The Outsider | Fall 2013

A PUBLICATION OF INTUIT: THE CENTER FOR INTUITIVE AND OUTSIDER ART

The Outsider

A life in art Working in multiple media, Chicagoan Eddie Harris depicts the black experience

Blurred lines Examining the thorny role of influence in self-taught art

VOLUME 18 | FALL 13

Fightin’ words Is outsider art alive and well, dying or just changing?

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EDITOR Janet Franz ART DIRECTION AND DESIGN Daniel Owsley, Innovative Publishing Ink EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

The Outsider FEATURES

10

It Takes a Hard Heart

Interview by Laura Bickford Chicagoan Eddie Harris’ wood carvings, drawings and paintings have politics, black power and beauty at their roots

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The Ambivalence of Influence

22

Word Play

26

Dead or Alive?

Ralph Concepcion, President, Governance Committee Chair Matthew Arient, Vice President Patrick Blackburn, Immediate Past President, Development Committee Chair Colby Mangers, Treasurer Kevin Cole, Secretary Tim Bruce, Collections & Acquisitions Committee Chair Ron Reason, Communications Committee Chair Jerry Stefl, Education Committee Chair

Jan Petry, Exhibits Committee Chair BOARD MEMBERS Susann Craig Cheri Eisenberg

Marjorie Freed Robert Grossett

By Rob Lentz Considering the effect of communal creativity on the “authenticity” of disability studio artists

By Dana Boutin Artists use text to create a unique kind of imagery, challenging viewers to think outside the frame

By Michael Bonesteel The debate over the viability of outsider art is enough to drive otherwise civilized folk to fisticuffs

Eugenie Johnson

DEPARTMENTS

Robert A. Roth

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On Intuit

Judy A. Saslow

30

In Memoriam

Gail Garcia Steffen William Swislow

32 Education

David Syrek

34

Recent Acquisitions & Promised Gifts

Cleo Wilson

35

Book & Movie Reviews

Karen Zupko

40 Donors

ADVERTISING SALES

41

All Things Intuit

Innovative Publishing Ink STAFF Joel Mangers, Executive Director Heather Holbus, Assistant Director of Operations & Promotions

On the Cover: Chicago artist Eddie Harris with one of the painted trees in his garden. Harris’ work, much of it exhibited publicly for the first time, will be on view at Intuit from September 13 to December 28 in the show It Takes a Hard Heart: The Life Work of Eddie Harris. Photo: Cheri Eisenberg.

Chris Renton, Development Coordinator Joel Javier, Education Coordinator Aza Quinn-Brauner, Collections & Exhibitions Coordinator Molly Lee, Library Assistant

Innovative Publishing Ink, a national publisher of association and corporate magazines for more than 20 years, is the official publisher of The Outsider. For more information on how your association or business can have its own publication, please contact Aran Jackson at 502.423.7272 or ajackson@ipipub.com. Please visit www.ipipub.com.

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On Intuit

Artist Kevin Blythe Sampson, exhibition curator Cleo Wilson and Intuit Executive Director Joel Mangers celebrate the opening of Kevin Blythe Sampson: An Ill Wind Blowing earlier this year. Photo: Cheri Eisenberg.

What an exhilarating and rewarding first year I’ve had as Intuit’s executive director! We strive daily to assert Intuit’s relevance and impact on the community. We could not accomplish this without our donors, members and friends. Thank you to everyone who has helped make this year productive and successful, bringing unparalleled self-taught and outsider art to our dedicated followers and new audiences alike.

Intuit received its first endowment ever this year, in the form of $50,000 from an anonymous donor. This is significant not only on a financial level but also on a professional one. Knowing that someone has tremendous faith in us and our purpose gives staff and board members increased confidence in pursuing our mission. Speaking of staff and board members, Intuit has a new collections and exhibitions coordinator, Aza Quinn-Brauner; a new development coordinator, Chris Renton; and a new education coordinator, Joel Javier. These new team members, along with several new board members, have re-energized programming and activities, resulting in increased membership and Intuit’s firstever corporate sponsors.

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Another feather in our cap was a $40,000 grant to go toward our new front entrance designed by renowned architect Jeanne Gang/Studio Gang. We are currently formalizing plans to increase our streetscape presence and entice more passersby to come in and see the inimitable things we do here. Please check our website, www.art.org, for more information about this dramatic project, and contact us for more information about how you can help us get it done.

Our entire Board of Directors, staff and I are grateful for all the support we receive, whether it’s from volunteers or major donors. Please come visit soon, and tell your friends to do the same! We welcome the opportunity to show off our many offerings.

Don’t miss: • Just Kid’s: OHYOUKIDMERTZ (running through December 28), an exhibition co-curated by Susann Craig and Marjorie Freed that highlights the art of Albert “Kid” Mertz (1905-1988). A onetime prize fighter and autoworker, Mertz lived with his family in a cinderblock house in Newaygo County, Michigan. Upon retirement, he spent his days living off the land and creating signs festooned with greetings, wacky

sayings and comments. For more on Mertz’s unusual use of language, see Dana Boutin’s story on page 22.

• Chicago’s Own: It Takes a Hard Heart: The Life Work of Eddie Harris (September 13-December 28) features the painstakingly crafted bas-relief wood-carved sculptures, carved and painted canes, paintings, and pencil drawings created by Harris during his five decades in Chicago. See curator Laura Bickford’s interview with Harris on page 10.

• The Belgians Are Coming: Intuit is excited to collaborate with the MADMusée of Liege, Belgium, on an exhibition from its international collection. The MADMusée shows the work of mentally challenged European artists and promotes understanding and appreciation through education, conservation and documentation. Check it out January 17-April 26, 2014.

• Another Glam Gala: Plans are underway for Intuit’s annual Visionary Ball benefit. This year’s gala, to be held Friday, November 15, will honor Intuit founding member and esteemed gallerist Ann Nathan with its Visionary Award. Watch for details at www.art.org.

— JOEL MANGERS, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

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“I wanted to do something I ain’t never seen before,” Harris says. “And I had never seen a painted tree.”

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It Takes a Hard Heart Chicagoan Eddie Harris’ vivid wood carvings, drawings and paintings have politics, black power and beauty at their roots INTERVIEW BY LAURA BICKFORD PHOTOS BY CHERI EISENBERG

The artist Eddie Harris, 78, has been living and working in Chicago for nearly five decades. His varied and multidimensional body of work attests to his deep engagement with the black experience of living in the United States. Recalling everything from his memories of picking cotton during his childhood in Arkansas to the years of rage and the Black Panther Party in Chicago, Harris’ largescale, mixed-media, bas-relief wood-carved sculptures; carved and painted canes; paintings; pencil drawings; and community garden at the home he shares with his daughter speak to his belief in the inseparability of art, life, political activism and the search for beauty.

Formally strong, with a painstaking attention to craftsmanship and gesture, Harris’ entire artistic practice shows a long dedication to both the aesthetic and cultural concerns of his life across several decades and multiple media, and presents a private and public address of black power and beauty.

The work of Eddie Harris, much of it exhibited publicly for the first time, will be on view at Intuit from September 13 to December 28 in the show It Takes a Hard Heart: The Life Work of Eddie Harris.

What follows is an edited transcript of interviews that exhibition curator Laura Bickford conducted with Harris at his home in May and June 2013.

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You’ve said that you always wanted to be in Chicago. When and why did you come here?

I was born in 1935 in Holly Grove, Arkansas. I stayed there till I was 20, and I came up here to make more money. I was tired of working all day for five, six dollars. I was working on a farm, picking cotton, driving tractors, planting cotton.

I can sit and think sometimes back when I was young, and I used to be in the fields, and you work all day from 7 in the morning to 6 in the evening, and you’re chopping cotton for $3 a day. So my dream was to come to Chicago where I could get a job. My body was down south, but my mind was up north in Chicago. So I came up here in 1957, and I didn’t know the jobs were gonna be so hard to find. The first job I had was washing dishes, in a restaurant. I was making 50-some dollars a week. When I came up here, you could get a kitchenette apartment for $12 to $13 a week, and I was making $52 a week, and I didn’t have to buy no food ’cause I was eating at the restaurant. And, to me, that was money. I had almost $40 a week of my own.

Have you always made things?

I started drawing when I was down south, but down there, they didn’t have no art teachers, no art classes, nothing.

So I was drawing, but I was drawing the way that I knew how to draw, the way that I taught myself. I didn’t know if I was doing it right or wrong ’cause there were no teachers telling you, “You should do it this way,” or “You should do it that way.” And I first started painting signs — didn’t really understand that either, ’cause I had no one to show me. [In Chicago,] I was working at a big company, and one of the bosses, he saw some of my work, and he said, “Why don’t you go to school, man?” He kept telling me, and so I went to Dunbar [Vocational School], doing the night school. And I surpassed three teachers. The first diploma I got, I signed up for another four years. And I went to that four years. Then I got another diploma. And after that one, the teacher said, “There ain’t no use in you coming back here. You know more than the teachers do. All you gotta do if you go to college is the professor is gonna get credit for learning you what

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An homage to Batman.

you already know. You know the basics and everything; that’s all you need.” So, when she told me that, she said, “You just keep doing what you doing, and the more you do, the better you’ll get.”

So that’s what I did. When you draw, you have to be alone. Quiet, where you can concentrate and think. I get ideas from everywhere, from just looking around.

Clearly, politics have influenced your work to some extent.

Right after I came out of school, that’s when the Panthers had a lot of organizations and when [the police] started

breaking up the Black Panthers. Being from down south, and coming through the things that I came through and seeing the things I saw, you know, the ups and the downs, I knew how hard it was for black people, and that had an effect on me. When I came to Chicago, it was a little better. You had some freedom. You didn’t have to say “Yes, sir,” and “No, sir,” and all that kinda stuff, and you didn’t have to go to the back door.

But I did discover this much: You know that restaurant I was working at? I was working there for three years, and it was

up on the North Side, near Clybourn and North Avenue. So, back then, we had a lot of bars around there, and right across the street, there was Barry’s Snack Shop — I never will forget it. There was a chef I was working with there, working at night, and we were getting off at the same time, and he said, “You want to go across the street and have a beer?” We went across the street, and we went into this bar and sat down, and the guy behind the counter that was serving the people, he kept passing us up.

And, after a while, he stopped and asked the chef, ’cause you know they would all come over and eat. And if they couldn’t get over there, they would just call, and I would be the one who would carry the food to them. And he asked what he wanted, and he told him and then told him what I wanted, and he says, “I’m sorry, but we can’t serve him.” Meaning me. And the chef says, “Wait a minute,” and I never will forget this; he says, “If you can’t serve him, then you can’t serve me. Matter of fact, you can’t serve him? You know you been calling over for food every day, and he can bring you your food, but you can’t serve him?” And he called the guy’s boss over and his boss, you know, he didn’t want to get into a lot of stuff, so they brought me my beer. And we drank a couple of beers.

by, and when I graduated, I stopped by the Wall, and I was talking to some of the artists. And I asked if I could come over, and they said, “Of course.” And that was Bill Walker. He was the leading man over there. So me and Bill Walker got to be very good friends. And I wasn’t doing nothing then but painting, no carving.

And, when I came out of school, my first art fair was Lake Meadow. And that’s when I saw people doing wood carving.

And I got interested in how they take the wood and make it look like that. And they were showing me some of the tools, which I didn’t even have. I had never seen them! And I started looking around, going to Jewtown and places like that, looking for the art tools.

And Bill Walker, he told me, “If you want to be a good woodcarver, first you start doing canes. Do small stuff, nothing big.

You do that for a while, and you get good, then you can start moving on to the bigger stuff.” So that’s what I did — I started doing canes. I just taught myself. And, as your body grows, your mind grows, too.

So, I would find the wood. And then they started tearing down buildings in the ‘70s — tearing down everything. So, when they started tearing them down, wood was no problem. It was everywhere. They were just happy for you to

come get it, ’cause then they wouldn’t have to pay to haul it all away. I would get a whole lot. One day, on the last street way east over there, I asked the boss, “Could I have some of the wood?”

And he said, “Yeah. What you gonna do with it?” And I told him I was gonna do some carving, and he said, “You carve that? That’s pine.” And I laughed, and I said, “I’ll bring you some and show you.

Let you see.” And I went home and I got a piece, and I brought it to him, and his eyes went big, and he said, “You carved this?” And I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “OK, you can get all the wood you want — I didn’t know anybody could carve anything out of pine.”

Because pine, when you carve it, when you use the carving tools on it, it’ll just split. It won’t come out what you want to cut. But that’s the catch in the way I do it. I don’t use no carving tools. I made my own tools. And I know the secret. The wood’s got to have a hard heart. You can tell if it does, and, if that pine has a hard heart, using the tools I made, you can carve it. I had got very good doing what I was doing. That’s why it looks different.

What made you continue to make carvings?

When my mother passed, in 1982, I didn’t have no brothers and no sisters,

And when we left, you know, I said, “I thought Chicago was different.” So that’s why the Black Panthers interested me; they weren’t doing anything wrong in my opinion; they were just trying to straighten things out. They were just doing some of it the wrong way. And I had a car back then, painted with all kinds of black people. And they called it The Soul Mobile, and it was in all the parades. And when people would see it, they would holler and say “Yay,” you know, and clap their hands; ’Cause back then, it was all about soul. You put your fist in the air, and you say, “Soul Power!”

You’ve mentioned your involvement with the Wall of Respect and with Bill Walker. Could you tell me about that a little more?

When I first came out of school, they were painting the Wall [of Respect] while I was going to school. And I would pass

A table called My Mother’s Home in Arkansas.

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Harris says of his garden: “I grew up around flowers. And I wanted them to grow here.”

no relatives, and I just had a few kids.

And it hit me really, really hard. And, for the rest of that year, the only way that I could keep my mind off of thinking about her was to carve. I didn’t care what it looked like; I just cut it out. And that’s how I got so much stuff. I wasn’t trying to sell it; I was just putting it out, to keep my mind off of her. Until,

eventually, it just went away, and I didn’t think about it anymore, and I started coming back to where I was. For the love of art, you know, for the love of art.

Now your work has moved into the garden here next to your house.

The progression to me seems like a natural one. You’ve always been

The artist Eddie Harris at home with some of his works.

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speaking to the public in a way, and now this is one of the most public but still personal venues possible.

I moved here in the winter of 2005. I was making mostly T-shirts and the plastic jug people when I came here.

And then, when Obama was running, I painted that tree over there. And then I painted the roots. I wanted to do something I ain’t never seen before.

And I had never seen a painted tree.

That’s what I always want to do: make something that I and nobody else has ever seen before. And then I started getting flowers and planting them all over the place. And the garden keeps growing, you know? I grew up around flowers. And I wanted them to grow here. Just like these trees are growing, growing all the time. That’s natural. Like life. We growing all the time. n Laura Bickford was born and raised in the South and has had a lifelong love of all things handmade, embellished, encrusted, fried, miniature and oversized. She has a bachelor’s degree in art history and folklore from the University of North Carolina and recently received a double-master’s degree in modern art history, theory and criticism, and arts administration and policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

One of Harris’ many bas-relief, woodcarved sculptures.

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Luke Tauber, Chopin’s Blood, 2010. Computer-generated image. Courtesy of The Center for the Arts at Little City.

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The Ambivalence of Influence Considering the effect of communal creativity on the “authenticity” of disability studio artists

BY ROB LENTZ

In his article “Art Outside the Walls,” my colleague Randy Vick examines the relationship between the outsider art world and artists with disabilities who work in community-based studios (Vick, 2012). Ever since the publication of case studies from the psychiatric hospitals of Europe and Jean Dubuffet’s writings on art brut, the prevailing assumption about artists living with mental illness or developmental disabilities is that, by definition, they must be outsider artists.

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category, or grants the work authenticity and value” (Fine, 2007). Biography drives the marketplace for authenticity, and demonstrating an immunity to influence can be to the benefit of artists, art studios, dealers and collectors.

Adam Hines, Different Adams, 2012. Colored pencil on paper, 18 x 24 in.

Photo courtesy of Project Onward.

Prime among the exalted themes of this vast literature is an insistence upon cultural isolation: that noble otherness made possible by the artist’s inability, or unwillingness, to conform to the accepted artistic standards of the day. Michel Thévoz, of the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, provides one of the oft-cited definitions of outsider art as consisting of work created by those “who for various reasons have not been culturally indoctrinated or socially conditioned. They are all kinds of dwellers on the fringes of society.” Their artworks, Thévoz further explains, “owe nothing to tradition or fashion” (Bottoms, 2007). As outsiders, artists with disabilities are by this logic expected to be immune to the civilizing effects of culture, their work inoculated against the influences of society — to say nothing of the art world.

But what happens to this defining characteristic of outsider art when artists with disabilities enter the modern world of the progressive art studio, where the isolation of psychiatric institutions is replaced with communal creativity?

When the psychologist Elias Katz and his wife, Florence Ludins-Katz, founded Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, California, in 1974, explains curator Matthew Higgs, “They certainly weren’t

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interested in creating an outsider art factory.” According to Higgs, in an interview with the Museum of Everything’s James Brett: “The work that comes out of the workshops [like Creative Growth] is a hybrid; ... not the wild man working in the woods with no external influences, nor the savvy MFA student reading Art Forum magazine.” Indeed, these two poles of experience can define the consumption of art, between the obsession with the pedigree of cultural references in contemporary art and the dogged quest for a “pure” artistic encounter in outsider art (Brett, 2011).

Biography drives the market Yet, as art centers for people with disabilities have achieved higher profiles and begun to attain success in the art world, many studios have specifically courted the outsider-art market. For example, the studio program Art Enables, based in Washington, D.C., employs the tagline “Outsider Art Inside the Beltway.”

This marketing strategy makes good sense, both financially and culturally. In his book Everyday Genius: Self-Taught Art and the Culture of Authenticity, Gary Alan Fine remarks that the perception of an outsider being uninfluenced by the art world “legitimates the art, places it in a

Intuit’s recent exhibition Beyond Influence: The Art of Little City featured a group of extraordinary artists from the Palatine, Illinois, disability studio who exemplify the notion of resisting influence while, at the same time, suggesting that it’s a concept whose relevance is waning.

Asserting that artists with disabilities are resistant to influence conforms to our preferred notions about outsider art, but it also risks implying a denial of agency on the part of the artist. The presence of video and computer-generated images in the show suggests that Little City’s artists are, in fact, open to new modes of expression and, like any artists, are capable of mastering new techniques in the service of conveying their ideas. Luke Tauber’s multilayered computer-generated images of the composer Frédéric Chopin are jarring in their technical precision by comparison to his whimsical handmade constructions. But his devotion to the subject matter, especially themes of death, resonates nonetheless.

Tauber’s family history of survival in Nazi death camps during World War II is often cited as the biggest influence on his work (Little City, 2013). In addition to the specific influence of the Holocaust upon Tauber’s body of work, the creation of his objects is itself a product of influence.

Clips from the documentary film Share My Kingdom reveal the collaborative process by which Tauber’s objects and installations come into being. Far from working in isolation, Tauber executes his ambitious large-scale sculptures with assistance from Little City staff members — much as any successful contemporary artist will work with studio assistants or fabricators to see his plans to fruition.

Tauber’s collaborator Marc Fischer explains: “Luke pretty much always knows exactly what he wants to make, or he has ideas and he needs help executing them.

He doesn’t, I think, expect that he should have to know how to do everything but that others should fill in some of the

details and then he can put his stamp on it in other ways” (Fischer, 2011).

With regard to art-world influences, it is striking that two of the works on display feature a collaged reproduction of Damien Hirst’s famous sculpture For the Love of God, a platinum cast of a human skull encrusted with diamonds. It is difficult to imagine a single work of art that more directly (and intentionally) references the excesses of the international contemporary art market. Yet the appropriation of the image by Little City artists Tarik Echols and Peggy Brostrom has the effect of knocking Hirst’s provocative work down a few pegs. In the process, the artists are carrying out that hybrid ideal suggested by the Katzes’ philosophy.

Exemplary outsiders Indeed, even where outsider status is desired, ambivalence about the question of influence is common at disability studios.

Creative Growth, one of the very first disability art studios founded in the United States, launched the careers of several artists who have become canonical in the outsider art world, including Judith Scott and Dwight Macintosh.

Scott’s otherworldly bundled sculptures are, in part, tactile responses to sensory isolation. Both blind and hearingimpaired, the artist also lived with Down syndrome, but her wrapping of objects appropriated from the studio was “her route into communicating, her way into a world view which previously remained hidden” (Steward, 2011).

Macintosh spent most of his life in institutions and emerged in his 70s to create an extraordinary body of work. In his monograph Dwight Macintosh: The Boy Who Time Forgot, art historian John MacGregor describes the artist’s work as “the externalization of the artist’s inner reality. The consistent pictorial language in which the images are embodied is exclusively the product of internal necessity and obsessive need to fill the blankness of the paper with personal markings” (MacGregor, 1992). Both artists, though markedly different in their output, had compelling biographies of authentic isolation that translated to utter singularity and a genuine lack of influence

Michael Smith, Fashion Figure with Headband, 2006. Graphite on paper, 12 x 14 in. Photo courtesy of Project Onward.

in their work. They were, in other words, exemplary outsider artists.

In more recent years, some Creative Growth artists have begun to blur the lines of categorization by finding success in contemporary art markets. Dan Miller’s densely layered, text-based paintings and drawings still resist discernible strains

of influence, but their formal elegance and expressive mark-making have found enthusiastic audiences beyond outsiderart circles. His work is now in significant institutional collections, most notably that of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

William Scott, though self-taught, reflects a departure from significant attributes of the canonical outsider artists: He paints with extreme skill and naturalism, and his work contains overt references to popular culture. The artist’s technical abilities and the influences suggested in his work have led to exhibitions at some of the world’s most cutting-edge contemporary art galleries. It is also worth noting that the biographies of both artists are significantly downplayed in Creative Growth’s marketing — a further departure from the template of outsider art. Ultimately, the careers of William Scott and Dan Miller suggest that it is the contemporary art world that is being influenced by outsider artists — not the other way around.

Ignoring influence While Creative Growth has consistently set the standard for all other studios to follow, the art center’s experience with evolving markets is by no means unique.

At Project Onward, the Chicago-based studio program I manage at the Chicago

William Scott, Untitled, 2012. Acrylic on paper, 22 x 30 in. Photo courtesy of Creative Growth Art Center.

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Tarik Echols, Day of the Dead, 2007. Crayon, collage on paper, 20 x 13 in. Courtesy of The Center for the Arts at Little City.

Cultural Center, dilemmas of marketing are commonplace, based on the convergence of biography and artistic output. The artist Michael Smith, for example, repeatedly creates gestural renderings of mysterious figures, drawn with obsessively repetitive contours. His drawings defy reference to any influence, and indeed his artistic practice resists any influence from our staff members. As is the case with many artists, outside suggestions are politely

entertained then promptly ignored. In the absence of discernible influences, Smith’s work can be interpreted, according to his biography, as a response to his living with autism and hearing impairment — a triumph of artistry by an individual with a disability. Or it can exist as a stunning display of contemporary art worthy of gallery exhibition — no explanation required.

Conversely, the art of Adam Hines more closely approximates the outsider school, both in biography and style. An artist with autism, Hines draws on cardboard in a manner that could be described as childlike or naïve but with an obsession for categorizing information that is fueled by a superhuman memory. Hines takes as his subject, however, the minutiae of popular culture, absorbed from watching TV and movies and listening to the radio.

For Hines, as is the case for many individuals with disabilities, popular culture is more than escapist entertainment: It is a vital link to the mainstream world, offering lessons in courtship, combat, workplace dynamics and all manner of real-life situations from which they may otherwise feel excluded. Like conversations with the artist, Hines’ drawings are a free-associating ramble through a thicket of cultural influences: pop stars, soap operas, TV jingles, board games and people with the same name. It is difficult to imagine an artist more influenced by external content, yet his drawings convey an authenticity and originality that fit comfortably within the outsider standard.

“There is always some hint of influence, some sign that the hermetically sealed artist has broken the seal and peeped inside. ... Hence the dilemma: outsider art is an oxymoron, and its naïveté is seldom as pure as it appears” (Elkins, 2006).

Elkins, J. (2006). Naïfs, Faux-Naïfs, Faux FauxNaïfs, Would-Be-Faux-Naïfs: There is No such Thing as Outsider Art. Inner Worlds Outside exhibition catalogue, edited by John Thompson.

Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 71-79.

MacGregor, J. (1992). Dwight Macintosh: The Boy Who Time Forgot. Oakland: Creative Growth Art Center.

In the end, most of our discussions about influence are missing the point. Being inspired by an external source of stimulation in no way diminishes an artist’s claim to originality or authenticity, as Little City’s exhibition aptly demonstrates. Every artist is influenced in some manner; if the source of influence is undiscernible to the naked eye, do we interrogate the contemporary artist or allow him to go about his business? If the source of “outsider” inspiration is interior, must we colonize this territory with our endless taxonomies?

No work of art is created in a vacuum.

Even the most impenetrable of canonical outsider artworks is still a product of the artist’s life experience, with its myriad influences. The fact that we as viewers stand outside this bubble looking in only means that we lack access to the interior. Isn’t it we, then, who are the outsiders? n Rob Lentz is co-founder and executive director of Project Onward, a nonprofit organization that supports the career development of artists with developmental disabilities and mental illness (projectonward.org). A visual artist, curator and writer, Lentz has had his drawings, sculptures and installations exhibited widely.

REFERENCES Bottoms, G. (2007). The Colorful Apocalypse: Journeys in Outsider Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Brett, James (2011). The Appendix of Everything. Exhibition #4 exhibition catalogue.

London: The Museum of Everything.

Center for the Arts at Little City: Luke Tauber biography (2013). Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, gallery exhibition materials.

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Fine, G.A. (2004). Everyday Genius: Self-Taught Art and the Culture of Authenticity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Fischer, M. (2011 July 7). “Luke Always Knows – Marc Fischer” [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://3artistsdocproject.blogspot.com.

Stewart, S. (2011). Art & Disability. Raw Vision, 72 (Fall/Autumn), 24-25.

Vick, R. M. (2012). Art outside the walls: The place of disability studios in the world of outsider art. The Outsider, 17 (Fall).

A V I S I O N A RY T R A C T “Ho Baron's ... sculptures are his idols, icons, demons and spirits... paired with his text to describe a theory of the universe, incorporating the Jungian 'universal creative unconscious' ... The book is thoughtful and enjoyable, providing ... his visionary perspective of spirituality and existence; gargoyles, Giger and Giacometti lurk in the peripheries.” Raw Vision, Vol. 78, Spring 2013 “Part monograph, part manifesto, Baron’s book … presents an overview of his life work creating embellished fantasy images … the accompanying text has an energy that parallels the intensity of his art and the unique mythological universe in which it orbits …

H. R. Giger meets Keith Haring, illuminated by the artist’s engaging insight.” Kirkus Reviews, Oct. 18, 2012

Available on Amazon $19.95

T H E O U T S I D E R 21

Word Play

From left: Works by Albert Mertz: Untitled (IYAM / BADLEY BENT), n.d. Wood, paint, screws, wire and railroad spike, 12 x 12 x 3 in. Collection of Marjorie and Harvey Freed. Untitled (ROOST / ALs LOST SOUL), n.d. Wood, paint and shoe sole, 13¾ x 14 x 1½ in. Collection of Salli Eley. Untitled (SMILE WOOD JA? / YOU DO’NT HAVE TO), n.d. Wood and paint, 14 x 16 x 2 in. Collection of Denise and Peter Kiernan.

Artists use text to create a unique kind of imagery, challenging viewers to think outside the frame

BY DANA BOUTIN “KANUKAKEL?” asks Albert “Kid” Mertz (1905-1988) in several of his hand-painted signs. This condensed symmetry of consonants and vowels is a manipulation of language that clashes with the notion that text in self-taught art is literal.

Poetic extractions and abstractions of text echo through works by Mertz and others, including fellow sign-painter Jesse Howard (1885-1983). In their own ways, these artists challenged readers to reconsider their worldviews, culling from periodicals and other widely distributed sources and presenting them back to the viewer. Designing text to view and imagery to read, Mertz and Howard responded to objects

22 T H E O U T S I D E R

all around them. The innovative spelling and grammar found in Mertz’s aphorisms and puns speak to a range of possibilities for language in art: its capacity to allude, double as image and create immediacy by involving the viewer.

OHYOUKIDMERTZ, a rare solo exhibition of the Michigan artist’s work, is on view at Intuit through December 28. Several of Mertz’s assemblages combine an object with text that suggests an innate sense of irony. Above the sole of a shoe mounted on a wood base and personified with a smiling face, Mertz painted the words “ALs LOST SOUL,” playing on the slipperi-

ness of representation. In an inversion of René Magritte’s The Treachery of Imagery (1928-29), which shows an ad-like image of a pipe and a caption telling the viewer that it’s not what it appears to be, here the object itself is present but the words are signifying a far-flung concept. The immediacy of the work, however, comes from the implied narrative of the artist spontaneously finding this lost object and leaving his footprint, so to speak, by creating it.

Mertz painted phrases he invented or borrowed from popular sources on pieces of wood and objects he found near his rural property in Newaygo County, Michigan.

“IYAMWHATIYAM,” reads a sign likely inspired by the cartoon Popeye the Sailor Man. (This unassuming statement of being, “I Yam What I Yam,” is famously sung by Popeye and is the title of a cartoon short released in 1933.) In several works, Mertz adopted the lay-philosopher tone of this cartoon folk hero. He incorporated the contraction “IYAM” into a piece personifying a railroad spike. “IYAM BADLEY BENT,” laments the affixed spike, one of many that Mertz presumably found in Newaygo, as train tracks ran through the county. These are some of Mertz’s most memorable and elusive object paintings. “APROBLEM ISN’TTHATHARD / IFUUSEURHEAD / IDAREYOUTOUSEYOURNOGG / IN,” urges another work in the show, which likely combines quoted and original text. Such added spins, along with inventive grammatical and visual devices, give Mertz’s quotes their unique twist.

Seeing double One should view Mertz’s signs with an eye for double meanings. With a nod to its status as an object, a head painted on three wood panels asks, “SMILEWOODJA?” Cartoon-like faces on this head double as frontal and profile perspectives, with ears also reading as noses. This head is stacked, like a totem pole, over a frowning face.

“YOU DO’NT HAVE TO,” allows the unhappy base face. Mosquitoes — a common annoyance at Owl’s Roost, as Mertz called his home — dangle from the elongated facial features in many of his portraits. Such details, along with found objects like the railroad spikes, hint at Mertz’s immediate surroundings, lending his pop-culture references a local flavor.

Mertz posted his works in and around his home and, as exhibition co-curators and collectors Susann Craig and Marjorie Freed can attest, engaged visitors with jokes and challenged them with playful puns. Driving through Michigan in the late 1960s, Craig hit the brakes when she came across a fence covered with sign and plaques. She recalls jokes that Mertz set up for visitors over the years. “I remember once crawling through a maze and finding wonderful things — signs, snakes carved out of logs.

One read, ‘Don’t tread on me.’ “ Craig shared her experiences with Freed and her husband, Harvey, who took fishing trips to a

Jesse Howard, Untitled (Do You Read Ann Landers Columns...), n.d. Paint on wooden windmill blade, 51-in. diameter x 6½ in. Courtesy of the Kansas City Art Institute and The Howard Family.

nearby town twice a year and soon would return home with more artworks than fish.

Another of Craig’s memories brings to life the wordplay seen in Mertz’s work. “He loved to joke around with visitors. He’d ask if they wanted to see his ‘rattlers,’ then show you his collection of baby rattles.”

Though such setups are preserved only in memory, they showcase his communication with an appreciative audience that dispels notions of an “outsider” thriving in isolation. This aspect of performance suggests another layer of cultural production.

Mertz probably didn’t think of himself as an artist in the conventional sense (Harvey Freed recalls Mertz asking if a “show” of his work referred to a television show), but his art-making was certainly integrated into his everyday activities and environment.

Signs of the times Mertz was not alone in developing an art environment made up of handmade

signs, of course. Mertz worked at a time when businesses had hand-painted signs and billboards, before the widespread use of relatively cheap vinyl signage resulted in increased uniformity of the American landscape. “Part of this art is a cultural look at a country that has disappeared,” says Marjorie Freed.

Another exhibition at Intuit, You Better Be Listening: Text in Self-Taught Art (2011-12), juxtaposed works by Mertz with those of another painter of signs, Jesse Howard, who also posted original and quoted text on objects and wood outside his home, in Fulton, Missouri. Grouped with works associated with protest or informing an audience, Mertz’s signs in the show commented on the depreciation of money, a relatively sober subject in his optimistic oeuvre.

Despite the disparity in tone in works by Mertz and Howard, it’s curious to note

T H E O U T S I D E R 23

Works by Jesse Howard and Albert Mertz in Intuit’s You Better Be Listening show. Photo: Cheri Eisenberg.

some of their shared impulses. Texts by both men urged their audiences to read and to use their noggins. Graphics call attention to the text as an image. In Howard’s works, pointing hands direct viewers’ eyes and lay stress upon reading, a subject of importance for Howard.

minimal palette, Howard likewise varies the color of his words and letters in one of the works in You Better Be Listening. In it, a wood plank with the names of political leaders painted on one end hang in the balance, with an excerpt from the Bible deriding these men on the other end.

Colorful language Through form, they make extracted text into their own visual language. The repeated message “DO YOU READ…” in a Howard work painted on windmill blades creates a revolving question, reading without end. For Mertz, it’s dashes in the spaces between words — or no spaces at all — that propel the reader forward and smiling faces that punctuate the breathless lines. A work by Mertz in the current exhibition reads, “THE-AUTO-OFYESTER-DAY-THAT-USED-TO-STOP-ON-ADIME-HAS-BEEN-REPLACED-BY-ONE-THATGOES-EVERYWHERE-ON-A-CREDIT-CARD.” The retired autoworker added his own poetic punctuation to this phrase with alternating colorful letters. In a relatively

Hard-hitting political and religious content, often quotes and commentary from the news or the Bible, is characteristic of Howard’s work. And both men’s art is steeped in cultural references. Text allowed them to extract ideas from popular sources and to directly address viewers (a directness that caused Howard some grief with his local community). In a philosophical yet critical work, Untitled (Man in the Glass…), Howard painted a widely published poem on self-judgment by Dale Wimbrow onto the wood framing a mirror. Mertz also reflected the viewer in his work by painting on a mirror. Another text offers a good-natured lease on life: “THE / RE’S / HOPE / FORU / IFUCAN / LOOKIN / THEMIRROR / ATYOURSELF / ANDLAUGH.”

24 T H E O U T S I D E R

The pronoun “you” invites readers to see themselves in the piece (a practice also found in works by text-based artists like Jenny Holzer, another poster of signs) and creates a sense of immediacy. With its inherent set of perspectives and opposites, language defines our perceptions and enmeshes us all in culture, which has a way of creeping into works of art.

Text came to the surface of visual art in the form of a question, asking what art is. Figuring prominently in art since the beginning of the 20th century, words challenge the status of art as an aesthetic object, give new meaning to images and soak up cultural references. Reflecting these references back to us, works by Mertz and Howard are also figural mirrors, asking who we the readers are. n Dana Boutin is a freelance writer based in Chicago.

She has contributed to exhibition catalogues, Newcity, F Newsmagazine and Artslant.com.

resilient

American Folk and Outsider Ar t

Bill Traylor (1854-1947) “Blue Cat” Circa 1939-1942 Poster paint and graphite on cardboard. 15'" X 14"

1371-4.indd 1

T H E O U T S I D E R 25

6/10/13 10:28 AM

Dead or Alive?

Illustration by Molly Lee

The debate over the viability of outsider art is enough to drive otherwise civilized folk to fisticuffs. Here, 10 thoughts on the issue.

BY MICHAEL BONESTEEL We asked Michael Bonesteel to participate in a point/counterpoint debate on whether outsider art is dead. Having spent the last 30 years studying and thinking about outsider art, he not unreasonably objected that such an approach might be a bit simplistic.

In reality, no one seems to really want to defend the term, however much they love the art. But, despite that, the label persists.

It’s part of Intuit’s name and the title of this magazine. The Philadelphia Museum of Art used it to label its recent blockbuster Great and Mighty Things show. Even people who are highly critical of it have a hard time not using the term when talking about the work

26 T H E O U T S I D E R

it purports to describe, in part because of the lack of any other label that qualifies as a perfect fit.

Of course, that may say more about the art’s diversity than about the terms, but we’ll let Michael get into the meat of the issue, including not just the label’s health but, more important, the viability of the art itself.

•

For the sake of argument, one could put it this way: Outsider art is dead; long live outsider art. Here are 10 points to consider.

1. Outsider art and its related categorical cousins (art brut, self-taught art, intuitive

art, visionary art, etc.) are not dead or dying per se, but they are changing. What IS dead and/or dying is the once-pervasive purist attitude that outsider art must be art brut, according to the stringent guidelines that the artist and pioneering collector Jean Dubuffet laid out in the 1950s (see #3). Roger Cardinal began to broaden the concept as early as 1972 in his book Outsider Art when he embraced a number of artists (such as Gaston Chaissac and Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern) whom Dubuffet considered too influenced by culture to be included in the art brut category. He had relegated them into his Annex ghetto, and they were subse-

quently labeled Neuve Invention (see #2)

by Michel Thévoz, of the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, where Dubuffet’s personal collection resides.

2. Today’s counterparts, those who would have been placed in that Neuve Invention category back then, are now almost standard fare among the new outsiders appearing on the scene (see #9). Witness what Randall Morris wrote in his blog about some of the new work at the 2013 Outsider Art Fair: “What the fair for the first time stepped up to the plate and included was the far left of the field that has been bandied about and doubted and never focused on before. In Europe it is called Art Singulier or Neuve Invention. Here in the U.S. it is the same but doesn’t really have a brand except perhaps unfortunately ‘outsider’ or ‘self-taught’. This is work by self-taught artists of our generation. Our peers.”

3. There has been a questioning and ongoing re-evaluation of Dubuffet’s concept of art brut as a viable definition in that this work was never purely noncultural to begin with. Adolf Wölfli, the original poster child for art brut, used collages from commercial and art historical sources.

Why, then, was Henry Darger’s inclusion ever questioned by Victor Musgrave (and Cardinal) in the 1979 “Outsiders” show in London when Darger was appropriating from mainstream culture just as surely as was Wölfli? This further points up the artificiality of trying to define, categorize and pigeonhole artwork that cannot be limited to strict criteria.

4. The term “outsider art” probably IS dying or, at least, is on life support. Despite being the preferred term from the 1970s through the ‘90s, it has had a rather unhappy history since then (see #5). First of all, Cardinal did not come up with the term; his publisher did. As soon as the work and its moniker became trendy in America, dealers began applying the label “outsider art” irresponsibly and erroneously to any form of self-taught or folk art that they put on the market, thus confusing its already rather complex definition in the minds of anyone who did not know better.

5. With the advent of political correctness, some began to view the term “outsider art”

What IS dead and/or dying is the once-pervasive purist attitude that outsider art must be art brut, according to the stringent guidelines that the artist and pioneering collector Jean Dubuffet laid out in the 1950s. as pejorative, saying that it discriminated against those artists so labeled because it implied that their work was somehow of less intrinsic value than that of insider artists or because it was an example of the powerful imposing their own biased category on people they deemed “outside.”

It’s as if being separate but equal was somehow demeaning; they just wanted to be equal. Of course, anyone who objects to being labeled an outsider artist probably has too much art-world savvy to be called that in the first place. By the same token, if one wants to be treated like an insider artist, then that artist is probably not an outsider (see #6). Regardless, because no one has come up with a better all-encompassing term, and the politically correct “self-taught art” just doesn’t have the same panache as “outsider art,” it seems that the “outsider” label will remain with us for a while yet.

6. I have been teaching classes on outsider art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for many years now, and every year, my students inform me in one way or another that they just don’t buy it — the concept of outsider art (by whatever name). They don’t understand why it was ever distinguished from academic (formerly “high”) art in the first place. They see all art, and correctly so in my opinion, as being pretty much the same in the end: a viable product of the creative imagination (again, see #9). Academically and otherwise, we live in an era of post-isms — e.g., a post-postmodernist era. Even though the trend in art schools is still conceptual art, this is really the last gasp of postmodernism. In reality, it’s all up for grabs.

I explain that Dubuffet felt compelled to come up with an alternative to mainstream academic art history because it refused to accept self-taught art as Art with a capital “A.” In other words, it was a necessary expedient at the time.

Conversely, Dubuffet refused to accept

academic art as “true,” “authentic” art. So, my classes in outsider art really are classes in art history, the history of how outsider art developed in the 20th century and beyond. But today, my students — and the art world, for that matter — tend not to categorize art in the same way it has been done previously. Art is not expressionist, surrealist, conceptual, graffiti, outsider or what-have-you. It is all just art. Period.

7. The encroachment of world culture via the media and Internet means that very few people can escape the reach and clutches of the Information Age. Dubuffet’s iconic social isolates are getting harder and harder to find. Not that they will cease to exist altogether, but there are fewer of them emerging or being discovered. The relatively recent discoveries of work by Guo Fengyi, Dan Miller, Charles Steffen and George Widener are testaments to the abiding but diminishing presence of new blood in the field, and it does not nearly approach the explosion of new work seen in the 1970s, ‘80s and early ‘90s.

8. Traditionally, art brut artists were divided into eccentric rebels/outcasts, mediumistic visionaries and the mentally ill. There were also the hybrid Neuve Invention/Artists Singulier practitioners.

To some extent, all of these types/descriptions are still valid. But, with the increased recognition, popularity and success of these artists, the chance for corruption is increasingly possible. We have seen a number of cases — from Scottie Wilson to the Rev. Howard Finster — in which fortune and fame bring commercialization and debasement. The mentally ill may be the hardest to corrupt, for their idiosyncrasies are often beyond influencing, but it is perhaps not entirely unknown for even the mentally ill to either consciously or unconsciously “sell out.” So, as outsider artists continue to be successful in the

T H E O U T S I D E R 27

marketplace, the chances of their work becoming more conventional are greater.

9. The old attitudes about High Art and Low Art are disappearing. Not so very long ago, the idea of “fine-art photography” as a respectable medium was considered questionable by academia. That situation has obviously changed. Today, courses in such areas as outsider art, sequential art (the graphic novel, comics) and tattoo art are beginning to be taught in schools of higher education. In the future, we can look forward to other marginal art forms, such as commercial illustration or perhaps even kitsch art or video games, being accepted as legitimate artistic expressions.

As these other expressions are embraced, they become amalgamated into the fabric of work by younger artists, hybridized and cannibalized. We have already seen how movements like Bad Art and neo-naïve art have grown out of the exposure of outsider art to academic artists. Today’s Neuve Invention artists, or Artists Singulier, are contemporary examples of that same process, only they are, hopefully, borrow-

28 T H E O U T S I D E R

“What is important is whether that art has that spiritual connection with the inner life. “ ing more than the veneer of outsider art and looking to its essence.

10. Prediction: Outsider art will be gone 100 years from now. It will be seen as an important historical niche that received recognition in the 20th century, but, once that recognition occurred, it became increasingly unnecessary to single it out as “different” or “other.” The purpose for its recognition had been served: to alert the art world that something very significant goes missing from mainstream art whenever artists become too distracted by money or celebrity to adhere to the spiritual nature of their practice. To summarize this idea, let me quote from an article I wrote for The Outsider (“Sacred Monsters: Outsider Art, Neuve Invention, and the Nature of

the Inner Life”) back in 2004: “Plumbing the unconscious for artistic inspiration has become a modernist cliché as well as the touchstone of art brut, and yet its veracity endures and is verified every time an artist of any stripe delves the depths of the psyche and creates, unflinchingly, through an intuitive inner vision. Often what is produced is so irrevocably original and artistically valid that it seems irrelevant and unimportant whether the method that brought it about was self-taught or academic. What is important is whether that art has that spiritual connection with the inner life. ...” If outsider art has done its job, art in a perfect world of the future will see no reason to distinguish between it and any other art form. n Michael Bonesteel is an adjunct professor of art history, theory and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a contributing editor of Raw Vision. He is the author of numerous magazine and newspaper articles, catalogue essays and books, including Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings (Rizzoli, 2000).

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T H E O U T S I D E R 29

In Memoriam Intuit mourns the loss of two generous friends

TERRY A. GLOVER The Board of Directors and staff of Intuit mourn the passing of our friend Terry Glover, 57, who died of colon cancer on December 24, 2012. She served on the board of Intuit since 2008 and was an active member of the Communications and Executive committees.

As managing editor of Ebony magazine, Terry generously shared her expertise and resources with Intuit, not the least of which included writing a piece in Ebony on the traveling exhibition The Treasure of Ulysses Davis. The show had its western-most show at Intuit in 2010.

30 T H E O U T S I D E R

managing editor of Ebony magazine in 2009.

Terry combined her interests in the creative arts and black culture to forge a flourishing journalism career in Chicago. Prior to joining Ebony, Terry was managing editor at Savoy magazine, Chicago editor for Uptown magazine and digital editor for playboy.com. She also was an occasional freelance writer for the Chicago Tribune.

She joined Ebony as a senior website editor of EbonyJet.com in 2006 and was promoted to

Terry was a woman of style, wit and intellect.

She is greatly missed. Her husband, Kendall Glover, and her daughters, Maya Glover and Parri Finister, survive her. Donations in her honor may be made to Intuit, 756 N. Milwaukee Avenue, Chicago, IL 60642.

CHICKIE ALTER All of us at Intuit were saddened to learn that former board member Cerna “Chickie” Alter, 74, passed away on May 10, 2013, after a long battle with cancer.

for the unheralded and the controversial, including becoming a supporter of and advocate for Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, and, later, a board member at Intuit.

Chickie was a pioneer in the art world, having cofounded the first corporate art consulting company, Alter and Sweig, in 1968. She also became the Chicago art community’s spokeswoman

Chickie will long be remembered for her kindness to and support of Intuit. She is survived by her two children, Joe and A.me; and two grandchildren.

A PUBLIC ATION OF INTUI

T: THE CENTE R FOR INTUI

The Outsider

TIVE AND OUTSI DER

A life in art Working in multiple media, Chicagoan Eddie Harris depicts the black experience

ART

Blurred lines Examining the thorny role of influence in self-taught art

VOLUME 18 | FALL 13

Fightin’ words Is outsider art alive and well, dying or just changing?

To be successful in any organization, you need the right kind of help.

Let us help you create a magazine that your company or association can be proud of.

To find out how your company or association can have its own magazine, contact Aran Jackson at 502.423.7272 or ajackson@ipipub.com.

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T H E O U T S I D E R 31

Education Programs Continue to Envision. Inspire. Engage.

Doc Atomic, aka Steve Thoma, with Teacher Fellowship Program teacher Debra Oliver and her students at Schurz High School.

Jenner Elementary teacher Matthias “Spider” Schergen takes his students to Intuit for a field trip.

Photos: Joel Javier.

It has been a very busy year for advancing our many educational initiatives at Intuit. Here’s a glimpse of what we’ve been up to.

Each year, Intuit’s award-winning Teacher Fellowship Program (TFP) culminates with the Student Art Exhibition in June. An opening reception was held in Intuit’s Study Gallery space to celebrate the work and achievement of our dedicated teachers and students who took part in TFP. The program never fails to have a profound impact on its participants: “I loved doing this project, since we got a chance to be creative and use some cool new tools. We learned useful techniques that could be helpful with all art. I learned that outsider art takes more than just painting random things. It takes time, skill and patience.” — Sabina Clodgo, fifth-grader, Lincoln Elementary

32 T H E O U T S I D E R

The TFP, a professional development program for teachers from Chicago Public Schools (CPS), reaches about 600 students across the city annually. Using self-taught and outsider art as a catalyst, teachers design innovative curricula for their students, who transform found and nontraditional materials to reflect their own visions. Twenty teachers from 10 or more schools are selected each year to participate in the program.

In 2012-13, 11 schools participated: Clemente Community Academy high school, Orr Academy High School, Carl Schurz High School, Franklin Fine Arts Center, Jenner Elementary Academy of the Arts, Abraham Lincoln Elementary School, Mary Lyon

Elementary School, Nettelhorst Elementary School, Orozco Fine Arts & Sciences Elementary School, Stone Scholastic Academy and Wildwood IB World Magnet School.

The program runs throughout the academic year. In the fall, teachers participate in a series of training sessions for curriculum development, including lectures, workshops and museum field trips, and then implement their projects in classrooms in the spring. It’s a true learning experience for the teachers as well: “The professional development session was excellent. The free flow of conversation regard-

A “visionary” sculpture created by a participant during the Doc Atomic workshop.

Photo: Molly Lee.

ing a wide range of topics was enlightening and engaging. It’s not often that teachers are gathered for professional development and given the opportunity to share their thoughts.”

— Mathias “Spider” Schergen, art teacher, Jenner Elementary Visionary power Intuit’s Education Program had a productive inaugural year, hosting our monthly Visionary Craft Workshop Series. Taught by local artists on Saturdays, the handson workshop series for all ages explores nontraditional art making techniques and materials. Workshops so far have focused on button jewelry, upcycled fashion, bookbinding and beaded portraits. As part of the series, Intuit was delighted to host a full-day hands-on sculpture workshop with Steve Thoma, aka Doc Atomic. Doc, who lives and

works in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was so thrilled to find a lesson featuring his work on our online Teacher Fellowship Program curricula database that he decided to come to Chicago for a visit. Doc facilitated a workshop that used nontraditional art materials such as small found objects and household goods to embellish a turtle-form sculpture.

In addition to volunteering his time and energy to run the workshop, he took some time to visit our TFPs being implemented at Franklin Fine Arts Center and Carl Schurz High School. At the schools, Doc was able to see the student work firsthand and meet the students inspired by the work of Doc Atomic himself. Another huge thanks to Doc, whose visit served as an inspiration to the entire Intuit community and its youth while deepening their connection to outsider art!

Looking ahead At the beginning of this academic year, Intuit joined the Terra Foundation’s American Art at the Core of Learning (AACL) Program, which is designed to connect Chicago museum educators and teachers with museum collections and resources to address the new Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in English Language Arts. Through a series of training and workshop sessions, Intuit and a core of major Chicago museums have paired up with local teachers in developing a curriculum that integrates our museums’ collections with the CCSS content. The AACL program will be piloted in fall 2013 at K-12 CPS schools. Through the AACL

Lincoln Elementary’s Olivia Zimba with her Lee Godie-inspired self-portrait.

program, Intuit has fostered meaningful collaborations with other well-established museums and teachers that will continue to have a resounding effect on our educational programming moving forward. In October, Intuit will lead a panel in a presentation on integrating the CCSS with museum collections at the annual Illinois Art Education Association conference. The panel includes museum educators from the National Museum of Mexican Art, the Smart Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Intuit plans to continue to grow and learn from the successes of the Teacher Fellowship Program and the Visionary Craft Series as we look for new pathways to provide innovative educational programming that employ outsider art to engage and inspire our community.

Intuit’s Teacher Fellowship Program is sponsored in part by generous grants from the Crown Family Philanthropies, the Elizabeth Morse Charitable Trust, the Field Foundation of Illinois, the Lloyd A. Fry Foundation, the Polk Bros Foundation and the Terra Foundation for American Art. We hope to see you at a future education program at Intuit!

Clemente Community Academy students’ Bill Traylor-inspired installation at the Student Art Exhibition.

Photo: Mary Jane Feigenbutz.

—JOEL JAVIER

T H E O U T S I D E R 33

Recent Acquisitions & Promised Gifts Intuit’s Permanent Collection has continued its steady growth thanks to the generous gifts of four very exciting artworks. With two pieces by artists previously not represented in the collection as well as two other distinctive works that show different facets of artists already included, the Permanent Collection has been enriched and given greater dimension.

Norbert Kox, The Pagan, 1995.

Acrylic and oil on reinforced panel (faux frame), 36½ x 23½ in. Gift of Norbert Kox.

Ernest “Popeye” Reed, Untitled (Female Figure/Bird), n.d. Carved stone, 8½ x 4 x 3½ in. Gift of Jan Petry.

David Philpot, Untitled, n.d.

Wood, varnish and rubber, 37½ x 7½ x 1½ in. Gift of the Driehaus Foundation.

Purvis Young, Untitled, c. 1992-93.

Wood, hardware and paint, 42 x 24 x 4 in. Gift of Joyce and Allan Cohen.

Thanks to the generosity of artist Norbert Kox (b. 1945), Intuit now has its first painting by the Wisconsin native.

The Pagan is an acrylic and oil painting on reinforced Masonite panel with a painted faux frame. The monochromatic artwork depicts a figure surrounded by religious and political symbols with a cemetery on a hill in the background.

Like many of the artist’s paintings, it is filled with metaphors and symbolism and warns of impending apocalypse. Intuit is thrilled to have such a fine representation of Kox’s art in our collection.

Intuit also now has its first work by Ohioan Ernest “Popeye” Reed (1919-1985), thanks to the continuing generosity of Exhibits Chair Jan Petry. A lifelong carver of wood and stone, Reed was drawn toward Greek, Egyptian and other mythological and fantasy imagery such as mermaids and sphinxes, and our new acquisition is no exception. The untitled piece is a sandstone carving (Reed’s material of choice) of a female bird figure that very well could be a Greek harpy.

It calls to mind other mythological works by Reed and is a significant addition to the Permanent Collection by this legendary artist.

Along with the addition of new artists to the collection, Intuit has had the pleasure of adding rare or atypical examples of artists’ work. An untitled cane by David Philpot (b. 1940) is a very good example of this. Generously donated by the Driehaus Foundation, this cane exists in high contrast with the two Philpot staffs already in the collection. Philpot’s canes are typically larger and endowed with jewels and painted decorations, so this cane is a subtler specimen. Made of naturalcolored, lacquered wood with a deceptively intricate segmented shaft, this cane radiates a sense of purpose — almost begging to be used.

Though a subtler example of Philpot’s artistry, it nonetheless exemplifies his strong African carving influence.

Lastly, Joyce and Allan Cohen have thoughtfully donated a beautiful, painted wood piece by Purvis Young (1943-2010). The untitled work is a large, standing wood construction with a sideways desk drawer on the lower half and a framed painting construction on the top. While Intuit’s other painting by Young (acquired last year) features a large, elongated head, this piece is more gestural and indicates multitudes of figures lost in a crowd. As with the Philpot cane, the Collections & Acquisitions Committee was impressed by the uniqueness of this piece. With its employment of a desk drawer and with its dual layered nature, it is a singular work by this exceptional found-object, collage-driven painter.

—AZA QUINN-BRAUNER PHOTOS: CHERI EISENBERG

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Book & Movie Reviews CHARLES A.A. DELLSCHAU

Edited by Stephen Romano with an introduction

by James Brett and essays by Thomas McEvilley, Tracy Baker-White, Roger Cardinal, Tom Crouch, Barbara Safarova and Randall Morris. Marquand Books/D.A.P., 334 pages, about 278 color illustrations, 2013. ISBN: 978-1935202905 (hardcover).

This first monograph dedicated to Charles August Albert Dellschau (18301923), the earliest documented selftaught artist in the United States, is a visually fascinating and heavy 12-by-12inch, 334-page coffee-table book that includes more than 250 high-quality reproductions of a carefully selected sample of the 2,500 ink drawings and collages Dellschau painted with watercolor on sheets of butcher paper. The central motifs of his works are close to 100 different designs of hybrid flying machines that combine the technology of 19th century air balloons and early 20th century dirigibles, zeppelins and biplanes. Formally, his art is a visual hybrid that combines the detailed conventions of mechanical and patent drawings with the colorful decorative power of illustration techniques used in architectural drawings and advertisement designs.

Dellschau first used sepia ink and drafting tools to draw perfect circles to produce a series of drawings of flying machines that include labels, legends and commentaries much in the style of mechanical or patent designs. Those early drawings bring to mind the ink works of Leonardo da Vinci, with two main differences: Dellschau embellished the designs with colored ink washes, more in tone with techni-

cal architectural illustration than with mechanical drawing style; in some ways, Leonardo’s flying machines seem less bold than Dellschau’s fantastic inventions.

Dellschau’s more colorful drawings are heavily tinted. Sometimes he applied such a dense layer of watercolor to the central motifs, the flying machines, that it looks like gouache. This produces a beautiful contrast between the machines and the blue sky areas surrounding them, which are almost translucent. His technique is described by Thomas McEvilley, one of the book’s authors, as similar to “drawing with paint.” As McEvilley observes, the more colorful of Dellschau’s works, which also include ornamental borders, produce a strange sense of contemplating a Renaissance painting with a rustic frontier aura.

Dellschau assembled his drawings in an unknown number of hand-bound books of double-sided pages, of which only 12 survive. The careful dating and numbering of each page and drawing of the existent books, and the gaps in that numeration system, suggest that at least 10 other books were destroyed or, hopefully, have only not yet been found. Between 1898 and 1921, after retiring from work first as a butcher and then as a clerk in a saddle shop in Houston, Texas, Dellschau spent his last years constructing his books at a rate of one page every two days. In 1923, after his death at the age of 92, his books were stored in the attic of his last residence, the house of a stepdaughter.

Forty years later, they were saved from destruction by a furniture refinisher and trader of used artifacts and introduced into the art world in 1969, in a modest exhibition on Flight at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. In 1996, his work was first included in an exhibition of outsider art at Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum titled Wind in My Hair. The following year, the Ricco/Maresca Gallery presented his work at the Outsider Art Fair in New York.

Dellschau’s work brought back memories from my childhood, when I spent hours

making designs for a flying machine, not based on balloons full of gas, as Dellschau did, but on imitations of the fascinating movement of birds’ wings. The skills I developed over the years of making those technical drawings led to my first job as an industrial draftsman when I was only 17 years old, long before I became a sociologist. My past experience with mechanical design and passion for biographical research makes this book a joy.

This publication was edited by art dealer Stephen Romano and includes an introduction by James Brett of the Museum of Everything in London. This excellent book puts together the results of years of systematic research on Dellschau’s life conducted by Tracy Baker-White with five essays that present the first serious attempt to analyze various dimensions of his work: an analysis of the content and form of his compositions by the late art critic Thomas McEvilley; an exploration of the use of handwritten inscriptions and aerial newsprints by scholar Roger Cardinal; a fascinating contextualization of the human dream of flight and the history of balloons by Tom Crouch of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum; a brilliant discussion of his work in the context of the experience of modernity and exile

by Barbara Safarova, the president of the ABCD Art Brut collection in Paris; and a passionate discussion of the enigma that has surrounded his life and work by writer and art dealer Randall Morris.

The research done by Baker-White on Dellschau’s life is well known to The Outsider ‘s readers from a 2011 essay published in this magazine. Dellschau was born in Berlin, Prussia, in 1830 and migrated to the United States in 1849.

Crossing the Atlantic was a grueling journey that must have certainly impacted the 19-year-old man and later inspired his dreams of transcontinental flights that would make it possible to cross the ocean, or the American continent, in relatively safe and comfortable flying machines. Evidence found by Baker-White

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indicates that, after settling with his family in Galveston, Texas, for a few years, and possibly after he was able to save some money, he traveled to California in 1854, at the end of the Gold Rush, four years after that state had become part of the United States. In 1859, he returned to south Texas, got married, raised a family and worked for 30 years as a butcher in his father’s trade.

Dellschau’s large body of work invites us to imagine that, late in his life, after the deaths of two wives and his three biological children, the five years he spent in California were transformed by his nostalgia into a time of youthful freedom, full of excitement and adventure. His books visually reconstruct events during those years when he was living in a boarding house in Sonora, California, and was a member of the Sonora Aero Club, a group of drinking miners who met every week to discuss their ideas and adventures in designing, building and attempting to use flying machines. Every one of the members of the club had to present a proposal for a design that was discussed and criticized by the other members. The club would then find ways to finance and build the approved projects.

Dellschau’s visual production includes a small series of sepia ink drawings closer to the tradition of illustration and cartooning that illustrate some events in the lives of the members of the club.

Those drawings, produced for the purpose of entertainment, show Dellschau’s great sense of humor as well as his skills for drawing the human figure in action, interior spaces, costumes and outdoor areas that were clearly inspired by the landscape of the Sierra Nevada foothills.

In his visual memories, Dellschau does not represent himself as an inventor or flier of those machines but as a club member in charge of drawing the designs and recording the events that took place at those meetings. Maybe this could explain why he kept all his books in secret: He might have felt unauthorized to disseminate the ideas and designs outside of the Sonora group.

Dellschau’s writing and visual narrative

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also suggest that he was convinced that his fellow Sonora Aero Club members were more advanced in the 1850s than were the early 20th-century aeronauts he carefully followed through the press.

This indicates that Dellschau was stimulated to draw not only by his nostalgia or by the late 1890s series of unexplained airship sightings called the Great Texas Airship Mystery but also by the increasing experimentation with flight on both continents at the turn of the 20th century, as Crouch shows in his essay.

In her incisive essay, Safarova asserts that Dellschau “possesses a certain kind of lucidity,” perhaps due to his condition of exile. She notes that his exile or immigrant condition was not only the result of his geographic displacement but was also radically marked by the loss of his own nuclear family, his separation from relatives who were still in Prussia during the first World War and his own ambivalent feelings during a time of xenophobia against Germans. As is welldocumented, in the United States during those years of war, hundreds of books written in German were removed from libraries and burned in public spaces.

German immigrants were also forced to stop speaking their language in public. Safarova builds on Bertolt Brecht and Giorgio Agamben to argue that Dellschau’s work confirms that exiles are “dialecticians” who transform their condition of rejection into a capacity to perceive and grasp their own time. In his epic and powerful drawings, Safarova writes, Dellschau interweaves world history and “autofiction,” blurring the boundaries between science and art.

In short, the essays do a good job of putting Dellschau’s work in biographical and historical context but present only a limited exploration of his visual sources.

The symmetry and sense of balance that characterize his compositions are interpreted by McEvilley as evidence that his drawings are “very involved in the tradition of the mandala” art. If his drawings recall the mandala form, this is an interesting visual coincidence that, however, does not say much about Dellschau’s sources or the visual culture to which he

was exposed. Cardinal seems on target in his assertion that Dellschau’s use of printed images and segments of newsprints are like “tokens of modernity” that provide his work with a “potent aura of immediacy and plausibility.” But the conventions of technical drawing and industrial patents as models of representation, as well as Dellschau’s use of collage, still require an in-depth exploration.

The partial analysis of Dellschau’s visual sources is accompanied by a celebration of the mystery that surrounds his life and work, a recurrent tendency in the literature on outsider art. The lack of records to this date about the existence of any of the other Sonora Aero Club members has been taken as an indication that the entire story constructed

by Dellschau may be only a figment of his imagination. As is well-discussed in the book, especially in Morris’ inspiring essay, this possibility obviously does not diminish the visual power of his work. It is understandable that the aura of mystery in Dellschau’s work, as is the case with many other self-taught artists, due to the elusive nature of creation itself, will always be, for some, an aesthetic and spiritual experience.

But celebrating mystery, despite a lack of knowledge about the specific life experiences and sources that shaped his work, does nothing to advance our understanding of Dellschau’s art. In short, we have to be careful that the celebration of mystery does not become a celebration of ignorance. Despite these quibbles, however, this handsome and well-edited volume, shaped by some of the most important voices in the field, provides another self-taught artist’s fascinating life story and surveys an amazing body of artwork.

—VICTOR M. ESPINOSA

RAW EROTICA: SEX, LUST AND DESIRE IN OUTSIDER ART

Edited by John Maizels and Colin Rhodes, with essays by Rhodes, Roger Cardinal, Michael Bonesteel, Jenifer P. Borum, Laurent Danchin, Thomas Röske and Françoise Monnin. Raw Vision Ltd., 168 pages, 190 color illustrations, 2013. ISBN: 978-0-954339364 (hardcover).

The cover of Raw Erotica: Sex, Lust and Desire in Outsider Art features Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern’s Die Praxis, a relatively modest image compared to most of the examples presented within the book’s pages. Even for the most seasoned art connoisseur, many of the artworks superbly reproduced between the covers are quite shocking, their psychological impact something that normalized Western culture has trained us to balk at. Co-author Jenifer P. Borum explains in her essay contribution on artist Steve Ashby that conventional attitudes about sexualized content have kept the careers of outsiders like Ashby in “the proverbial back room” of “the margin of the margin.” Indeed, this statement could be applied to many artists included in this volume.

Deciphering and delineating the differences between what is erotic and what is pornographic is something that intellectual defenders of art with sexual imagery, created by outsiders or otherwise, must continually take to task, and the essayists of Raw Erotica are well equipped for the challenge. Colin Rhodes, director of the Self-Taught and Outsider Art Research Collection, opens the book with his essay, “Rawerotics.” The author writes that erotica is primarily aesthetic, that it “gives life and character to the erotic players,” and “is engaged and connected” — all things that pornography lacks in its disinterested, objectifying nature. With that

in mind, what readers are looking at in this book are “rawerotics,” which Rhodes explains as being a relatively small but still significant percentage of the imagery in outsider artwork. According to Rhodes, such depictions of sex and love are made “without recourse to cultural convention,” though this doesn’t mean that all the sexual content within outsider art is completely separate from the way that sex is typically portrayed in popular culture. For many of the artists featured in this book, pornography is still a starting point, from Josef Wittlich’s pin-up posed nudes to the found pages of girlie magazines that Zdenek Kosek embellishes with his own handwritten calculations.

Extensively published outsider expert Roger Cardinal writes in his essay, “Depicting the Object of Desire,” that there is some erotic art made by outsider artists that is “unashamedly signalling sexual excitement ... here a phallus, there a vulva, no explanation needed.” While works presented in this catalogue are by no means simplistic, there are works that feature content that is relatively unambiguous, like Roy Ferdinand Jr.’s Untitled (Monica Lewinsky), a straightforward illustration of the notorious sex act; Johann Garber’s dense, orgiastic compositions; and Kapreles’ violent, grotesque characters with erect and seeping organs.

In instances like these, the authors tend to race through examples, sometimes introducing a different artist every paragraph or two. This rapid rate of discussion doesn’t allow for much of a thorough understanding of each artist’s practice, though it does reinforce the abundant activity within this under-recognized genre and the need for books like this one.

Not all rawerotica can be read as easily as those mentioned above, and the writing in this book pertaining to the more conceptually enigmatic artworks is especially insightful. There’s a big difference between “explicit” sexual content and “perverse” content, and Michael Bonesteel addresses the latter head-on in his essay, “Free Sexuality or Perversion? The Erotic in American Outsider Art.” In this discussion, the strangeness of sexual content ranges from mere kinkiness in Lewis Smith’s drawings of female wrestlers to the sadomasochistic situations of Malcolm McKesson’s work to the

nude children featured in the oeuvres of Henry Darger and Morton Bartlett.

Neither Darger nor Bartlett depict actual sex among the children in their works, though their unclothed bodies make erotic intentions on the part of the maker impossible to rule out. Bonesteel readily acknowledges that fact and also points out that “they were personal and private creations” by “two reclusive and lonely bachelors, both orphaned at an early age, both emotionally arrested in childhood,” and suggests that perhaps, since neither artist seems to have made any special effort to sexualize the children, if they are seen as erotic, it’s “not because the artist made them so, but because of what the viewer brings to them.”

Truly, we are bringing ourselves, including our own hangups and prejudices, when we look at artwork of such a sensitive nature as the ones presented in Raw Erotica, but, like the authors, we can still try to understand with compassion and an open mind.

—ROBIN DLUZEN “GREAT AND MIGHTY THINGS”: OUTSIDER ART FROM THE JILL AND SHELDON BONOVITZ COLLECTION

Edited by Ann Percy with Cara Zimmerman; with contributions from Francesco Clemente, Lynne Cooke, Joanne Cubbs, Bernard L. Herman, Ann Percy, Colin Rhodes and Cara Zimmerman. Yale University Press, 288 pages, 245 color illustrations and 1 b/w, 2013. ISBN 978-0-3001-9175-2 (hardcover).

This is a blockbuster catalogue for a blockbuster exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, yet, like a parade of similar volumes, it is built around samples of work by mostly well-known artists, each equipped with a one- to two-page biography, followed by essays revisiting

T H E O U T S I D E R 37

popular themes in outsider art, whether the history of the “field” or the nature of black Southern art. It’s formulaic but done with enough competence and insight to represent the best current introduction for folks new to this kind of art.

Like many similar enterprises, this is a bit of a vanity project — something Sheldon Bonovitz comes close to acknowledging in an interview included as a chapter in the catalogue (QED on vanity): “Rather than leave it to the Museum when we die and have a show then, why not do it during our lifetime and get the pleasure of having it — of having interviews like this, explaining our views concerning the art, and seeing how the Museum will deal with it and treat it?”

The vanity isn’t just that of the Bonovitzes, who assembled the collection, but of the museum, which has received it with ostentatious pride. And a good deal of the vanity is justified. If the Bonovitz collection is not as unique as the catalogue presumes, their very good taste still could not be clearer in the truly outstanding stuff here, much of it collected in depth, including work by Emery Blagdon, Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, Bill Traylor, Martín Ramírez and numerous others.

The catalogue’s reproductions of their work are first-rate and the writing well-informed, although the formalist in me thinks most of these can stand on par with the museum’s better-established denizens without the clinical details, discovery narratives and other contextualizations the biographical entries provide. (Formalism, I should note, is not the prevailing view in the academic circles that supply catalogue essays. Lynne Cook, in her generally cogent essay on the discovery of “outsider” art, expresses apparent satisfaction that appreciation of Bill Traylor’s work has shifted from the aesthetic to the historical and sociopolitical.)

Other exceptional elements here include a media-rich iPhone app built for the exhibition and groundbreaking research into literal material culture. The museum’s conservators conducted what has to be the most thorough forensic investigation ever into the materials used in the creation of this art. If you wonder what Emery

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Blagdon built his healing machines from, the catalogue’s last chapter is your chance to find out.

This research is part of what makes Great and Mighty Things a big event, even if it’s not the first time a substantial collection of self-taught art has been given to a conventional museum. The Milwaukee Art Museum has the Michael and Julie Hall, Anthony Petullo, and Richard and Erna Flagg collections; Atlanta’s High Museum has the T. Marshall Hahn collection; and Herbert Hemphill’s core collection is at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. The Philadelphia Museum brings a new level of institutional heft into our little corner of the art world, however. This is a venerable comprehensive museum of art where the outsider work joins, among other things, perhaps the world’s finest Marcel Duchamp collection, which is as insider as it gets. And the museum reportedly will be hanging outsider work alongside existing art in established galleries, an effort no comparable institution has systematically undertaken.

Such a move raises the question of whether distinguishing “outsider” from other art remains a desirable or even viable concept. There’s certainly a sense in which these artists are “associated only through their presence in a single private collection,” as curator Ann Percy writes.

Of course, they are actually associated in other ways: in other collections, at times by shared culture or class, by the collectors, writers and dealers with whom many of these artists interacted.

But perhaps the salient point is that most of this commonality does not speak to the character of the art. “Outsider” and similar labels address nothing intrinsic about the work, or about the artists, even if all too often they are treated as somehow elevated beings — or, put another way, patronized as being “special.” What’s relevant to the art is that they are simply creative, and that’s the power of the field — recognizing that creativity is truly common ground.

The real outsiders here may not be the artists, who in general were never nearly so isolated as many once believed, but the very people who call them outsid-

ers. As with most great art, we can only penetrate uncertainly into the real meaning and intentions of this work, with or without the assistance of biography and contextualization.

In any case, this impressive exhibition represents an important step in moving the work beyond the outsider pigeonhole (despite the show’s own subtitle).

The catalogue fits self-taught/outsider art solidly within the mainstream art narrative, which is no surprise, considering the sponsoring organization and why it collects what it does. By some lights, that’s a bad thing, the dominant discourse inevitably dominating whatever it touches. If you believe this is rebel art, the warmth of a museum embrace may be suffocating. But is it really so bad, even if that narrative or this institution is not to one’s own taste? It’s their story to tell, and none of this work ought to be considered exclusive to any given story, biography or community.

Lest anyone think that the remaining controversies surrounding this work revolve around the outsider label and the threat of dominating narratives, it’s instructive to read some of the public comments the museum collected and published on its website. Most are favorable and demonstrate the work’s exposure to new audiences. But, as is often the case with this kind of online discussion, it’s the negative ones that pack the most punch: “This exhibition is exploitive. If ‘outsider’ art should be institutionally recognized why separate it at all? The Bonovitz’s are just rich people interested in collecting cheap artwork under the mask of anthropology.

The PMA should invest in young contemporary artist that truly pushes the buttons of its old people demographic.”

In light of that unhappy thought, thumbing through the catalogue and appreciating the fact that there is a catalogue of this quality to thumb through, one can’t help thanking goodness for a dose of vanity.

—WILLIAM SWISLOW

SÉRAPHINE

Film directed by Martin Provost and written by Provost and Marc Abdelnour (2008). DVD released

by Music Box Films (2009); in French, with English subtitles; 125 minutes. Available for streaming or purchase at amazon.com.

Between 1904 and 1912, while living in Paris, German art critic and collector Wilhelm Uhde was one of the earliest patrons of two masterful artists, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, and also was the first to discover Henri Rousseau (Le Douanier). And, when Uhde moved with his sister to Senlis, just north of Paris, to write and escape the bustle of city life, he made another important discovery: the art of his housekeeper, Séraphine Louis.

In Séraphine, writer/director Martin Provost has created a film that is deliberately understated and subdued in its style, while luminous in its presentation of one woman’s compulsive and spiritual pursuit of the higher power of art. “My guardian angel told me to paint,” Séraphine says.

Winner of seven Césars (France’s Oscars), including Best Film and Best Actress, Séraphine is an exceptional and visually stunning movie that’s not to be missed, particularly by fans of outsider art.

In Séraphine, we accompany the devout domestic as she toils in her daily tasks.

She labors scrubbing floors, cooking meals and washing clothes at water’s edge. We watch Séraphine collecting small amounts of oil from votives while attending daily Mass, wildflowers and mud while communing with nature, and blood from a butcher’s shop while shopping — all ingredients destined

to be used in her homemade paints.

Performing the most thankless jobs, she manages to save a sou or two, which she uses to purchase wood for her canvases.

After working long hours during the day, Séraphine retreats to a small one-room flat to paint long into the night, eventually collapsing for a few hours of sleep, only to begin her arduous routine all over again in the morning.

The main character, popularly known now as Séraphine de Senlis, is flawlessly portrayed by Yolande Moreau. Her brilliant performance ranges from extended solo scenes with no dialogue to poignant exchanges with Uhde, with the actress perfectly embodying the housekeeperturned-artist throughout. “Be ardent in your work, and you will see God in your cooking pots,” Séraphine tells Uhde during one encounter.

Séraphine, however, is more than just a biopic, more than just another film about an eccentric artist. Director Provost offers an insightful, somewhat mystical film about the improbable intersection of two disparate lives, both arguably enriched by the fortunes of their encounter.

This strong presence of fate spilled over into the filmmaking itself, as Provost attests in an interview published on the Music Box Films website. After learning that Moreau lived just 3 kilometers from his country home, he approached the actress about making the film, according to the interview: “I told her Séraphine’s story and she said yes. Later on, in the Kandinsky library, I found the only known portrait of Séraphine, done in pencil by one of her neighbors. The resemblance [is] striking. It was Yolande Moreau.

When I showed her this portrait she was speechless at first, but then added, offhandedly, ‘It’s not flattering, but it is me indeed!’“ The film is replete with images of the artist’s paintings, which she began creating in 1905, at age 41. Mostly intricate floral fantasies whose colors originate from homemade pigments enriched by the exotic ingredients that were her “little secrets,” the paintings seem to come alive, possessing motion and drama rarely seen in still life.

Spanning a period from about 1913 to 1940, the film captures the unexpected relationship between the avant-garde art dealer and his visionary cleaning lady. Uhde’s patronage has barely begun to materialize when he and his sister are forced to flee France and return to Germany at the advent of World War I, and Séraphine is once again left to persevere on her own. Then, in 1927, Uhde (played by Ulrich Tukur) and his sister Anne-Marie (Anne Bennent) return to France, settling in Chantilly, near Senlis.

But he fails to reconnect immediately with Séraphine. This on-again, off-again, on-again dynamic fuels Séraphine’s inspiration. But her financial success, followed by the interrupted support when Uhde stops buying her paintings at the onslaught of the Great Depression, sends her into despair and, ultimately, to a psychiatric hospital.

Uhde rejected the label “naïfs,” which Europeans sought to apply to this new art, opting instead to call these discoveries “modern primitives.” In 1929, Uhde organized an exhibition, Painters of the Sacred Heart, that featured the work of the artist, who, by that time, had become relatively well known. Her work was also included in the 1932 exhibition The Modern Primitives in Paris.

On the most basic level, the film is a good introduction to the artist’s life and work — enough reason alone to warrant watching Séraphine. But it is also an unforgettable masterpiece of a movie, full of little mysteries — happenings outside the frame — that serve to enhance our film experience. Director Provost astutely and with great sensitivity presents outsider Uhde (the German in France, a homosexual man), in contrast with outsider Séraphine.

The film embraces its main characters, in a straightforward fashion, for who they are, and viewers are left to judge or not judge them as we wish. Who is more the outsider, we may be left to wonder.

Séraphine is a film with great integrity and veracity and, as such, it does not attempt to answer all its questions. That is left to us.

—KEVIN COLE

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Thanks to Intuit’s Donors The generosity of individuals, corporations, foundations and board members enabled us to continue our world-class exhibitions, create informative publications and award-winning education programs, and build one of the finest collections of self-taught and visionary art in America. We are pleased to recognize our esteemed contributors during the 2012 calendar year.

President’s Circle ($10,000+) Alphawood Foundation Crown Family Philanthropies The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation The Lloyd A. Fry Foundation Eugenie & Lael Johnson Jan Petry Polk Bros. Foundation Sage Foundation Visionary Circle ($5,000-$9,999) Patrick K. & Judith R. Blackburn BMO Harris Bank Ralph Concepcion & Janet Williams Illinois Arts Council Ruth DeYoung Kohler Julie & John Mathias Elizabeth Morse Charitable Trust PepsiCo, Inc. Robert A. Roth William Swislow & Janet Franz Leadership Circle ($2,500-$4,999) Aon Foundation Cheryl Lynn Bruce & Kerry James Marshall Nick Cave City of Chicago – CityArts Marjorie R. & Harvey Freed Gail Garcia Steffen & John Steffen Randy Vick Cleo F. Wilson Gary R. Zickel & Franco Gianni Benefactor ($1,200-$2,499) Cathryn E. Albrecht & Chris Warren-Boulton

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Russell E. & Barbara Bowman Robert T. Grossett Just Folk Lena Kondo John R. Mangers McCamant Advertising & Design, Inc. Leah Missbach & F.K. Day Judith and Dennis Newton Nikki Will Stein & Fredric Stein Jerry & Judy Stefl Dale E. Taylor & Angela Lustig Patron ($500-$1,199) Paula & Gordon Addington Matthew Arient Deborah Behnke Orren & Marilyn Bradley Tim & Stacy Bruce Leslie Buchbinder Jeff Cahn Capri Capital Partners Kevin & Hunter Cole Tim Cook Susann E. Craig Deseo Events Tracy Dillard Salli Eley Sam & Betsey Farber Bob Faust Gary Alan & Susan Fine Foundation to Promote SelfTaught Art Nanette Freeman Susan Goodman Kenneth Green & Ellen Marie Glassmeyer Andrew Griffin, MD, & Moira Collins Sharon Gums Thomas D. Isenberg Christopher J. & Sara G. Julsrud Lisa Key & Kevin Lint

Rachel D. Kohler & Mark Hoplamazian Randy Kroszner Mary & Bruce Leep Rob Lentz Juju Lien Sue & John Lowenberg Nancy Luton Kevin E. Lyle Gabrielle Martinez Mark Lyman & Anne Meszko Judy & Ray McCaskey Michael McCluggage Bonnie McGrath Angie Mills Walter & Ann Nathan Roberta & Herbert B. Nechin Felicia Pfeffer Ricco Maresca Gallery Bettylu & Paul Saltzman Judy A. Saslow Rebecca Sive Tom Sourlis & Sue Eleuterio Lisa Stone & Don Howlett David Syrek & David Csicsko Marian Towne Frank Tumino Althea & Chaga Walton Laura & Bob Watson Tom Yoder & Kathleen Carl Karen Zupko In-Kind Contributors AAA Rental System Cathryn E. Albrecht & Chris Warren-Boulton A New Leaf Anchor Brewing Company Artists Frame Service Big Chicks Big Shoulders Realty Birkdesign Inc. Patrick K. & Judith R. Blackburn Boka Restaurant Group

Boulevard Bikes Cenegenics Chicago Event Graphics Chicago Neighborhood Bike Tour Kevin & Hunter Cole Ralph Concepcion & Janet Williams Susann Craig The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Cheri Eisenberg John Faier Marjorie R. & Harvey Freed Laura Garza Gerard Audio The Icon Group Lowercase, Inc. Manual Cinema Angie Mills Roberta & Herbert B. Nechin Sarah Giller Nelson Cindy & Michael Noland Jan Petry Ravenswood Events Ron Reason Robert A. Roth Ruzicka & Associates Richard & Ellen Sandor Family Foundation Judy A. Saslow Gallery Anupy Singla Sofitel Chicago Spudnik Press Cooperative Starshaped Press Jerry & Judy Stefl Sunday Dinner Club David Tamarkin Nathan Vernau Vosges Haut-Chocolat

All Things Intuit Intuit’s chief mission is to promote public awareness, understanding and appreciation of intuitive and outsider art — and we’ve been doing it in a big way during the last year. In addition to mounting a tremendous lineup of art exhibitions, we’ve offered tours of local outsider art collections, conducted art-making workshops, held our first Vernacular Spectacular sale of all things funky, hosted events by fellow arts groups (yes, our facilities are available for rent!) and put on a couple of super-fun parties that brought together art lovers while also raising funds to sustain our mission. On that note, be sure to save the date — Saturday, November 15 — for our 2013 Visionary Ball, which you won’t want to miss. Find details at www.art.org.

Michelle Fire leads Intuit patrons on a tour of Big Chicks’ collection of local, unknown, self-taught and international artists.

Photo: Matt Bergstrom.

Nick Cave and Benefit Chair Michelle Boone at Intuit’s Visionary Ball 2012. Photo: Cheri Eisenberg.

Jinja Birkenbeuel, Sulyn Silbar, Lauren Blair and Erica Gafford enjoy the 2012 Visionary Ball. Photo: Cheri Eisenberg.

Luna Negra Dance Theater holds a fundraiser at Intuit. Photo: Quinn Wharton Photography.

Intuit’s first Vernacular Spectacular: the place to go for funky stuff. Photo: Mary Jane Feigenbutz.

Students learn to use the techniques of Hawkins Bolden and William Hawkins in our Hawkins/ Hawkins Workshop. Photo: Heather Holbus.

Guests enjoy the beautiful courtyard at A New Leaf during the springINTUIT party.

Photo: Heather Holbus.

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PSRT STD U.S. POSTAGE PAID CHAMPAIGN, IL PERMIT NO. 100

756 N. Milwaukee Avenue Chicago, Illinois 60642

A PUBLICATION OF INTUIT: THE CENTER FOR INTUITIVE AND OUTSIDER ART

The Outsider

A life in art Working in multiple media, Chicagoan Eddie Harris depicts the black experience

Blurred lines Examining the thorny role of influence in self-taught art

VOLUME 18 | FALL 13

Fightin’ words Is outsider art alive and well, dying or just changing?

T 312.243.9088 F 312.243.9089 www.art.org Intuit is open to the public Tuesday-Saturday, 11 a.m.-6 p.m.

Thursday, 11 a.m.-7:30 p.m.

Admission is $5; Members free Join Intuit today at www.art.org

The Outsider UPCOMING THE BELGIANS ARE COMING Intuit is excited to collaborate with the MADMusée of Liege, Belgium, in an exhibition from its international collection. The MADMusée presents the work of mentally challenged European artists and promotes understanding and appreciation through education, conservation and documentation.

January 17-April 26, 2014