My research currently suggests that the critical discourse and artistic exchanges between outliers and the mainstream American art world came to a head at three moments during the past century. On each occasion, this interface was vividly evidenced in landmark exhibitions initiated by museums devoted to the presentation of modern and contemporary art. In the earliest period, that is, circa 1926–1943, the locus of this burgeoning exchange was New York, where two fledgling institutions, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Studio Club (from 1931 the Whitney Museum of American Art), played seminal roles, initially through their embrace of traditional folk art as the prime locus of inspiration for a uniquely American vanguard modernism and then in their support for certain modes of the genre of popular painting exemplified in the work of the self-taught African American Horace Pippin (1888–1946). When the mainstream art world re-engaged with the widening category of the self-taught after World War II, in the period stretching from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, the existence of a viable living (as opposed to a traditional and hence defunct) national folk art was widely recognized, and a subset of that production became identified as outsider art. Originating as a historically bounded category, rooted in the preindustrial, largely rural, culture of the Northeast, circa 1750 to 1870, a twentieth-century folk art now came to be seen as something produced mainly in the South, in poor, and in many cases African American, agrarian communities. This redefinition, in turn, effected a radical shift in the paradigm governing the professional/self-taught
As previously, these recharged conceptual constructions were figured through the vehicle of seminal shows and exhibition programs that were initiated by institutions on the East Coast. Though little remarked upon to date, curatorial endeavors and the critical reception they provoked were (in tandem with the aesthetic responses of professional artists) instrumental once again in reshaping the field. This project will consequently pay particular attention to exhibition histories and the formation of collections, both public and private, and to their reception in the critical literature generated in
According to some cultural theorists, among other transformative social factors, changes in communications technologies and in medical practices relating to the mentally and physically challenged, together with rising levels of education, make it improbable that significant bodies of work will continue to be created by individuals whose biographies approximate that of the paradigmatic twentieth-century outsider artist. Those rare exceptions who challenge this endgame prognostication no longer orbit in a parallel world but assume a place alongside the medley of makers of today’s vastly expanded, globalized art world, their indifference to the tenets and protocols of artistic discourse seemingly no handicap to participation on what is deemed to be an even playing field. If formerly isolating definitions like “outsider” and “self-taught” are abandoned because they fail to serve a critical function, and the honorific of