The first problem is how to define them: Self-taught artists? Mavericks? Outsiders? Lynne Cook, a curator at the National Gallery of Art, proposes a new term for American artists who have worked mostly outside the mainstream world of museum, galleries and patronage. She calls them “outliers.”
“Outliers and American Vanguard Art” is not the first large exhibition to survey work made by isolated visionaries (Henry Darger and Martín Ramírez) or inspired folk artists (the quilters of Gee’s Bend and retablos painters of the Southwest) or maverick figures who thrived by straddling boundaries (Horace Pippin and Jacob Lawrence). But it definitely feels like an institutional moment. If it isn’t a benediction, it is certainly a resounding acknowledgment that something has changed in our understanding of these artists.
“Outliers,” Cook argues, is a term without negative baggage and suggests a relationship more fluid than the black-and-white terminology of insider and outsider. Plus, Malcolm Gladwell has made it sexy.
The exhibition is enormous, engaging and sometimes upsetting. By focusing not just on outlier artists, but on three key moments when the boundaries between the outliers and the vanguard of the established art world became porous, the show documents influence and borrowings and ultimately the collapse of most distinctions between the schooled and the unschooled, the ironic and the naive, the conceptual and the obsessive. It includes some 250 works and makes the most extensive use yet of the concourse-level visiting exhibition galleries that were a major feature of the recent East Building renovation.
The three key moments begin with an almost two-decade period after the First World War when Americans began looking to folk art and early American artists for the creation of a new American nationalist art practice. With Depression-era programs that supported independent and folk artists, and a focus on “modern primitives” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1938, “insider” artists had access to a range of naive, direct and evocative forms of expression flourishing in places far from New York, and without pretense to being “high” art.
The second chapter, roughly coinciding with the civil rights movements of the 1960s and ’70s, is devoted to outsider artists who directly challenged the centrality and gate-keeping function of the institutional art world. Artists of color, gay and lesbian artists and artists working in rural and isolated parts of the country emerged to speak on their own terms. The work of outsiders wasn’t just a cornucopia of inspiration for mainstream painters and sculptors; it asserted the presence of new voices and new subjects and new techniques that had been traditionally excluded from the art world.
Finally, with a chapter beginning around 1998 and continuing into this decade, the lines seem to dissolve entirely. Eliminating hierarchies and the last vestiges of condescension from the relationship, the art world began to think of itself as flat, broad, and open, as if everyone was an outlier. In part, this was spurred by the internationalization of the art world, and an influx of artists from countries and cultures that were never part of the Western tradition.
But ultimately, it was the market that did most of the leveling. And so the world of outlier artists now has celebrities and art stars and a core canon of iconic works waiting for eager viewers to Instagram. Expect crowds near the scroll-like narrative paintings of Darger, the enigmatically spare works on paper of Bill Traylor, the squat, rough-hewed limestone carvings of William Edmondson and the intricately detailed maps of the psyche made by Ramírez. The easy headline summary of the exhibition for those who don’t want to dig any deeper is that these works have now, finally, been accepted into the inner sanctum of the elite art world.
But this show raises deeper questions, and some of them are unsettling. The exhibition charts the traffic in ideas between established artists, such as Marsden Hartley, Charles Sheeler and Cindy Sherman, and outsider figures.
“Outliers and American Vanguard” Art is on view at the National Gallery of Art through May 13. For more information visit nga.gov.