Outsider Art

Family Band. Jon Serl, American, 1894-1993. Oil paint on fiberboard. All images courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection, photography by Will Brown. 

More than two hundred objects from one of the finest private collections of works by American self-taught artists are on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Great and Mighty Things: Outsider Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection presents drawings, paintings and sculptures (1930s to 2010) by twenty-seven artists.  

Boffo. William Hawkins, American, 1895-1990. Alkyd house paint on Masonite with fiberboard horns; textured mane and raised body made of alkyd paint mixed with starch chunks (probably dried glue). 

Outsider art eludes categorization, is not based on established traditions or techniques and is usually produced with unconventional materials such as house paint, wood scraps, shirt cardboard, and roofing tin. It's often associated with Art Brut (European "raw art"), folk, naïve, primitive, and vernacular art. There is no defining term for its practitioners, who have been referred to as visionaries, spiritualists, intuitives, mavericks, isolates, eccentrics, Sunday painters, instinctives, and so on. What they have in common: Spontaneous creative activity, inventive and imaginative.

Runaway Goat Cart, c. 1939-42. Bill Traylor, American, c. 1853-1949. Opaque watercolor and graphite on cream card. 

"This exhibition will demonstrate how works of art of enduring interest and quality can be created by people without formal training, who have limited or no connection to art dealers, critics, galleries, museums, and schools," says Ann Percy, Curator of Drawings. "In this exhibition, I believe that visitors will discover new and surprising aspects of the art of the 20th and 21st centuries in the United States." 

Through June 9 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway.