As a leading focal point of the Outsider Art world, OAF is uniquely positioned to organize an exhibition that assembles the best available works in our field, and rally the passionate community of aficionados, collectors, and fairgoers that have been following OAF since its inception twenty-eight years ago.

Many of the dealers participating in Art Brut Global are pioneers in the world of self-taught art and exhibited at the first iteration of OAF which took place in 1993 at New York City’s Puck Building. These include American Primitive, Henry Boxer, Cavin-Morris, Fleisher/Ollman, Carl Hammer, Marion Harris and Ricco/Maresca. Also participating are veteran dealers like Yukiko Koide, Creative Growth, Andrew Edlin, J.P. Ritsch-Fisch, Galerie du Marché and Les Yeux Fertiles.

Outsider Art dealers have carved out an historically important and influential niche in the art world landscape, thriving on the strength of the powerful art they have unearthed in places where few others were looking. With the help of astute writers and visionary curators, artists who today are the cornerstones of the Outsider Art and Art Brut canon like Aloïse Corbaz, Henry Darger, Thornton Dial, Martin Ramirez, Judith Scott, Bill Traylor and Adolf Wölfli, have transcended those categories and been recognized as some of the greatest artists of their times. Now, a new generation of dealers and scholars has risen to the fore, making discoveries and using digital technology to reveal and disseminate incredible accounts of self-taught creators and the universes they invent. 

Ilija Bosilij Bašičević (1895–1972)
Serbia

Ilija Bašičević (who later adopted the surname Bosilij as an artistic pseudonym) was born in the town of Šid, in what is now Serbia and Montenegro. After enduring constant hardship through both World Wars, Bosilj took up art at the age of 62. In the 1950s, a “naive” art renaissance swept through Yugoslavia. This peasant revival – vehement in its opposition to the “decadent” modernism of Western Europe and in tune with nationalistic sentiments – was condoned if not actively encouraged by the Communist regime. The artist was influenced in his choice of subject matter by the largely oral traditions of Serbian folk poetry, myth and history. 

Bosilij’s work figures prominently in the permanent collection of the Museum Charlotte Zander in Bönnigheim, Germany, and is also held by the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Museum Ilijanum in Šid.

His work was exhibited continuously at Galerie St. Etienne in New York beginning in 2004, and was included in Turbulences dans les Balkans at Halle Saint Pierre, Paris (2018).

Guo Fengyi (1942–2010)
China

Guo Fengyi was born in Xi'an, central China. She obtained her high school diploma in 1962 and found work in a rubber factory. However, severe bouts of arthritis forced her to give up her career at the age of thirty-nine. She turned to alternative medicine in the hope of alleviating her symptoms, and found a new spiritual path in Qi Gong. She started experiencing visions in 1989, as a result of which she produced large numbers of drawings, first on the backs of pages from calendars, then later on rice paper.

She worked with Indian ink and brushes, producing works up to five meters long, drawn with no initial plan in mind, discovering her own creation as she worked. The multitude of delicate lines form ghostly figures, dragons, phoenixes, and faces, sometimes interwoven, smiling and serene or terrifying and monstrous.

In 2013, Guo Fengyi's works were featured in three major exhibitions: The Encyclopedic Palace at the 55th Venice Bienniale, the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, and the Alternative Guide to the Universe at the Hayward Gallery, London. A solo exhibition To See from a Distance took place at the Drawing Center, New York, in 2020.

Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern (1892–1982)
Germany

Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern's path to artistic recognition was not an easy one. Born in Kaukehmen, East Prussia, he was incorrectly diagnosed as schizophrenic. He vagabonded in Germany for several years, essentially dropping out of existence until reappearing in 1919 as Professor Dr. Eliot Gnass von Sonnenstern, a quack practitioner of palmistry and natural health remedies. "Gnass" hoodwinked a broad section of the public but, instead of pocketing his proceeds, he gave his money to the poor. The next several years found "Gnass" in recurring trouble with German authorities suspicious of his holistic practices. He regularly landed himself in jail, lunatic asylums and penal camps before escaping in 1944 to Berlin, where he survived by selling firewood scavenged from the city's post-war ruins.

In 1949, aged 57 and lacking any formal visual arts training, Schröder-Sonnenstern began to draw. An intense repertory of images rapidly poured forth from the artist's hand. Combining fragments from biblical, mythological, and literary sources, Schröder-Sonnenstern's roguish entities are at once farcical, demonical and highly erotic. His fantastical drawings are without iconographic precedent. Executed in colored pencil on paper and board, his otherworldly forms and scenes are often combined with texts penciled directly onto the surfaces of the drawings. The works attack bourgeois sensibilities at every level with a message that is both deeply dystopian and oddly euphoric.

His work was championed by many renowned artists including Hans Bellmer, Andre Breton, Jean Dubuffet and Marcel Duchamp, who included him in many important exhibitions of their work in Paris and New York beginning in the late 1950s. Overlooked for decades, a major exhibition at Michael Werner Gallery in New York in 2011, From Barefoot Prophet to Avant-Garde Artist, received great acclaim.

Anna Zemánková (1908–1986)
Czech Republic

Anna Zemánková's lyrical, otherworldly botanically-inclined compositions are as beautiful as they are mysterious. Her mediumistic working method was akin to that of other Outsiders partnering with unseen, guiding forces, yet her oeuvre stands radically apart from work produced within a communal Spiritualist context. 

Born Anna Velelá on August 23, 1908 in Moravia, which is now part of the Czech Republic, Zemánková was dissuaded by her family from pursuing art, and instead studied dentistry. She married and raised a family, settling in Prague after WWII. As she grew older, she suffered from the dispersal of her grown children, her deteriorating marriage and serious health issues, resulting in severe depression.

Her sons knew of her early love for making art, and attempting to lift her spirits, provided her with paper, paint, and pastels, Zemánková found solace and a renewed sense of purpose in her unique creative practice. Her creativity was expansive, and she experimented with crimping the paper, or sewing with silk thread through the drawings, adding a third dimension.  Sometimes she collaged a drawing over another drawing, extending the collaged edges over the original drawing.  Of her imagery, Zemánková has said: "If you think these are flowers they are from a garden not of this earth.”

Zemánková’s art has been exhibited internationally over many years and was included in the seminal Outsiders at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 1979. Cavin-Morris Gallery, New York has worked with her oeuvre since 1993. She is included in the permanent collections of the Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne, the American Folk Art Museum, New York, the Milwaukee Art Museum, New York and the Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe, among others.

Bill Traylor (1854–1942)
United States

One of America's classic Outsider Artists, Bill Traylor was active for only several years (ca. 1939-1942), but is today recognized internationally for the over 1200, vibrant drawings on cardboard he produced on the sidewalks of Depression-era Montgomery, Alabama. 

Born into slavery, Traylor remained on the plantation on which he was raised, to work and raise his own family, and moved to Montgomery in 1928. Forced to leave his job at a shoe factory due to a disability, he became homeless, yet was granted refuge at night in shops in th city's African-American neighborhood on Monroe Street. His work was collected and championed by local artist Charles Shannon. Shannon had the foresight to hold Traylor's oeuvre in storage until reintroducing it to the artworld during the late 1970s, just as interest in Outsiders was growing.

Traylor drew scenes of both rural and urban daily life, inspired in equal parts by memory and imagination. Ranging from simple portraits of local denizens to complex, activated compositions the artist called "exciting events," these drawings tell stories by means of a reductive, formal sensibility in which many have recognized hallmarks of the modern. Men in top hats, women with arms akimbo, ferocious dogs, drunkards, children, stubborn mules, and lively domestic quarrels have inspired scholarly interpretations ranging from the plausible to the ridiculous. Traylor's brilliantly conceived tall tales, made for an audience of passers-by, will never lose their mystery.

Traylor’s Art has been widely exhibited in museums throughout the United States. Major solo exhibitions were held in 2019 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. and in 2013 at the American Folk Art Museum, New York. His work is in many public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the American Folk Art Museum, New York.

Banner caption: Bill Traylor at work, Montgomery, AL, ca.1940s, via the Alabama State Council on the Arts.

Martín Ramírez  (1895–1963)
Mexico

Born in Tepatilan, Jalisco, Mexico in 1895, Martín Ramírez was a rancher and a family man, until poverty and political violence drove him to California in search of migrant work in 1925. In 1931 Ramírez was diagnosed with catatonic schizophrenia and committed to state hospitals, first in Stockton, and then at the DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn. He began to draw in the 1930s, using unlikely materials culled from hospital supplies. Erroneously labeled a chronic mute, Ramírez flourished as an artist until his death in 1963, producing an impressive body of over 300 large-scale, mixed-media drawings. This oeuvre would have been lost if not for the advocacy of Dr. Tarmo Pasto, a Sacramento psychiatrist who met the artist after his move to DeWitt. Pasto offered him encouragement, some supplies, and later archived and exhibited his work.

Ramírez’s creative ingenuity was staggering. Patching together long, rectangular sheets of thin operating-table paper with mashed potatoes and spit, he drew with pencil, crayon, charcoal made from burned matchsticks. He made paint by chewing on colored newsprint, then spitting it into homemade bowls of hardened oatmeal. His isolated figures and scenes are often dramatically framed by his signature proscenium device: lively gauchos from the Mexico of his youth, stately Madonnas, trains disappearing into underworld tunnels, animals, a lone figure seated in contemplation, possibly a self-portrait. Onto more complex works, he layered collaged images from print sources. Recently discovered drawings made in the final years of his life reveal a bolder use of color, and riskier, more abstract compositions driven by his confident, undulating line.

Ramírez’ drawings have been exhibited widely in museums, most notably in solo exhibitions at the American Folk Art Museum, New York (2007, 2009), the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid  (2010) and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2017). His art is in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the American Folk Art Museum, New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Madge Gill (1882–1961)
United Kingdom

Born Maude Ethyl Eades in London's East End to a single mother, Gill was placed in an orphanage at the age of 9. Eventually she married, but suffered further losses with the deaths of two of her four children, as well as the loss of one eye following a severe illness. Like many working class people of her generation, Gill turned to Spiritualism. At 38 she became a well-known medium, facilitating seances in partnership with her spirit-guide, “Myrninnerest,” who became the subject of hundreds of her post-card size drawings.  

Gill’s drawings have been in numerous important exhibitions including Parallel Visions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1992) and Dubuffet and Art Brut, hosted by the Kunst Palast Museum in Dusseldorf (2005). Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne.