Outsider art is art by self-taught or naïve art makers. Typically, those labeled as outsider artists have little or no contact with the mainstream art world or art institutions. In many cases, their work is discovered only after their deaths. Often, outsider art illustrates extreme mental states, unconventional ideas, or elaborate fantasy worlds.
Visionary art is art that purports to transcend the physical world and portray a wider vision of awareness including spiritual or mystical themes, or is based in such experiences.
An art car is a vehicle that has had its appearance modified as an act of personal artistic expression. Art cars are often driven and owned by their creators, who are sometimes referred to as "Cartists".
Joseph Coleman is an American painter, illustrator actor and performance artist. He has been described as the "walking ghost of Old America" by his wife, photographer Whitney Ward, for his over-riding interest in the historical arcana and personae that often populate his paintings. Of Coleman's work, the New York Times wrote that, “If P. T. Barnum had hired Breughel or Bosch to paint sideshow banners, they might have resembled the art of Joe Coleman.” While Berlin's Tagesspiegel said of Coleman, "Like [George] Grosz in the 1920s, he holds a drastic mirror up to his own times."
Charles August Albert Dellschau was one of America's earliest known visionary artists, who created drawings, collages and watercolors of airplanes and airships and bound them in 12 known large scrapbooks that were discovered decades after his death.
Folk art covers all forms of visual art made in the context of folk culture. Definitions vary, but generally the objects have practical utility of some kind, rather than being exclusively decorative. The makers of folk art are typically trained within a popular tradition, rather than in the fine art tradition of the culture. There is often overlap, or contested ground with 'naive art'. "Folk art" is not used in regard to traditional societies where ethnographic art continue to be made.
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.
Howard Finster was an American artist and Baptist minister from Georgia. He claimed to be inspired by God to spread the gospel through the design of his swampy land into Paradise Garden, a folk art sculpture garden with over 46,000 pieces of art. His creations include outsider art, naïve art, and visionary art. Finster came to widespread notice in the 1980s with his album cover designs for R.E.M. and Talking Heads.
Shadows and Fog is a 1991 American black-and-white comedy film directed by Woody Allen and based on his one-act play Death. It stars Allen, Mia Farrow, John Malkovich, John Cusack, Madonna, and Kenneth Mars. It was filmed on a 26,000-square-foot (2,400 m2) set at Kaufman Astoria Studios, which was the biggest set ever built in New York. It was also Allen's last film for Orion Pictures.
Les Blank was an American documentary filmmaker best known for his portraits of American traditional musicians.
The Architecture of Doom is a 1989 documentary by Swedish director Peter Cohen and narrated by Rolf Arsenius. German- and English-language versions have also been released.
Reel Affirmations (RA) is a non-profit, all-volunteer LGBT film festival in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1991 and held every year in mid-October, as of 2011 Reel Affirmations was one of the largest LGBT film festivals in the United States. Baltimore's Gay Life newspaper called it "one of the top three films festivals for the entire LGBT community." A 2007 guidebook claims it was one of the largest LGBT film festivals in the world. A listing of LGBT film festivals claims it is the largest all-volunteer film festival in the world.
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.
The Houston Alternative Art chronology was originally compiled by Caroline Huber and The Art Guys for the exhibition catalogue No Zoning: Artists Engage Houston, which was published by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) to accompany the group show of the same name. The exhibition was on view at CAMH from May 9-October 4, 2009. No Zoning: Artists Engage Houston was co-curated by Toby Kamps and Meredith Goldsmith and featured projects by twenty-one Houston artists using the city as inspiration, material, and site. This chronology documents Houston's alternative art scene.
Alan M. Bolle is an American artist best known as The Springman for his Chicago-based work incorporating springs into media as varied as cars, clothes, and music. More recently he has moved to New York and specialised in depictions of live music performances.
The L.A. Rebellion film movement, sometimes referred to as the "Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers", or the UCLA Rebellion, refers to the new generation of young African and African-American filmmakers who studied at the UCLA Film School in the late-1960s to the late-1980s and have created a black cinema that provides an alternative to classical Hollywood cinema.
Gretchen Baer is a noted American painter and performance artist living in Bisbee, Arizona.
Dalton Stevens, better known as the Button King, was a hobbyist, outsider artist and musician notable for his unusual button art and related media appearances. Since 1983, Stevens had painstakingly decorated various objects with thousands of colorful buttons.
Jesse Lott is an American artist known for his wire and wood sculptures, papier mâché figures and collages made from found materials within an aesthetic he calls "urban frontier art".
