During my first visit to the Outsider Art Fair in Manhattan yesterday, February 27, the overall experience was exactly what I’d expected: a few stand-out booths amid a sea of puzzling ones. I often find the first floor of the Metropolitan Pavilion venue, a popular spot for New York art fairs, impossible to navigate, but it certainly wasn’t helped by the head-spinning juxtaposition of booths featuring contemporary Indigenous art influenced by generations of tradition with presentations boasting glazed ceramic animals with incised smiley faces.
I suppose my feelings of discombobulation with the fair’s “Outsider” label is that it puts drawings from the likes of Shuvinai Ashoona and the late Inuk artist Annie Pootoogook, or other examples of non-Western creative practice such as the centuries-old miniature cosmological paintings from India at the Magic Markings booth, on the same level as kooky contemporary artists leaning into the aesthetics of kitsch as a means of underscoring non-institutional art and accessibility. Of course, those two categories were not the only ones represented at the fair, which runs through Sunday, March 2 — there was also a wealth of sacred geometry, faux-naif figuration, pop-culture references, hand-stitched textiles, and painted aluminum sculptures embodying American folk art.
Beyond the exquisite presentation of contemporary Inuit art at the booth of Toronto-based Feheley Fine Arts, I found both respite and stimulation in works uncategorized by tropes or medium. At Cavin-Morris Gallery’s booth, late Czech artist Olga Karlíková’s “Záznam ptačiho zpěvu (A recording of birdsong)” (1996) cut through the chatter when I spotted it from across the venue. The artist’s abstract, seismographic gestures capture the sounds of the avian world in a charming ink-on-paper manuscript, a simultaneously indecipherable and intuitive document.
I also spent considerable time with Pittsburgh-based artist Bill Miller’s vintage linoleum collages at the dieFirma space, which came naturally due to my soft spot for offbeat materials and the Paris of Appalachia. DieFirma Founder Andrea Stern admitted that Miller worked on the edge of Outsider art as someone with an education in graphic design and painting, but added that he was led down a path of considering the obsolescence of people, materials, and entire communities after the workplace deaths of his grandfather and father as well as his observations of the Steel City’s industrial collapse.
Miller collages exclusively from discarded vintage patterned linoleum (cork, linseed oil, and pine resin topped with enamel paint) sourced from across the country. He embraces scuffs, holes, indents, and wear when hand assembling his visually comforting compositions that also serve as fossils of both American domestic and economic life before the explosion of plastic.
“Galleries didn’t know what to do with him or where to place him,” Stern said of Miller before his partnership with dieFirma. Hand-cut with scissors and X-acto knives and fastidiously put together, Miller’s works are a labor of love born from a love of labor, commemorating the personal histories imprinted on each panel of flooring.
At Cell Solace’s booth, vintage shoulder bags, purses, and pocketbooks made by incarcerated people in the United States from the 1940s to 1970s also unquestionably embodied the meaning of a labor of love. Ahead of tobacco restrictions in prisons, incarcerated people constructed the bags from countless cigarette packs, magazines, and postage stamps as gifts for loved ones. Meticulously folded and woven together in eye-catching patterns, the bags were not only crafted out of pure discipline and attention to detail, but also a remarkable testament to expressing love and appreciation with limited means. They were often given to sweethearts, relatives, and friends outside of the prison system to be regarded as prized possessions, and provided a creative and meditative outlet for people serving prison sentences.
Other bright spots included a presentation of self-taught artists at Stellarhighway’s booth, Japanese artist Yuichiro Ukai’s figurative and feral drawings at Yukiko Koide Presents, and David Syre’s modernist-minimalist drawings on black paper from his solo presentation with Sarah Crown.
Beyond my apprehension about its “Outsider” art label, the fair is rife with offerings for anyone who prefers the intimacy of booths guided by personal experiences to institutional curation.
