Revised Vision:
I generally thank the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore for my quiet yet enduring interest in folk and outsider art. AVAM had just opened when I graduated from Johns Hopkins in 1995 and through a connection at the Baltimore Jewish Times, my first employer, I managed to get a private tour of their opening exhibit called the Tree of Life. I went back to it a dozen times, taking every person I knew in town and several visitors.
Visioniary Art is loosely defined as art produced by non-professionally trained artists, often the handicapped, the incarcerated, the insane, the voiceless who have found their voice buried in the folds of their own creativity. In contrast to Folk Art, often defined by untrained artists working in thousand-year-old traditions, Visionary Art often seems to come from nowhere, artists whith few influences save their own lives. It’s a movement with very loose boundaries and therefore prone to a lot of curators with political agendas but the style nonetheless hits me right between the soul and the conscience.
Around that time, I had been spending what little disposable income I had on the work of local artists to decorate my apartment. My main criteria were if I liked them as people and their price. Style didn’t really matter. I had it in my stupid 23-year-old head that I was an art collector, and pursued it with the same organizational vigor that one applies to a baseball card or dead moth collection.
AVAM changed that. I got interested in folk and visionary art not as an acquisition or even a hobby but as a passion. I would go to shows and follow artists I could never afford nor meet, artists whose work I enjoyed on their own rather than how it might look on my wall. I realized that buying art, if you’re serious and respectful of where it came from, carries with it a certain social responsibility, to care beyond the point of getting, to know of what and whom you speak.
I’ve got a long way to go, before I could be a serious art collector but visionary and folk are where I’ll go when the times comes. And when I’ve learned a thing or three…
Places to Start: Visionary Art
- American Visionary Art Museum (Baltimore, MD)
- Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art (Chicago, IL)
- Intuit’s directory of Visionary and Outsider Art Galleries.
- Raw Vision magazine
- Visionary Art.com
Folk Art:
- Folk Art Society of America
- American Folk Art Museum (NY, NY)
- Museum of International Folk Art (Santa Fe, NM)
- Folk Art & Craft Exchange (online marketplace)