When Outsiders Become Insiders: The Outsider Art Fair Opens

Feb 29

The outsiders became insiders today at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Pavilion, as the Outsider Art Fair opened for the 32nd time, highlighting the work of self-taught artists who plumb the outskirts of elitist global art networks with scant regard for convention or vogue.

Advocating for self-taught artists worldwide since 1993, the Outsider Art Fair features 63 exhibitors from 32 cities in eight countries. It features artworks created by some of the most acclaimed artists in the field, including James Castle, Henry Darger, Thornton Dial, William Edmondson, Minnie Evans, Bill Traylor, Martín Ramírez, Nellie Mae Rowe, Judith Scott, and Joseph Yoakum,

Here are some highlights:

Robert Latchman’s, Big Brooklyn Bridge, a monumental 2023 piece in medium colored pencil on cardboard, is part of a series of works the Brooklyn-based artist created focusing on the iconic span. His bridge pieces were the subject of 2018 solo show called “The Bridge! The Bridge!” at Brooklyn’s LAND Gallery, which brought his work to the fair.

In this iteration, Latchman draws on his Trinidadian upbringing to deliver a piece that brings vibrant color and geometry to the bridge's real-life brick and stone drabness. Like many of his bridge pieces, Big Brooklyn Bridge alludes to the bridge’s iconic arches, and the skyline of Manhattan behind them, but loops in Latchman’s life experience, along with personal notions of modernity, crowding and ascension.

Bill Traylor, *Black Man Leading Brown Dog*

Bill Traylor, a former slave who worked in Alabama farms and factories after emancipation, didn’t being his art practice until he was in his 80s. Though he never trained or studied art, his simple drawings and paintings, often on discarded paper, succinctly trace his life experience and African American urban culture of early to mid-20th Century.

Black Man Leading Brown Dog, a work in medium pencil and tempera on cardboard, depicts a monstrous brown, male dog with a harness about its neck that is attached to a leash wielded by a black figure in a hat. The figure is made small by the size of the animal and his expression, depicted simply but stunningly, is one of uncertainty and fear.

Abstract expressionist Janet Sobel, who died in 1968, is a Ukrainian-born abstract expressionist painter who is said to have been creating drip painting in her Brighton Beach apartment years before the technique was brought into the mainstream by Jackson Pollock,

Several Sobel works were brought to the fair by James Barron Art of Kent, Connecticut. One of them, a work in gouache on paper, features two faces flourishing amid a colorful bouquet of floweres. The two look forlorn and disengaged, despite their starring roles as the blossoms of this variegated floral array. Like so many works in the fair, the piece is untitled.

Evelyn Reyes is a San Francisco-based artist whose powerful, minimalist work gains momentum through repetition. Reyes' career has centered on series of shapes and abstractions depicting quotidian objects like fences, cakes, rubber bands, and, in the case of the work presented here, carrots.

Brought to the Outsider Art Fair by San Francisco’s Creativity Explored studio, the 2011 oil pastel on paper work Carrots suggests upward potential, motion and direction, with a hint of possible violence creeping in via the red figures at the lower left. All the geometrics are brought to life through residual smears and smudges that suggest haste, anger, and anxiety.

Noviadi Angkasapura is a native of Indonesia who traces his inspiration to a 2001 visit from a spirit-like being that instructed him to live, and create, honestly and patiently. Represented by New York’s Cavin-Morris Gallery, Angkasapura says he is a messenger for the spirit and that the figures in his drawing flow from internal and external forces.

The 2023 ink and graphite on paper work presented at the fair contains human and animal forms, swirling in a burnt orange and brown amalgam of designs and words. The name of his spirit visitor, Ki Raden Sastro Inggil, is prominently included, which is common in Angkasapur's work.

The Outsider Art Fair runs through March 3 at the Metropolitan Pavilion, 125 W 18th St, New York,