No more outsiders

I'm just going to dive in head-first with this recent obsession with outsider art. Ok? Ok.

Chicago has a small museum dedicated to this stuff-- Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art. I'm not sure I like the moniker "intuitive art" since, well, all art is intuitive and most of life is intuitive. But I don't mind "outsider art." This phrase tells it like it is. No euphemisms here. We are interested in these people because they exist outside the normal artistic social strata, because they don't expect to make money from their art, because their training was unusual or non-existent, because they didn't have to do this art, they just DID.

(( Clarification: no one really has to do anything, but career artists feel compelled to create by forces external to themselves, get into habits that they sometimes feel they must sustain in order to keep making a living, and so on -- an outsider, generally speaking, could just stop, and to most observers the daily fabric of their lives would continue unchanged. They would keep right on working in the insurance office or mopping floors at MIT--oh wait, that's a different movie. ))

Also, Intuit somehow managed to get hold of "art.org"--so there's another reason to listen to them.

Anyway. When I visited Intuit the major exhibition was on Savannah, GA sculptor/barber Ulysses Davis. His work is extremely broad and multifaceted and, quite unexpectedly, I was most intrigued by the patriotic pieces. This is a guy who did a complete set of busts of the presidents of the United States. Each one projects an individual personality filtered through a unifying--quirky--artistic sensibility. Also, I can't resist mentioning the racial ambiguity of the faces. I mean, look at Lincoln here! Fascinating.

Then I was lucky enough to visit the Art Chicago festival and spot not only a few works by my boy James Castle, but also one or two by the totally awesome Joseph Yoakum, who literally ran away to join the circus, saw the world, settled back in Chicago with his family, and started prodigiously drawing--when he was in his fifties or sixties, depending on who you ask. He eventually produced tons of unmistakable landscapes based on his travels.

Check out Mt. Swan of Darling Mountain Range near Perth of Western Australia, 1968:

And now for The Hills of Old Wyoming in the Valley of the Moon near Casper, Wyoming

(gotta love the run-on titles):

Righteous.