Outsider Art

I was first introduced to what is called “Outsider Art” in Chicago, when I was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Some of my friends and teachers were onto this trend very early. It was a loose group that sometimes hung out at Phyllis’ gallery just off of Michigan Blvd. She had the first show of everybody who turned out to be anybody--Tolliver, Finster, Howard, Simon, Yoakum, etc. etc. etc. Ray Yoshida and Roger Brown were crazy-mad for this kind of art and bought a lot. I don’t remember if Wolfli ever was shown at Phyllis' gallery, but I do know that Jim Nutt, one of her main stable members, bought one or two at some point.
I think we were all attracted to this sort of art in part because we also felt a bit like outsiders. New York was king and Chicago was clearly the second city. And this art and the art we made didn’t look anything like the work being made in New York.
Not that every artist or teacher at SAIC was into imagistic art. There were some abstract artists. But the cool people were the Hairy Who’s and all the subsequent groups on that family tree.
We loved crude. We loved rule-breaking such as compositions or proportions that didn’t make any sense. We loved guys who put religious content into their work. We loved Maxwell Street on an early weekend morning where you could find bizarre things. Ray and Roger were competitive and their apartments sang with the love of the unexpected.
I can’t recall who discovered Joseph Yoakum--it might have been Whitney Halstead or Don Baum, but it was well known that he fancied young ladies and chocolate cake. So on my first and only visit to his studio, I baked him a cake. My oven had no thermostat so the cake turned out to be very mushy on the inside, but he liked it anyway and gave me two drawings as a gift.
I wasn’t in any position to be buying art at that point but I did manage to purchase a Pauline Simon “Matisse Odalesque” for fifty dollars before I moved to Africa. I still have all three pictures.
I sometimes like to try to approach my own work the way an outsider artist does--without thought to conventions or logic and not worried about what dealers or customers might think. Outsider Art at its best is pure art. Urgent. Compelling. Strange. Raw. Unimaginable.