITORS

Aarne Anton/Nexus Singularity (Pomona, NY)

Akio Nagasawa Gallery (Tokyo)

Bill Arning Exhibitions (Kinderhook, NY)

Arts of Life/Circle Contemporary (Chicago)

bg Gallery (Los Angeles)

James Barron Art (Kent, CT)

Margaret Bodell/ Revival Arts (Milford, CT)

Henry Boxer Gallery (London)

BravinLee Programs (New York)

Norman Brosterman (New York)

Cavin-Morris Gallery (New York)

Center for Creative Works (Wynnewood, PA)

Court Tree Collective (Brooklyn)

Creative Growth Art Center (Oakland, CA)

Creativity Explored (San Francisco)

M. David & Co. (Brooklyn)

Diamond (New York)

dieFirma (New York)

Dutton (New York)

Andrew Edlin Gallery (New York)

Elza Kayal Gallery (New York)

Espacio KB (Bogotá)

Feheley Fine Arts (Toronto)

Fleisher/Ollman Gallery (Philadelphia)

The FolkArtwork Collective (Des Moines, IA)

Fountain House (New York)

Hana Pietri Presents (Chicago)

Harman Projects (New York)

Marion Harris (New York and CT)

Hughes at Olsen (Sydney, Australia)

Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts (St. Paul, MN)

Gallery Jones (Vancouver)

Galerie Kahn (Ars-en-Ré, France)

Kishka Gallery & Library (White River Junction, VT)

koelsch gallery (Houston)

Yukiko Koide Presents (Kyoto, Japan)

LAND Gallery (Brooklyn)

Jennifer Lauren Gallery (Manchester, UK)

Keith De Lellis Gallery (New York)

Galerie Pol Lemétais (Toulouse, France)

Lindsay Gallery (Columbus, OH)

Joshua Lowenfels Works of Art (New York)

Magic Markings (New York)

Modesti Perdriolle Gallery (Brussels)

North Pole Studio (Portland, OR)

Northern Daughters (Vergennes, VT)

Claire Oliver Gallery (New York)

Pan American Art Projects (Miami)

Peninsula Art Space (New York)

Plataforma ArtBase (Montreal / Mexico City)

Portrait Society Gallery (Milwaukee)

Steven S. Powers (New York

PULP (Holyoke, MA)

Pure Vision Arts (New York)

Ricco/Maresca Gallery (New York)

Ritsch-Fisch Galerie (Strasbourg, France)

The Ruffed Grouse Gallery (Narrowsburg, NY)

SAGE Studio (Austin, TX)

SARAHCROWN (New York)

Shelter Gallery (New York)

SHRINE (Los Angeles /New York)

Stellarhighway (Brooklyn)

Stewart Gallery (Boise, ID)

Van Der Plas Gallery (New York)

Wilsonville (East Hampton, NY)

Zürcher Gallery (New York)

NOT IN NEW YORK?

The Online Viewing Room of the OAF 2025 

will be live on February 27th

OUTSIDER ART FAIR 2025

Metropolitan Pavilion

125 West 18th Street New York, NY 10011

outsiderartfair.com

Bill Traylor @ Betty Cuningham Gallery, NYC

Bill Traylor
Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York
Through March 3, 2019

BILL TRAYLOR, born a slave in 1853, is today revered as a major American artist and is currently the subject of an extensive solo exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor (up through March 17, 2019). Betty Cuningham Gallery presents its second exhibition of the work of Bill Traylor. On view are 25 works, the majority of which are from the collection of The Charles E. and Eugenia C. Shannon Trust.

In 1939, Charles Shannon, a young artist, encountered the 85-year-old Bill Traylor, seated in front of a blacksmith shop, with a pencil in his hand, on Monroe Street in Montgomery, AL. Intrigued, Shannon provided Bill Traylor with encouragement and art supplies. He purchased approximately 1200 works from Bill Traylor, for modest prices, and these preserved works have become the basis of Traylor’s legacy today.

Fascinated by the endless inventiveness and aesthetic beauty of Bill Traylor’s work, Charles Shannon organized Traylor’s first exhibition in 1940 at New South – an arts center in Montgomery founded by Shannon and others. Traylor’s next exhibition, and his first in New York, was at the Fieldston School in 1942. Bill Traylor’s work would not be shown again until 1979-80 at R. H. Oosterom Gallery in New York.  Since 1980 there have been numerous exhibitions. Particularly noteworthy in museums are 1994 – 95 - Lively Times and Events: The Drawings of Bill Traylor, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, AL (and travelling); 1998-99 - Bill Traylor (1854 -1949) Deep Blue, Kunstmuseum, Bern, Switzerland and Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany (and travelling); 2013 - Bill Traylor, Drawings from the Collections of the High Museum of Art and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, American Folk Art Museum, New York, NY (and travelling) and Traylor in Motion, Wonders from New York Collections, American Folk Art Museum, New York, NY; 2018 – Outliers and American Vanguard Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C (and travelling); and currently Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. Today, Bill Traylor’s work can be found in museums and public collections around the world.

BETTY CUNINGHAM GALLERY
15 Rivington Street, New York, NY 10002
www.bettycuninghamgallery.com

Philadelphia Museum of Art: Outsider Art Works acquired by the PMA - Exhibition is planned for 2013

The Philadelphia Museum of Art acquires major private collection of works by self-taught artists through a donation from Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz. The museum become one of the major holdings of Outsider Art in the USA. An exhibition is planned for 2013. 

Approximately 190 works by self-taught artists have become promised gifts to the Philadelphia Museum of Art from Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz, who have assembled over the past three decades one of the finest collections of outsider art in private hands in the United States. Their donation, which the Museum will celebrate with an exhibition and catalogue in spring of 2013, will increase the Museum’s holdings of outsider art by more than sixty percent. Sheldon Bonovitz is a member of the Museum’s Board of Trustees.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art began acquiring works by self-taught artists in 1993 and has organized a major traveling exhibition in this field, James Castle: A Retrospective (2008-2009). The Museum currently owns approximately 300 works by more than 50 self-taught artists. It is committed to showing their work in the context of mainstream production, as it often resonates in evocative ways with major movements represented in the collection, such as Dada and Surrealism, and with many aspects of contemporary practice. This was demonstrated in an exhibition mounted in 2000, entitled When Reason Dreams: Drawings Inspired by the Visionary, the Fantastic, and the Unreal. The new promised gifts will place the Museum among the major public holdings of outsider art in the USA, along with those of the American Folk Art Museum in New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the Milwaukee Art Museum.

“Jill and I are delighted to make this commitment of the works in our collection which have been selected by the Museum’s curators,” said Sheldon Bonovitz.  “With our gift, we are helping the Museum build recognition across a wide audience for the remarkable contributions of self-taught artists. We thank the Museum for recognizing the importance of self-taught artists within the broader field of contemporary art and hope that it will encourage other donors to help us further this important mission.”

“Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz have been pathfinders in this field,” said Timothy Rub, the Museum’s George D. Widener Director and CEO. “Their dedication to the work of self-taught artists and the exceptional vision they have brought to the development of their collection will now benefit the public and enable others to understand and appreciate this important, but little known aspect of modern and contemporary art.”

The exhibition planned for 2013 will focus on American artists active between the 1930s and 1980s, many of whom are African American, and will feature works by such iconic figures as William Edmondson, Bill Traylor, and Martín Ramírez, as well as by somewhat lesser-known but widely respected artists such as James Castle, Howard Finster, William Hawkins, and Elijah Pierce.

“Self-taught artists use a wide range of inventive working methods and often employ unconventional materials, including house paint, wood scraps, roofing tin, and shirt cardboard,” said Ann Percy, Curator of Drawings. “The individuality that characterizes the work and the artists’ methods of conceiving images independently of familiar styles, trends, or movements will appeal to a diverse audience interested in exploring new terrain in the art of the 20th and 21st centuries.”

Among the highlights of the Bonovitz collection are six works by William Edmondson (1874-1951), including the stone sculpture Horse. A retired janitor from Nashville, Tennessee, William Edmondson took up carving tombstones and outdoor stone ornaments in his mid to late fifties, sometime in the early 1930s. Over the next decade and a half he filled his back yard with small figures of birds, animals, and people, which he sculpted from found chunks of limestone using an old railroad spike for a chisel. Masterful in their simplification of form, pared down to the barest essentials, minimally articulated as to surface and texture, and almost geometric in their near abstraction, these works are today considered among the finest achievements of self-taught art in the United States.

Mexican-born Martín Ramírez (1895-1963), who ranks among the most respected self-taught artists in North America, is represented by seven spectacular works in the Bonovitz collection.  Working with found materials from the confines of DeWitt State Hospital, Auburn, California – diagnosed with schizophrenia, Martin Ramírez spent the greater part of his adult life in mental institutions – he reportedly employed ad hoc substances like spit, bread, and perhaps even mashed potatoes to bind together bits and pieces of used paper into large drawing surfaces.  On these irregular sheets he laid down thick, expressive crayon and graphite lines to create remarkably conceived, semi-abstracted images of trains, tunnels, Madonnas, horsemen, animals, and landscapes, often adding collaged elements from popular books or magazines.  Combined with the works by Martin Ramírez already owned by the museum, the Bonovitz gift will place Philadelphia’s holdings of this important artist among the finest in public institutions in the USA.

Known for his vibrantly colored, dramatically stylized paintings, William Hawkins (1895-1990) turned to art seriously at around age 85, after a life spent working – mostly in Columbus, Ohio – at jobs such as farming, truck-driving, demolition, and steel casting. The Bonovitz collection includes six major works by this artist, who employed brightly colored semi-gloss enamel paints, often poured directly onto large pieces of plywood or Masonite and energetically mixed, swirled, and scumbled with a stubby old paintbrush. His images, dramatic in effect and whimsical in composition, were derived from newspapers, magazines, photographs, and advertisements, and he often incorporated found materials into his works. In Boffo, the animal’s head and shoulders are built up with a heavy application of a bituminous substance such as tar or asphalt.

Bill Traylor (c. 1853-1949) 's works consist of flattened, simplified, and silhouetted images that are drawn with great skill and ingenuity on often-irregular paper or cardboard surfaces, as seen in House with Two Men, Dog, and Bird, one of a dozen superb works by the artist in the collection.  People, birds, and animals are in constant action in Traylor’s work, running, climbing, shooting, fighting, yelling, drinking, poking, chasing, pointing, or sitting, often within or on top of strange, unidentifiable geometric structures. Born a slave, Bill Traylor spent most of his life as a farmhand; however, for a few years in the late 1930s and early 1940s, homeless and in his late eighties, he drew pictures in pencil, colored pencil, and poster paint on found pieces of cardboard, making his art on a sidewalk in downtown Montgomery, Alabama.

Philadelphia Museum of Art
www.philamuseum.org