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.
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 Pingry School is a coeducational, independent, college preparatory country day school in New Jersey, with a Lower School (K–5) campus in the Short Hills neighborhood of Millburn, a Middle (6–8) and Upper School (9–12) campus in the Basking Ridge section of Bernards Township, and a campus for experiential learning in Pottersville. The school was founded in 1861 by John F. Pingry. The school has been accredited by the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Elementary and Secondary Schools since 1998 and is considered one of the most prestigious in the state and country.
Nicholas John Blinko is a British musician and artist, best known as the lead singer, lyricist, and guitar player for the anarcho-punk band Rudimentary Peni. He is also known for being an "outsider" artist, whose pen-and-ink drawings and paintings have been shown in galleries worldwide. Blinko also creates all the drawings used by the band for its artwork.
Martín Ramírez was a self-taught artist who spent most of his adult life institutionalized in California mental hospitals, diagnosed as a catatonic schizophrenic. He is considered by some to be one of the 20th century's best self-taught masters.
Adam Seth Gardner is an American guitarist and vocalist of the band Guster and a member of the Tufts University Beelzebubs.
George Widener is a self-taught artist who employs his mathematical/calculating capability to create art ranging from complex calendars and numerical palindromes to Rembrandt-like antiquarian landscapes to Asian scrolls. He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Lisson Gallery is a contemporary art gallery with locations in London and New York, founded by Nicholas Logsdail in 1967. The gallery represents over 50 artists such as Art & Language, Ryan Gander, Carmen Herrera, Richard Long, John Latham, Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, Jonathan Monk, Julian Opie, Richard Wentworth, Anish Kapoor, Richard Deacon and Ai Weiwei.
Barbara Gladstone is an American art dealer and film producer. She is owner of Gladstone Gallery, a contemporary art gallery with locations in New York and Brussels.
James T. Nutt is an American artist who was a founding member of the Chicago surrealist art movement known as the Chicago Imagists, or the Hairy Who. Though his work is inspired by the same pop culture that inspired Pop Art, journalist Web Behrens says Nutt's "paintings, particularly his later works, are more accomplished than those of the more celebrated Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein." According to Museum of Contemporary Art curator Lynne Warren, Nutt is "the premier artist of his generation". Nutt attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in Chicago, Illinois. He is married to fellow-artist and Hairy Who member Gladys Nilsson.
The Chicago Imagists are a group of representational artists associated with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who exhibited at the Hyde Park Art Center in the late 1960s.
Thornton Dial was a pioneering American artist who came to prominence in the late 1980s. Dial's body of work exhibits formal variety through expressive, densely composed assemblages of found materials, often executed on a monumental scale. His range of subjects embraces a broad sweep of history, from human rights to natural disasters and current events. Dial's works are widely held in American museums; ten of Dial's works were acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2014.
John Bunion (J.B.) Murray was an abstract expressionist painter from Glascock County, GA. His work has been shown among folk art exhibitions and is included at the American Folk Art Museum and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and has been featured in many museum exhibitions, including "Self-Taught Genius" at AFAM and "When the Stars Begin to Fall" at the Studio Museum. His work is best known for its codified use of colors and improvised script, called "spirit script," which could only be translated by the artist.
Robert Hawkins is an American artist born in Sunnyvale, California, USA and presently lives in London, UK., Hawkins' is best known for his "ferocious" style of realism. His first drawing in a publication appeared in the kid's section of the San Francisco Chronicle at the age of 5.
Charles Gaines is an American artist whose work interrogates the discourse of aesthetics, politics, and philosophy. Taking the form of drawings, photographic series and video installations, the work consistently involves the use of systems, predominantly in the form of the grid, often in combination with photography. His work is rooted in Conceptual Art – in dialogue with artists such as Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner and Mel Bochner – and Gaines is committed to its tenets of engaging cognition and language. As one of the only African-American conceptual artists working in the 1970s, a time when political expressionism was a prevailing concern among African-American artists, Gaines was an outlier in his pursuit of abstraction and non-didactic approach to race and politics. There is a strong musical thread running through much of Gaines' work, evident in his repeated use of musical scores as well in his engagement with the idea of indeterminacy, as similar to John Cage and Sol LeWitt.
Susan Te Kahurangi King is an autistic artist from New Zealand who found international fame in 2009. She was born in Te Aroha in 1951.
The Outsider Art Fair or OAF is an international exhibition that features outsider artists who work in a variety of mediums. It is a biannual fair occurring in New York City and Paris, the former taking place in January and the latter in October. Plans were made for a Basel edition in 2018 to run alongside Art Basel, but has since been postponed until further notice.
Amy Ellis Nutt is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist and a New York Times bestselling author. She was the recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her reporting at The Star-Ledger on the 2009 wreck of the Lady Mary fishing vessel. She has also worked as a health and science writer for The Washington Post and a writer-reporter at Sports Illustrated.
Phyllis Barbara Kind was an American art dealer active in Chicago and New York. She promoted the work of the Chicago Imagists and outsider artists.
Lewis Smith was an artist belonging to the Outsider art movement.
