Outsider Art

OUTSIDER ART “Outsider art,” a term coined by art critics and historians rather than by artists themselves, refers to the art of individuals who create aesthetic images or structures without formal academic training or connections to the mainstream art community. Expressive visual imagery produced by creators without academic training is as old as “art” itself, but recognition of their works as art, as well as the awareness that elite, academic, or mainstream audiences have evinced in such works, has waxed and waned in response to various aesthetic, social, and cultural trends. Not coincidentally, such interest often appears most forcefully during times of artistic upheaval, experimentation, and discovery. The late-twentiethcentury revival of interest in the various genres subsumed under the umbrella terms “outsider” or “self-taught” art called attention to the ability of such creators-who may or may not identify themselves as “artists”—to conceptualize and compose work of great power, vigor, and integrity. This terminology also brings into question the creators’ connections to their local community or communities, and thus forces consideration of the relation of outsider to folk art, of tradition to creativity, and of community to individual in folklife.