Outsider art is art made by self-taught individuals who are untrained and untutored in the traditional arts with typically little or no contact with the conventions of the art worlds.
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.
Florence Elizabeth Riefle Bahr was an American artist and activist. She made portraits of children and adults, including studies of nature as she found it. Instead of using a camera, more than 300 pen and ink sketchbooks catalog insights into her life, including her civil and human rights activism of the 1960s and 1970s. One of the many important captured events included the Washington D.C. event where Martin Luther King Jr. first gave his I Have a Dream speech. Her painting Homage to Martin Luther King hangs in the (NAACP) National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's headquarters. She created illustrations for children's books and painted a mural in the Works Progress Administration (WPA) for the Johns Hopkins Hospital's Harriet Lane Home for Children. Her works have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions since the 1930s. In 1999, she was posthumously awarded to the State of Maryland's Women's Hall of Fame, as the first woman artist they recognized.
Jodi Wille is an American film director, curator, and book publisher known for her work exploring American subcultures.
Joan Erbe Udel was a Baltimore painter and sculptor. She was best known for using bright colors and was called "The Grand Duchess of Baltimore Painters" by Ned Oldham as quoted by Rebecca Hoffberger in Baltimore Magazine. She received her training at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she was a student of Leonard Bahr and Louis Bouché.
Mina Cheon is a Korean American new media artist, scholar, and educator. Since 1997, she has been living between Baltimore, New York, and Seoul.
Edward Adamson was a British artist, "the father of Art Therapy in Britain", and the creator of the Adamson Collection.
Lily Yeh is an artist whose work has taken her to communities throughout the world. She grew up in Taiwan and moved to the United States in 1963 to attend the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Fine Arts. She was a professor of painting and art history at University of the Arts (Philadelphia) from 1968 until 1998. As founder and executive director of The Village of Arts and Humanities in North Philadelphia from 1986 to 2004, she helped create a national model in creative place-making and community building through the arts. In 2002, Yeh pursued her work internationally, founding Barefoot Artists, Inc. In addition to the United States, she has carried out projects in several other countries.
John Maizels is the founder of Raw Vision magazine which he created in London in 1989 as a forum for the work of self-taught artists, or unknown geniuses, which he felt was overlooked and under-appreciated. Initially published biannually, Raw Vision is now published quarterly.
Joyce J. Scott is an African-American artist, sculptor, quilter, performance artist, installation artist, print-maker, lecturer and educator. Named a MacArthur Fellow in 2016, and a Smithsonian Visionary Artist in 2019, Scott is best known for her figurative sculptures and jewelry using free form, off-loom beadweaving techniques, similar to a peyote stitch. Each piece is often constructed using thousands of glass seed beads or pony beads, and sometimes other found objects or materials such as glass, quilting and leather. In 2018, she was hailed for working in new medium — a mixture of soil, clay, straw, and cement — for a sculpture meant to disintegrate and return to the earth. Scott is influenced by a variety of diverse cultures, including Native American and African traditions, Mexican, Czech, and Russian beadwork, illustration and comic books, and pop culture.
Elizabeth Talford Scott was an American artist, known for her quilts.
Deana Haggag is an American arts organization leader. She is the program officer in arts and culture at Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Formally, Haggag was the President and CEO of United States Artists (2017–2020), and was Executive Director of The Contemporary (2013–2017) in Baltimore, Maryland.
Nina Simon is an American exhibition curator, writer, educator, and museum director. She is the founder of the non-profit organization OF/BY/FOR ALL. Simon previously was the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, from 2012 until June 2019. She is the author of three books: The Participatory Museum, The Art of Relevance, and, in 2023, her first novel, Mother-Daughter Murder Night, which was a New York Times bestseller and Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick.
"Missionary" Mary L. Proctor is an American artist, best known for her visionary paintings, collages, and assemblages.
Grace Bashara Greene was an American visionary artist noted for her assemblage work and for the visionary environment she created in her house, which was featured in the documentary film Eyeopeners.
Susan Subtle was an American curator, columnist, and product developer; known for her curatorial work focusing on recycled and outsider art. Subtle lived and worked in Berkeley, California until her death in May, 2020.
Paula Gately Tillman is a photographer from Baltimore, Maryland best known for her 1980s and 1990s work documenting underground scenes and fringe personalities in New York and Atlanta.
Jim Condron is an American artist working in painting and sculpture. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and Baltimore, MD.
Juliette Élisa Bataille was a French textile and outsider artist. She created small embroideries with the character of paintings, by sewing silk, cotton, and wool onto rectangular pieces of cardboard. She is known for the works she composed during a three-year period at Ville-Évrard Psychiatric Hospital. She met the artist Jean Dubuffet at the hospital, who was collecting art brut.
Judy Tallwing McCarthey is a leatherwoman and artist.
