Outsider Art Archives - Page 4 of 8

Abe Goldstein painting, The Osmonds. Outsider Art example.

December 24, 2019 Bill Swislow

What Is Outsider Art?

I wrote this little essay about 25 years ago, when the concept of outsider art was new to the also-new World Wide Web. The real experts hadn’t yet gone online, and something was needed there to explain this kind of art. Like many of us, I’ve learned a lot since then, and the recent death of Roger Cardinal, whose 1972 book “Outsider Art” originated the term, made me consider revising the essay. It has a bit of history about it, at least for me, though, so I’ve left it as is. My views about the term have changed, however,

Outliers and American Vanguard Art book cover

January 8, 2019 Bill Swislow

Review — Outliers and American Vanguard Art

Outliers and American Vanguard Art, by Lynne Cooke. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 412 pages, 450 color plates, 2018. ISBN: 978-0226522272. Hardcover, $65 Outliers and American Vanguard Art, filling several rooms at the National Gallery of Art, is a dauntingly large-scale show. And at five pounds, 412 pages, 450-plus illustrations and a 10 x12 form factor, its catalog is even more daunting. But, despite some excess imbrications and fixed subject positions, the art and the important points being made are plenty sufficient to interest non-academic readers. Curator Lynne Cooke’s core premise is that the story of modernism is woefully incomplete absent

Cover of Eugene Von Bruenchenhein Mythologies catalog

January 8, 2019 Bill Swislow

Review — Eugene Von Bruenchenhein: Mythologies

Mythologies, the name of the Kohler Art Center exhibit and substantial catalog, makes a holistic case for Eugene Von Bruenchenhein’s brilliance.

August 15, 2018 Bill Swislow

Outsider Art: Chicago We Own It

A look past Chicago’s outsider art canon to anonymous & lesser-known artists, the collectors who found their work, and Maxwell Street, where many learned how

Two figures on ceramic plaque by Harvey Ford, 1994

June 16, 2018 Bill Swislow

Harvey Ford: Objects of Beautyness

Harvey Ford was a prolific producer of drawings when he was in the art program at Joliet’s Stateville Penitentiary, but he also made some impressive sculptures, mostly ceramic, and at least a few papier-mâché. The colors and shapes are more than a match for the intensity of his drawings, many of which he made with burnt matches. Although prison art programs produce a lot of material that is of little interest beyond the cellblock walls, the Stateville program, as its output makes evident, encouraged artists to follow their own creative direction. Ford was a true visionary and a case study

Outsider Art: Visionary Worlds and Trauma book cover

March 1, 2018 Bill Swislow

Review — Outsider Art: Visionary Worlds and Trauma

Outsider Art: Visionary Worlds and Trauma, by Daniel Wojcik. University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, MS, 276 pages, 174 color illustrations, 2016. ISBN: 978-1496808066. Hardcover, $45 Can we agree that the art still sometimes known as outsider is much more interesting than what to call it? It might seem a simple enough proposition, yet arguments over the label continue to distract from the art, even among those who consider the debate mostly fruitless. Daniel Wojcik’s book is a case in point. When it’s good, it’s very good, providing sensitive, thoughful accounts of the art and its creators, with real insights into

The-Forevertron-built-by-Tom-Every-Dr.-Evermore-south-of-Baraboo-Wisconsin

May 20, 2017 Bill Swislow

The Forevertron Forever — Genius by the Roadside

North of Madison and just south of Baraboo, Wisconsin, is one of the country’s great roadside attractions, Dr. Evermor’s Forevertron. The Forevertron is a steampunk paradise, with a Victorian look in service of science-fiction vision. Creator Tom Every, born in 1938, has experience as a farmhand, salvager, construction worker and architect’s assistant, according to Leslie Umberger’s Sublime Spaces and Visionary Worlds catalog. Every also helped to fabricate attractions at The House on the Rock, Wisconsin’s foremost tourist trap and a whole other story. He has involved explanations for the work, but the focus here is its visual impact. The site

Miamis-Bottle-Cap-Inn-before-an-addition-on-the-right-side

March 11, 2017 Bill Swislow

Bottle Cap Valhalla: The Bottle Cap Inn

Unsealed: Bottle Cap Art | The Woolseys | The Patent Drawings | How To | The Race Question| The Blockbuster The Galleries: Masterworks | Troops | Signed | Flashers | Other Shapes | Mine | Bottle Cap Inn | Two Monuments Joe Wiser’s Bottle Cap Inn in Miami was featured in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, but more importantly it was a triumph of an obsessive personal vision. Fortunately, many interior views were preserved in a series of postcards and press photos. The bar was created in the 1930s by Joe Wiser, said to be a disabled World War I veteran. He choose to decorate with the most available ornamentation,

December 11, 2016 Bill Swislow

Howard Finster Time!

Experience Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden, site of a one-person creative flowering like few the world has ever seen. Also, see the Sidewalks of Paradise Garden. Read a review of Norman Girardot’s enlightening exploration of Finster’s art and theology. Visit my archival Howard Finster page.

Buildings embedded in the sidewalk at Howard Finster's Paradise Garden, circa 1990

November 30, 2016 Bill Swislow

The Sidewalks of Paradise Garden

Among the most stunning features of Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden in Summerville, Georgia, are its sidewalks. Some bear representational images of buildings, others are abstract aggregations of potsherds. Some bear text messages, others are virtual encyclopedias of Finster’s tools. These mosaic ribbons threading through the garden are a potent representation of how his creativity found expression in every aspect of the environment around him.