Outsider art is art made by self-taught or supposedly naïve artists with typically little or no contact with the conventions of the art worlds. In many cases, their work is discovered only after their deaths. Often, outsider art illustrates extreme mental states, unconventional ideas, or elaborate fantasy worlds.
Henry Joseph Darger Jr. was an American writer, novelist and artist who worked as a hospital custodian in Chicago, Illinois. He has become famous for his posthumously discovered 15,145-page fantasy novel manuscript called The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, along with several hundred drawings and watercolor illustrations for the story.
The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago is a contemporary art museum near Water Tower Place in downtown Chicago in Cook County, Illinois, United States. The museum, which was established in 1967, is one of the world's largest contemporary art venues. The museum's collection is composed of thousands of objects of Post-World War II visual art. The museum is run gallery-style, with individually curated exhibitions throughout the year. Each exhibition may be composed of temporary loans, pieces from their permanent collection, or a combination of the two.
The Loyola University Museum of Art (LUMA), which opened in the fall of 2005, is unique among Chicago's many museums for mounting exhibits that explore the spiritual in art from all cultures, faiths, and eras. LUMA is located on Loyola University Chicago's Water Tower Campus in downtown Chicago, at 820 North Michigan Ave.
Charles August Albert Dellschau was a Prussian-American who gained posthumous fame after the discovery of his large scrapbooks that contained drawings, collages and watercolors of airplanes and airships. He has been classified as one of the first visionary artists.
The American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM) is an art museum located in Baltimore, Maryland's Federal Hill neighborhood at 800 Key Highway. The museum specializes in the preservation and display of outsider art. The city agreed to give the museum a piece of land on the south shore of the Inner Harbor under the condition that its organizers would clean up residual pollution from a copper paint factory and a whiskey warehouse that formerly occupied the site. It has been designated by Congress as America's national museum for visionary art.
Judith Scott was an American fiber sculptor. She was deaf and had Down Syndrome. She was internationally renowned for her art. In 1987, Judith was enrolled at the Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, California, which supports people with developmental disabilities. There, Judith discovered her passion and talent for abstract fiber art, and she was able to communicate in a new form. An account of Scott's life, Entwined: Sisters and Secrets in the Silent World of Artist Judith Scott, was written by her twin sister, Joyce Wallace Scott, and was published in 2016.
Eugene Von Bruenchenhein (1910–1983) was an American self-taught artist from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Over the course of fifty years, from the 1930s until his death in 1983, Von Bruenchenhein produced an expansive oeuvre of poetry, photography, painting, drawing and sculpture. His body of work includes over one thousand colorful, apocalyptic landscape paintings; hundreds of sculptures made from chicken bones, ceramic and cast cement; pin-up style photos of his wife, Marie; plus dozens of notebooks filled with poetic and scientific musings. Never confined to one particular method or medium, Von Bruenchenhein continually used everyday, discarded objects to visually explore imagined past and future realities.
The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMoCA), formerly known as the Madison Art Center, is an independent, non-profit art museum located in downtown Madison, Wisconsin.
Marilyn Jensen Houlberg was a professor, art historian, anthropologist, photographer, and curator. She was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. Houlberg traveled extensively, conducting art historical and anthropological research in countries across the Caribbean and western Africa. She is known for curating exhibitions based on the religious icons and visual practices of Haitian Vodou and her anthropological research on the culture of the Yoruba people in southwestern Nigeria. Her photography archives and visual art collections are housed in various institutions throughout the United States. She was Professor Emeritus of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she taught for over twenty years.
The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art is an art museum located on the campus of the University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois. The permanent collection has over 15,000 objects. Admission is free and open to the public.
Visual arts of Chicago refers to paintings, prints, illustrations, textile art, sculpture, ceramics and other visual artworks produced in Chicago or by people with a connection to Chicago. Since World War II, Chicago visual art has had a strong individualistic streak, little influenced by outside fashions. "One of the unique characteristics of Chicago," said Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts curator Bob Cozzolino, "is there's always been a very pronounced effort to not be derivative, to not follow the status quo." The Chicago art world has been described as having "a stubborn sense ... of tolerant pluralism." However, Chicago's art scene is "critically neglected." Critic Andrew Patner has said, "Chicago's commitment to figurative painting, dating back to the post-War period, has often put it at odds with New York critics and dealers." It is argued that Chicago art is rarely found in Chicago museums; some of the most remarkable Chicago artworks are found in other cities.
Charles Steffen (1927–1995) was an American self-taught artist from Chicago, Illinois. He belongs to the outsider art movement and is known for his drawings of an imaginary world "peopled by creatures resembling aliens."
Lee Godie was an American self-taught artist who was active in Chicago during the late 1960s until around the early 1990s. She was a prolific artist who was known for her paintings and modified photos which are shown in galleries and museums such as the Hayward Gallery in London and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She is often considered Chicago's most collected artist.
Robert A. "Bob" Roth is an American publisher and art collector who lives in Chicago. He was the founder and publisher of the Chicago Reader, one of the most influential and successful newspapers of its type. He was also one of the founders and the first president of Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, located in Chicago. Intuit is the only nonprofit organization in the U.S. dedicated solely to presenting "outsider" art by self-taught artists.
The Woman Made Gallery (WMG) is a Chicago based non-profit gallery known for elevating women and non-binary artists through exhibitions, membership, and community dialogue programs. Woman Made's vision is to ensure the equal placement of women's art in the art world. WMG is Chicago's longest-operating feminist art gallery and one of the leading organizations promoting women's art in the US.
Willie Young is a 20th-century American artist. Young is mainly self-taught, and his work has been exhibited alongside other prominent outsider artists, such as Bill Traylor, Nellie Mae Rowe and Thornton Dial. The main body of his work consists of delicately rendered graphite drawings.
Susan Te Kahurangi King is an autistic artist from New Zealand who found international fame in 2009.
Kevin Blythe Sampson is an American artist and retired police officer living in Newark, New Jersey. He makes sculptures from discarded found objects that act as memorials for various people who have died. He has a studio based out of Newark.
Dr. Charles Smith is a visual artist, historian, activist and minister who lives and works in Hammond, Louisiana. His sculptural work focuses on African and African American history.
