Outliers and American Vanguard Art

This catalogue accompanies a major exhibition that explores the shifting relations and complex interweaving of schooled and unschooled artists over the past century in the US. The exhibition presupposes that the world occupied by practicing artists, art critics, and museum professionals is both defined by and dependent on its margins. The exhibition will debut at the National Gallery in Fall 17, and then travel to the HIgh Museum in Atlanta and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The self-taught artist, by definition at the periphery, is a cultural construct whose identity has been captured throughout the twentieth century in monikers such as folk, na#65533;ve, vernacular, visionary, primitive, and outsider art and in figures such as Grandma Moses, Horace Pippin, David Butler, Sister Gertrud Morgan, Bill Trayor, James Castle, Joseph Yoakum. and Rosie Lee Tompkins. But these artists have also influenced--and been promoted by--some of our country’s most advanced practitioners, such as Zoe Leonard, Matt Mullican, Betye Saar, and Jim Nutt. The exhibition is organized around three distinct periods in which engagements between mainstream artists and autodidacts were at their most dynamic and consequential: between 1924 and 1943, 1969 and 1982, and 1997 to the present.