Spencer Herr (born March 1974) is an American folk artist from Phoenix, Arizona. [1] He currently lives in Asheville, North Carolina.
Herr grew up in Phoenix, Arizona and attended Northern Arizona University. [1] He spent his early twenties traveling and seeking adventure throughout the US west coast, Mexico, Australia, and Asia. At 26, he moved to South West Virginia where he met his wife, Kara. He lives and works in Asheville with his wife and two daughters. [1]
In 2006, Herr began to show his art publicly. He approached Betsey-Rose Weiss the next year with a CD of his works. Upon viewing Herr's paintings, Weiss decided that he would be the first artist she would choose to represent as the new owner of an Asheville gallery. [2] Herr was exhibited at the 20th annual Outsider Art Fair in New York in January 2012. [3] His work was represented at the Outsider Art Fair by Marcia Weber Art Objects, a gallery that sells a large number of his works to collectors worldwide. [1]
Much of Herr's work is laden with spiritual allusions. His interest in religion can be seen in two of his older series based on Abraham's Covenant and the poetry of 13th century Persian mystic Rumi. [1] His series working man's mystic addresses the relationship between ego death and the desire to connect with God. His use of layering expresses an interest in the perception of memory. Herr often sacrifices realism for essence. Paintings of his daughters are not portraits of their physical characteristics, but rather they capture the girls' wonderment and innocence. [2] Having grown up in the southwest, Herr is fascinated with rough environments. His work represents this through journalistic portrayals of states of mind, as opposed to landscapes. [4]
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.
The Phoenix Art Museum is the largest museum for visual art in the southwest United States. Located in Phoenix, Arizona, the museum is 285,000 square feet (26,500 m2). It displays international exhibitions alongside its comprehensive collection of more than 18,000 works of American, Asian, European, Latin American, Western American, modern and contemporary art, and fashion design. A community center since 1959, it hosts festivals, live performances, independent art films and educational programs year-round. It also features The Hub: The James K. Ballinger Interactive Gallery, an interactive space for children; photography exhibitions through the museum's partnership with the Center for Creative Photography; the landscaped Sculpture Garden; dining and shopping.
Allan Capron Houser or Haozous was a Chiricahua Apache sculptor, painter, and book illustrator born in Oklahoma. He was one of the most renowned Native American painters and Modernist sculptors of the 20th century.
Samuel Walsh is an Irish abstract artist. He is a member of Aosdána, founder of the National Collection of Contemporary Drawing and is closely associated with the beginnings of EVA International. Born in London in 1951 to Irish parents, he moved to Limerick, Ireland in 1968, where he resided until 1990. He now lives and works in Co. Clare.
Moses Ernest Tolliver was an American artist. He was known as "Mose T", after the signature on his paintings, signed with a backwards "s."
Purvis Young was an American artist from the Overtown neighborhood of Miami, Florida. Young's work, often a blend of collage and painting, utilizes found objects and the experience of African Americans in the south. Young gained recognition as a cult contemporary artist, with a collectors' following that included Jane Fonda, Damon Wayans, Jim Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, and others. In 2006 a feature documentary titled Purvis of Overtown was produced about his life and work. His work is found in the collections of the American Folk Art Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the High Museum of Art, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Bakehouse Art Complex, and others. In 2018, he was inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame.
Noah Becker is an American and Canadian artist, writer, publisher of Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, and jazz saxophonist who lives and works in New York City and Vancouver Island. He is a contributing writer for Art in America Magazine, Canadian Art Magazine and the Huffington Post.
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 Randall Nelson is an American painter and sculptor based in Phoenix, Arizona.
Lorenzo Scott is a contemporary American artist whose work gained prominence in the late 1980s.
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.
Jon Serl (1894–1993) was an American artist. He is best remembered as a painter like the American artists Grandma Moses and Edward Hicks. He also worked in other roles and under several different names. These included as a vaudeville artist named Slats; as a voiceover performer for Hollywood named Ned Palmer, and as a migrant fruit collector, better known under the name Jerry Palmer.
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.
Alice Williams Cling is a Native American ceramist and potter known for creating beautiful and innovative pottery that has a distinctive rich reds, purples, browns and blacks that have a polished and shiny exteriors, revolutionizing the functional to works of art. Critics have argued that she is the most important Navajo potter of the last 25 years.
Holly Farrell is a Canadian painter.
Don Porcella is contemporary American multimedia artist, most known for his pipe cleaner sculptures and encaustic paintings Don Porcella is best known for elevating low-brow, mass-market craft materials into high art. Porcella's subjects are usually inspired by consumerism, nature, the human condition, science fiction and folk art with humor.
Shin Gallery is an encyclopedic art gallery owned by Hong Gyu Shin. It specializes in modern and contemporary art, and hosts museum-quality exhibitions. It is located on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York, and it opened in 2013. In 2014, an immersive project space was opened next to the gallery. In 2017 Shin Gallery expanded to include three different gallery spaces on Orchard Street. Then in 2020, Shin Haus get launched, a program that aims to discover up-and-coming artists. The Gallery also specializes in rediscovering overlooked artists, traditionally marginalized due to their ethnicity and gender. Shin Gallery also works with a variety of venues including national heritage sites, hotels, and public spaces further demonstrating its international agenda.
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.
Melissa Cody is a Navajo textile artist from No Water Mesa, Arizona, United States. Her Germantown Revival style weavings are known for their bold colors and intricate three dimensional patterns. Cody maintains aspects of traditional Navajo tapestries, but also adds her own elements into her work. These elements range from personal tributes to pop culture references.
Melvin Way was an American folk artist.