Outsider art has always had its devotees, but the 34th edition of the Outsider Art Fair, returning to the Metropolitan Pavilion March 19 through March 22, works at a different scale. Attendance surged by 40 percent last year. The vast majority of those visitors were first-timers. This year brings 68 exhibitors, a new fair director, Elizabeth Denny, 13 debuting galleries, and two programming firsts: live performances and an outsider fashion shop. Self-taught art, long sidelined by the mainstream, is pulling a crowd.
OAF owner Andrew Edlin shares a theory on outsider art’s allure. “The artists who are being shown were not making the work for the most part for an audience,” he says. “It’s more personal, it’s more autobiographical. And you know, I always thought that the more personal something is, the more universal. We can just relate to it.”
This year’s fair leans into that relatability with expanded programming. Friday brings two performances and three “OAF talks” to the fair, including a political satire from the Norwegian puppet theater group Wakka Wakka. One of the fair’s two curated spaces, “From The North,” spotlights Inuit prints and drawings from Canada. The space’s curator—a leading expert on Inuit art—will lead a panel discussion with the chief curator of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal. “RUN STORE,” another curated space making its fair debut, is an outsider fashion shop led by Susan Cianciolo, an artist and educator who revives her cult 1990s New York label “Run” for the occasion.
Among the 13 newcomers, London’s Gallery of Everything brings work by the late Sam Doyle (1906-1985), who painted expressive portraits on discarded materials such as metal roofing. New York’s Nancy Hoffman Gallery presents the intricate work of New Mexico-based Timothy Cummings, who began crafting puppets as a teenager for county fairs before turning to painting and developing a practice centered on the tumultuous passage between childhood and adulthood. Detroit’s PASC, an art studio and exhibition program supporting artists with developmental disabilities and mental health differences, joins a contingent that Edlin has worked to maintain at roughly 15 percent of exhibitors—workshops and studios dedicated to advancing independent artistic practices and individual career paths.
At Edlin’s own booth, neurodiverse artist Nicole Appel shows portraits that are less faces than full consortiums of a person and what they love. Nearby are several works by visionary artist Abraham Lincoln Walker (1921-1993), an evangelical speaker and house painter by trade who created over 800 paintings in near total solitude. At the heart of the installation, an “art-brut masterpiece” by Aloïse Corbaz (1886-1964) commands most of the back wall.
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To Edlin, the individualistic range is the point. “It’s not a movement,” he claims, “It’s a genre. Each person is like their own movement. There’s no compulsion to evolve, or to say, ‘What am I going to do for my next show?’ There’s just the compulsion to create.”
The Outsider Art Fair runs from March 19 through 22 at the Metropolitan Pavilion, 125 West 18th Street, New York, NY.