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Engage your students as soon as they walk into your classroom with my best-selling, full-year bell-ringer set. Each day includes a unique and creative task. Topics include grammar, vocabulary, writing, and figurative language.  

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I’m a curriculum writer, literacy educator, and all around book lover with a passion for helping English teachers engage their students with creative, high-quality resources. My mission? To make teaching English a whole lot easier for you, teacher friend! 

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7 Creative Activities to Teach The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton

S.E. Hinton was only 15 when she started writing her classic novel,  The Outsiders. Now, over 50 years after its publication, Hinton’s coming of age novel continues to provide an impactful commentary on society. Year after year, many English teachers return to this story, each time glimpsing something new through the eyes of its memorable protagonist, Ponyboy Curtis. This has long been a favorite in the ELA classroom. Its dramatic and emotional plotline lends itself incredibly well to creative activities that make teaching The Outsiders  engaging year after year. Below are my 7 favorite activities for teaching S.E. Hinton’s classic.

1. Identity Activity

This first activity gets students to dig deeper into themes of identity in the novel. It challenges students to think about how identity is represented in The Outsiders  by teaching them to make connections to the way they view their own identities.

How this activity works:

On the day after students have read chapters 1-2 from  The Outsiders , I like to initiate this activity by putting up an identity-related poster on the classroom door. This gets students thinking about the idea of “identity” before they even sit down.

At the start of class, I explain that Ponyboy identifies himself as a greaser. Then, in small groups or as a whole class, I get students to discuss the important elements of identifying with this group (i.e. appearance, interests, actions, personality, etc.). Students should develop a list that may include such things as having long greased hair, fighting, committing crimes, being tough, carrying a switchblade, and showing loyalty, for example.

Students then get the chance to analyze their own identities. I have them consider what kind of group they associate with. I hang identity cards on the wall all around the room (football player, musician, academic etc.). Then, I explain that students should look around and have them choose one that they identify with the most. I always offer the option for students to create their own identity card as well as some may not feel connected to the pre-selected options.  It’s important to tell them that it doesn’t matter if they are alone in a group since perhaps the other people who identify with this group are simply not in this class!

To close the activity off, I like to start a whole class discussion using questions like…

• Which group in the class do you think your group has the least in common with? Why?
• Can you identify with more than one group? What other groups in this class activity do you identify with?
• What did you learn about identity through this activity?

2. Stereotypes

The second activity I use for teaching The Outsiders  will prompt students to dig deeper and empathize with the characters. This time, however, it is by deconstructing the stereotypes at the center of the novel. I usually do this activity after students have finished reading chapters 3 and 4.

I start this activity by putting up 5 pictures of strangers around the classroom. Then, in small groups, I get them to discuss assumptions they have about what their personalities would be like, what job they would have, etc. After they’re done this first part of the activity, I like to pause and provide students with the definition of stereotype: a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing. I have students discuss with their groups whether or not they stereotyped during this activity.

Then, I explain that in The Outsiders , the Socs and Greasers cannot get along with each other because they hold stereotypes. The Socs think the greasers are low-life thugs while the greasers think the Socs are rich snobs. I also explain that in these chapters, Cherry and Ponyboy, two people from completely different groups, are able to break down stereotypes and find common ground with one another.

As a second part of the activity, I have students try to find examples of Ponyboy’s shift in perspective. Below are a few possible responses that students might share:

• “It seemed funny to me that Socs – if these girls were any example – were just like us” (37).
• “I don’t know why I could talk to her; maybe for the same reason she could talk to me” (39).
• “It seemed funny to me that the sunset she saw from her patio and the one I saw from the back steps was the same one. Maybe the two different worlds we lived in weren’t so different. We saw the same sunset” (41).

I like to conclude this activity by starting a class discussion with questions such as “How do you think it feels to be stereotyped” and “What are the negative consequences of believing stereotypes?”

 3. Nothing Gold Can Stay

In chapter 5 of  The Outsiders , Ponyboy recites Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” The poem is referenced again later on in the novel when Johnny Cade says to Ponyboy, “Stay gold.” After students have read chapters 5 and 6, I get them to complete an activity centered around Frost’s poem to prepare them for the impact of Johnny’s memorable line.

For this activity, I put students into groups of 3 or 4. I hand out printed copies of Frost’s  “Nothing Gold Can Stay”  to each group, and I project a video of Ponyboy reciting the poem from The Outsiders movie, getting students to follow along.

I then go through the poem line by line, and I ask them questions that invite them to dig deeper into the poem’s meaning. For example, for the first line, I ask “What does nature’s first green mean” and “Why is it gold? Do you think Frost means the color gold? What else could gold symbolize/represent?” Students record their answers on a  brainstorming sheet,  and then once we’ve gone through each line, we discuss possible interpretations and lingering questions about the poem as a whole and its significance to the novel so far.

The idea of impermanence is central to Robert Frost’s poem—and to The Outsiders. As a final question, I ask students to reflect on things in their lives that will eventually change. I get them to consider how will they cope with these changes.

4. The Interview Activity

This activity is designed to be used for after students have read chapters 7-8 of The Outsiders . In these chapters, Ponyboy tells the reader about being interviewed by reporters while in the hospital visiting Johnny and Dally. Not much detail is provided on who is interviewed and what questions are asked, but the reader gets more insight into this in chapter 8 when Ponyboy says what information was included in the article.

I start this interview activity by putting students into pairs. Students will be using the information we have from the newspaper article for this activity, so I have them read the long quotation in the novel where Ponyboy describes the information included in the articles. Then, I get them to choose one of the characters listed below to be interviewed:

• Cherry Valance
• Darry & Sodapop
• Randy Adderson
• The School Principal

From the long quotation , they will infer what questions a local reporter might ask the character they’ve selected. Their questions should also be informed by their reading, and they must include responses from the interviewee. I encourage students to try and make this as realistic and professional as possible. I usually give each group some time to practice their written interview before performing it out loud in front of the class.

This activity is not only entertaining, but it will also force students to further invest themselves in the characters and the details of the novel!

5. Socs vs. Greasers Rumble

The Socs vs. Greasers rumble activity can be done after chapters 9-10 to get students thinking critically about the idea of the rivalry between Socs (East) and Greasers (West). In these chapters, the hostile relationship between the Socs and the Greasers comes to a climax with the planned rumble. Students will be exploring this rivalry using information from the whole novel.

For this activity , I put students into groups of four and label their table Greasers or Socs. I then tell the students that they are now looking at their new gang! Sometimes, I’ll even pit them against another specific group from the opposing gang for a little added fun.

Next, I have the groups complete an “East vs. West Rumble Assignment” where they answer distinguishing questions according to their assigned gang (Soc or Greaser). Students should be encouraged to “get into the character’s brain” and really pretend that they are a member of that gang to answer questions like “What are some things you dislike about the Socs / Greasers?” and “How would you react if a Soc / Greaser was insulting a member of your gang?” After they’re done, I get each group to share what they wrote with the rest of the class from the perspective of a Greaser or Soc. The answers are always mostly very negative towards the other gang as they are biased towards their own.

After students have shared, I tell them that they will now look at each gang objectively—not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts. They will share the biggest differences and similarities between the gangs and the gang members. Through this activity, it is always my goal for the students to realize that the gangs actually have a lot in common.

6. Wanted Poster

When I’m teaching The Outsiders,  I like to separate the last two chapters of the novel into two fun activities. The first is this wanted poster assignment.  Earlier in the novel, Ponyboy is involved in an altercation where his friend Johnny ends up killing someone, and Dally instructs them to get away and hide in an abandoned church until he comes for them. For the wanted poster activity, students will create a “Wanted Poster” for one of these two characters who were on the run. This is a fun activity that will allow students to show their understanding of key details surrounding these characters.

Using a graphic organizer,  students plan out their poster before they begin working on a good copy. I get students to focus on the following information:

• the full name of the character
• their nickname
• a physical description
• specific acts committed
• personality traits
• known hangouts/associates
• what to do if found
• a reward amount.

I also get them to include an image (either drawn or found), and I encourage them to be as creative as possible!

7. Outsiders Tattoos

This final activity for teaching The Outsiders  is one that students tend to really enjoy! Tattoos are not only something that is sure to spark your students’ interest, but they also lend themselves well to teaching about symbolism in  The Outsiders. 

I start this activity by asking my students to imagine that a character from  The Outsiders  decides to get two tattoos on his or her arm. Then, I get them to consider what they would choose based on what they know about the character. The character, the tattoo designs, and the explanation behind them are up to the students. However, the choices should be grounded by concrete details in the novel. Students get to draw the tattoos. I like to give them a tattoo worksheet for this with a bare arm graphic as a canvas.

To make this even more fun, I suggest putting the artwork up on the walls and turning the class into a full-on  Outsiders Tattoo Expo . Get students to go around and look at all the tattoos. Then, wrap up with a discussion on which tattoos each student liked and why!

I hope you found these 7 creative activities for teaching The Outsiders  helpful! If you are interested in more tips and resources for developing students’ reading skills in ELA, click here.

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Easily Plan your Unit on The Outsiders (+ Free Final Project)

• April 25, 2018

The Outsiders is an ideal book for the ELA classroom. Don’t you agree? The novel, about a teenage boy who questions the divisions – social, political, economical – of the society he’s trapped in, is wildly engaging for students. The voice is gripping, real, honest. Probably because the book was actually written by a teenager dealing with truly difficult experiences.

Like so many of our students.

Though the book is at a relatively easy reading level, it’s a great option for hooking kids who have defined themselves as non-readers. And it’s quite the platform for discussing things that matter to our kids – the ways they define themselves, the raging social divisions going on around them, the complexities of being a teenager.

If you’re lucky enough to get to add it to your curriculum, it lends itself to SO MANY wonderful creative activities! Here are ten to make your unit planning easy peasy. Sprinkle these in between your discussions and you’ll be set for a fabulous unit. And don’t miss the free final project, integrating STEM + ELA, at the end of the post.

#1 The Open Mind When you’re looking to get students thinking deeply about characters, consider an activity I call “The Open Mind.” Either assign students a character, or let them choose one they are most interested in. Then ask them to go inside that character’s head, creating a page of sketchnotes that go deep with the relationships, crucial life events, dreams, and developments relating to that character. Ask them to include several quotations.

#7 Peacemakers Presentations Ponyboy is a peacemaker. Despite all that he has been through, he builds bridges. One great extension activity would be to have students research other peacemakers, creating a wall of peace in your classroom with visual displays on great leaders of peace throughout history.

Suggest people like:

• Mahatma Ghandi
• Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Nelson Mandela
• Desmond Tutu
• Malala Yousafzai
• Aung San Suu  Kyi
• Jane Addams

#8 “This I Believe” Essay for Ponyboy

You know how I feel about PBS’ “T his I Believe” curriculum (LOVE). Writing personal belief essays is a great activity with any class, but it also functions well as an activity for a literary character. Ponyboy has a strong mind of his own, and his beliefs get clearer and clearer as the book progresses. Asking him to write a “This I Believe” essay in the style of the PBS radio series, focusing in on one crucial belief with lots of specific, detailed anecdotes and examples to support the power of that belief, would be a great activity for an Outsiders unit.

#9 Bring in a Touch of Transcendentalism

Ponyboy walks his own road. It’s not too hard to connect his story to the transcendentalist movement. I especially like to bring in one quotation by Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Ask students to consider the meaning of this quotation, and how the different characters in the book stack up to it. Who is willing to let their views change when confronted with new ideas and circumstances? Who grows instead of stagnating? What characters cling to their consistency and small-mindedness?

#10 Create the App Final Project

Particularly if you’ve already experimented with the critical thinking required for One-Pagers and This I Believe essays, you may wish to do a creative final project for the novel rather than an essay. Build a bridge to the ever-popular themes of STEM by launching your students into an app creation project. Have them imagine they are Ponyboy, creating an App that would help real people break down the barriers between them. You can download this final project completely free here .

I’ll help you find the creative ELA strategies that will light up your classroom. Get ready for joyful teaching!

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HI! I love this so much! Just wondering if you have the template for the Open mind activity that you would be willing to share? Thanks!

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21 The Outsiders Activities for Middle Schoolers

September 6, 2022 //  by  Katherine Monsen

I remember reading The Outsiders in middle school and while it was okay, I think that it would have been more engaging if there were more activities done with it, aside from the written comprehension questions and essay. Some are free and some aren't, so you may have to pick and choose, but in my opinion, they are all fabulous resources that I would use with my students. Enjoy and happy reading!

1. Anticipation Guide

A quick anticipation guide can be a great pre-reading activity. It could be done independently or in a discussion format, depending on how much time you have for it. Personally, I would have students answer independently, then share their thoughts in a small group, but you could also make it a whole class activity.

Learn more: Poster 4 Teachers

2. 1960's Scavenger Hunt

This digital pre-reading activity is great because it introduces the time period to kids so they have a better understanding of what's happening while reading and also teaches online research skills. I feel like kids are out of touch with how things were before their time, so this activity can really ground them with relatable ideas. The link is for the word document, which I would shorten a bit, in the interest of time.

Learn more: Chloe Min

3. First Impressions

First impressions can often lead kids to stereotype without getting to know someone. In this pre-reading activity, students will get to discuss their thoughts on images, which hopefully leads to them realizing that we can't always judge a book by its' cover. It compares modern photos with some of the book characters too.

Learn more: Ms. SM'S English Classes

4. Pop! Characterization

Kids will be head over heels for this activity! Funko Pop! figurines are being collected like crazy, so this task will be easy to set up and get going for them. It's a creative way to do character analysis and engaging for kids that like to draw. They can choose their favorite characters to draw and write about or be randomly assigned.

Learn more: Laura Randazzo

5. Who Would You Choose?

It may look like this activity is just a character analysis graphic organizer, but there is also a second part. Students use their character notes and the book to decide which character they would choose to help them in certain situations and then have a class discussion to explain how they made their decision.

Learn more: How To Teach a Novel

6. Symbolism Bookmarks

Understanding symbolism is difficult for many kids and it is prevalent in literature. For an activity after students finish reading, this one is helpful. The slides are included, so just download and away you go. In the end, students will end up with a bookmark too.

Learn more: Slideshare

7. Hercules Book Report

When you go to the link, you'll be able to get a copy of the assignment sheet sent to your Google Docs. The original assignment gave 3 options on presentation formats, but I am partial to Bloom Balls, which takes the traditional book report and breaks it into manageable pieces while allowing for creativity. Any way students present the information, this is a great review activity.

Learn more: Mr. Hudyman

8. The Outsiders One Pager

Final book projects don't have to take an extended period of time to complete. This one-pager can be done in 2-3 class periods and still requires in-depth analysis and creativity. The final product can be used as an eye-catching classroom display. I like how it asks kids to analyze the book in a unique way.

Learn more: Teach Sparkle Pop

9. Activity Pack

If you're looking for a full unit of activities that just need to be copied, then look no further. This downloadable book has everything you need, broken down by chapter. You can also get a printed copy or 30 copies of the book along with the activity pack. If you have the budget for it, then this will be a lifesaver.

Learn more: Prestwick House

10. Novel Unit

This is a free fabulous unit plan with all printouts included in pdf. It is from a school in Kentucky and includes everything you need, including standards and discussion questions. The wanted poster activity seems like a fun activity that kids will be engaged in as well.

Learn more: Raechel Cowell, Terri Smith, Karen Johnson

11. Teaching the Outsiders for Engagement and Inclusion

This engaging package is unlike the others and really caught my attention. It makes kids think outside the box and brings diversity into the book, where there isn't any seen. These 4 activities will surely grab your students' attention.

Learn more: Nouvelle ELA

12. Crossword Puzzle

Sometimes we need a quick extension activity, review activity, or something for early finishers. Here you can customize the crossword puzzles and give students something meaningful to work on.

Learn more: Word Mint

13. Newspaper Writing

Looking for a creative writing activity ? Here's a great one! It comes with all the graphic organizers you need as well. It will take some time to complete, but can be classwork and homework.

Learn more: Teachers Pay Teachers

14. Comprehension Questions

These questions can be answered either in person or virtually on Google Classroom, which is great considering all that's going on in the world. There are over 100 questions included, so you'll have everything you need for the entire book.

Learn more: Simply Novel

15. Figurative Language

What a great resource this is. It includes video clips and digital activities for students to complete. They focus on 5 different figurative language components and provide everything you need, which makes this a great assignment.

Learn more: PBS Learning Media

16. Storyboards

Students can create storyboards for 7 different activities, which include plot diagrams, themes, symbols and motifs, characters, conflict, narrative adaptation, vocabulary, and a wanted poster. I love that they allow for creativity without the demand for students to be artistic. Ponyboy Curtis would approve of these activities.

Learn more: Storyboard That

17. "Some Novel Ideas"

A veteran teacher shares her thoughts and activities she uses and includes links to explain activities or provide the files she mentions. Her introduction to the activities is so relatable as well.

Learn more: Some Novel Ideas

18. Collaborative Poster

This activity is in response to Robert Frost's poem "Nothing Can Stay Gold". Students will answer why Ponyboy reads this poem in the book and then students will get to each color a piece that will end up being assembled into one poster. This is such a creative activity!

Learn more: Study All Knight

19. Vocabulary Activities

Unlike some vocabulary activities , this one is text-dependent and utilizes text-based sentences, questions, and definitions. It would be beneficial in a digital classroom as well. It can be done in a little bit of time each day.

Learn more: Teacher Created Materials

20. Conflict Foldable

This activity is a bit more basic, but still teaches a valuable lesson about the types of conflict seen in The Outsiders. Students are asked to find scenes in the book that demonstrate each type of conflict.

Learn more: Think. Live. Be... Positive

21. Characterization Quick Write

I saved my favorite activity for last. The author randomly assigned characters, which is probably the quickest way to begin. There is a graphic organizer to complete as planning for the final product. This is definitely an activity that will grab the attention of most kids.

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The Outsider Art Fair Returns, in Top Form

On the fair’s 30th anniversary, a question hangs in the air: Has this genre been absorbed by the mainstream? What is ‘outsider’ when its greatest talents are in the canon?

By Roberta Smith

It has been two years since the Outsider Art Fair last gathered, over 60 galleries strong, at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Manhattan. But now it’s back and the atmosphere is, not surprisingly, celebratory.

Dealers are happy to see each other again. Many participants are showing new material, works that are not well known or completely unknown. Ask them. And the more familiar works by anointed masters look fantastic in the bigger booths near the entrance: James Castle, Joseph Yoakum, William Hawkins, Martín Ramírez. These booths belong to veteran galleries like Fleisher/Ollman (Booth A5) , Carl Hammer (B6), Hirschl & Adler Modern (B8) and Ricco-Maresca (A11) that are responsible for building the field, and part of outsider history too.

Yet at the same time, as with so many things post-Covid, the fair feels different, maybe a little tense. Where is all this going? This is the fair’s 30th anniversary; it has been a tremendous success and all things concerning outsider art seem to be in motion, but is it simply going to be absorbed by the mainstream?

Its very definition has become more and more elastic, its separation from the “insider” art world blurred. What exactly is an outsider artist — who typically works in isolation without training and very little exposure to art — when the phenomenon is increasingly embraced by major galleries and museums and its greatest talents have entered the canon? It has become de rigueur for even non-major contemporary art galleries to represent at least one or two outsiders, as do relative newcomers to the fair like Nicelle Beauchene (B10 ), James Fuentes (D12) , Fierman (A9) and Situations (A10) .

Outsider art could not be stopped. Once its greatness — and its market potential — was understood, the insider art world opened the flood gates and here we are. You could say that the outsider fair is fighting back by going a bit elastic itself in ways that will probably be debated — at least until 2023.

Field Trip: Psychedelic Solution, 1986-1995

The most visible sign of that elasticity is the exhibition “Field Trip: Psychedelic Solution, 1986-1995,”) the largest of four curated displays instigated by Andrew Edlin, the fair’s owner. It expands the outsider art category to include the similarly marginalized genre of psychedelic art — paintings, drawings and posters — that flourished in the Bay Area starting in the 1960s. Such material was the focus of Psychedelic Solution, a gallery known for its groundbreaking exhibitions, founded in the West Village in 1986 by Jacaeber Kastor, a West Coast transplant. The homage has been organized by Fred Tomaselli — himself the creator of some quite beautiful, trippy art. It contrasts color-oriented works like Joe Coleman’s recent portrait of Hunter S. Thompson and the abstractions of Olga Spiegel with a host of ink drawings, exuding varying degrees of intricacy and obsession by the likes of Robert Crumb, Bruce Conner, Jean Conner and less familiar artists like Peter Spoecker, Rick Shubb and Kastor himself, seen in a marvelously overgrown collaboration with his mother, Sue Kastor.

Shrine Gallery

Acting on the slightly self-serving knowledge that an art dealer’s contribution to art history is frequently lost, Scott Ogden, Shrine’s owner and guiding spirit, has mounted a tribute to the outsider art dealer Luise Ross, who had a gallery in New York from 1982 to 2013, during which she — and others — were probably somewhat overshadowed by the formidable Phyllis Kind. This show is most interesting for early uncharacteristic works by Mose Tolliver and Minnie Evans, whom Ross was among the first to champion, along with Gayleen Aiken, the great undersung narrator of her own life. Paralleling the show, the gallery has assembled an online archive from Ross’s files featuring posters, announcements, letters and a timeline.

Portrait Society Gallery of Contemporary Art

In essence, this group show stars the relatively unknown Della Wells, an amazing collagist born in 1951 who seems to take Romare Bearden as a point of departure. Working with small shards cut or torn from magazines she makes dense, sparkling and mosaic-like urban landscapes that are frequently occupied by a stylishly dressed woman. The results resemble Cubism accelerated for modern times. Wells’s backgrounds — especially her choppy blue skies — are often punctuated with small images, which make the air seem charged with memories.

Hill Gallery

In a section devoted to the work of Ralph Fasanella, the standout is a rare full-length portrait that should be in a museum. Ever the populist, Fasanella favored crowd scenes, but in “Seated Woman in a Yellow Dress,” from 1954, he gives us a regal Black woman lost in thought with a relative simplicity and clarifies his love of color and pattern. Also here are Fasanella’s small close-up portraits of subway riders, distinctive New York faces from midcentury, some of whom are dozing.

Bullet Space

The art of Melvin Way was discovered by Andrew Castrucci, the founder of Bullet Space, and introduced to the public at the first Outsider Art Fair. Way is a great artist undeterred by mental illness and his insistence on remaining homeless. His small ink drawings — nearly 30 of which are on view — are at once mysterious and highly suggestive. Their pulsing lines and numbers resemble a merger of mathematical equations, molecular models and computer circuitry as well as atomic structures — they also seem to chart the energy of thought itself.

Forest Grove Preserve

This nonprofit land preserve located in Sandersville, Ga. — a first-time participant here — devotes its limited display space to the peripatetic, relatively unknown art of Owen Lee (1922-2002). Into its also tiny booth at the fair, it has packed enough different kinds of works to be a group show. Most involve some colorfully opulent combination of painting, drawing and collage with an irrepressible vibrancy and resemblances to textiles being the through line.

ArTech Collective

Another first-timer to the fair, this Bronx nonprofit provides support for artists with disabilities. It is showcasing the relatively unknown work of Rayed Mohamed and Bin Feng. Influenced by Chinese landscape painting, Bin’s paintings on paper exude confidence and promise. Mohamed’s efforts — also painting on paper — are more developed and distinctive: expanses of saturated color built up from — or embedded with — small repeating marks that suggest maps, battle plans or a private language on the loose.

Norman Brosterman

One of the fair’s most singular artifacts is a dozen or so pages from a small handmade booklet dated 1866 whose maker is as yet unidentified. Its wry ink drawings and fine script recount the story of a formerly enslaved family and their former owners after Emancipation reversed their fortunes. The smiling Black family prospered while the frowning whites, having lost substantial (human) property, fell on hard times, sometimes finding employment as nannies for their former servants.

Bruce Bickford

The fair’s smallest curated exhibition, organized by the artists Eric White and Aaron Guadamuz, features the drawings of Bruce Bickford (1947-2019), an artist and animator. But it centers on Bickford’s personal obsession with the mystery-horror television series “Twin Peaks.” It is represented here by a detailed miniature model of the town, which was actually pieced together from locations around Los Angeles and Washington State — including but not limited to the town of Twin Peaks. Devotees of the series will recognize such landmarks as the Falls, the Gazebo and the Great Northern Hotel. The rest of us can savor the tenderness of the artist’s touch, the weathered palette and the lack of straight edges that, fittingly, give the place a life of its own.

Lindsay Gallery

Although not well-known as an outsider veteran, this Columbus, Ohio, gallery has been around for 24 years. Its roster is especially impressive for paintings of the enigmatic visionary, Morris Ben Newman (1883-1980) who claimed to be descended from Ethiopian royalty. In his luminous landscapes, the forms of trees, houses and terrain are naïve but united by lavish paint-handling that is a hallmark of a great artist.

Outsider Art Fair

March 3-6, Metropolitan Pavilion, 125 West 18th Street, Manhattan. 212-337-3338; outsiderartfair.com .

Roberta Smith , the co-chief art critic, regularly reviews museum exhibitions, art fairs and gallery shows in New York, North America and abroad. Her special areas of interest include ceramics textiles, folk and outsider art, design and video art. More about Roberta Smith

Arts & Culture | January 31, 2023

S.E. Hinton Is Tired of Talking About ‘The Outsiders.’ No One Else Is

The author reflects on her classic 1967 novel, its 1983 film adaptation and its legacy today

Patrick Sauer

History Correspondent

In late October 2022, a big-time streaming star returned to the city where it all began for him. Ralph Macchio (most recently of “ Cobra Kai ” fame) was in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to promote his memoir, Waxing On: The Karate Kid and Me . Hosted by Magic City Books , the live conversation in the Art Deco auditorium at Will Rogers High School featured another pop culture icon: S.E. Hinton , the writer whose teenage words would forever be emblematic of young adult literature and whose most famous creation, The Outsiders , helped launch Macchio’s career some 40 years earlier.

Prior to the event, Hinton was quietly going about her business, wandering the school’s halls absent-mindedly. “It was funny when I first came into the building,” she said near the end of a phone conversation last Halloween, a week and a half after her appearance with Macchio. “It’s been a long time, so I was kind of looking around … and a woman came up and asked me, ‘Is this your first time inside the school?’ I said, ‘No, not really.’”

More than half a century ago, Susie Hinton (soon to be known by her gender-neutral pen name) was a student at Will Rogers, where she received a D in creative writing because class assignments were nowhere near as important to her as working out the plot and characters of The Outsiders . The story would come to define her life—even though these days she would rather discuss just about anything else.

“I am very tired of talking about [it],” says Hinton, now 74. “I don’t give speeches about it anymore. The thought of getting into it one more time is almost paralyzing. You’re lucky. This may be the last interview on The Outsiders I’ll ever give. … Oh god, for once, I’d like to discuss Rumble Fish .”

While Rumble Fish is certainly a fine book (and a terrific artsy film ), it isn’t ranked 32nd in PBS’s “ The Great American Read ” poll of the top 100 English-language novels. Over its 56-year lifespan, The Outsiders has sold more than 15 million copies , been published in more than 30 languages and never gone out of print. The 1967 book is a foundational text in the young adult fiction canon, and the 1983 movie version (featuring Macchio as 16-year-old Johnny Cade) plays an outsized role in bringing tourists to Hinton’s lifelong home of Tulsa.

Hinton has nine books to her name , from children’s picture books to a horror novel to a collection of intertwined short stories with adult characters to the coming-of-age works that built her literary career. But none of the others matches the ongoing cultural phenomenon that is The Outsiders . It’s still an English class staple, taught (and occasionally banned ) in middle and high schools across the country. The heartfelt movie adaptation has staying power, too. One of its ramshackle filming locations, the Curtis brothers’ home, opened to the public in 2019 as the Outsiders House Museum . And in 2021, the film underwent a 4K restoration that reinstated several beloved scenes from the book that failed to make the original cut.

Hinton may have said all she has to say about The Outsiders , but it remains an American classic, as relevant and beloved today as when it was published more than five decades ago.

The origins of The Outsiders

Writing was an oasis from a rough upbringing Hinton rarely mentions but did describe to the New York Times in 2005. As author Dinitia Smith wrote:

Ms. Hinton’s, father, Grady, was a door-to-door salesman, her mother, Lillian, an assembly-line worker. “My mother was physically and emotionally abusive,” Ms. Hinton said. “My father was an extremely cold man.”   It’s clearly a difficult admission to make, and one she has almost never made. The family attended a “fundamentalist, hellfire and brimstone” church, she said. “It turned me off religion.”

By the time she was 15, Hinton had already been churning out stories and poems for eight years. She wrote about what she knew: the ongoing battles between the haves and have-nots. In interviews over the years, Hinton described herself as an observer who grew up in North Tulsa “greaser” (slang for their greased-back hairstyles) territory but wasn’t beholden to any one group. She was a tomboy who loved to read and yearned for honest teenage representation.

The genesis for The Outsiders was an incident in which a friend of Hinton’s was jumped by a carload of upper crust “Socs” (short for “Socials”) and beaten up for being a greaser. The escalation in the high school cliques’ long-running rivalry fueled a creative burst that found the 16-year-old finishing the first draft in a week in 1966.

“What I was talking about was real,” Hinton says. “Books at that time for teenagers were ‘Mary Jane goes to prom,’ but [they] didn’t include sneaking in the liquor, which was the main point. Nobody was writing about what was going on in my high school: the social and class warfare.”

The Outsiders is a coming-of-age novel told through the eyes of 14-year-old Ponyboy, the youngest of the three orphaned Curtis brothers. He’s a sensitive, Robert Frost -reciting soul whom Hinton once described as “the closest I’ve come to putting myself into a character.” She aimed for realism, so the Socs and greasers smoke and drink, chase girls, and fight.

The book covers two weeks in the chaotic lives of Ponyboy and his best friend, Johnny. The plotting is concrete and relatively sparse. In short order, Johnny kills a Soc who was trying to drown Ponyboy, forcing the greaser friends to go on the run. Seeking shelter in an abandoned church, the boys bond over cigarettes, sunsets and a yearning for life without socioeconomic unrest. Deciding to return home to the face the music, the outlaws become heroes, rescuing children from a burning building at great personal cost.

By the book’s end, three characters are dead, including Johnny and Dallas Winston, a rebellious East Coast transplant who goes down in a hail of police bullets. The violence is frank, as is the utter lack of nurturing adult figures. But what stands out is how much these tough, wrong-side-of-the-tracks teenagers care for one another. They share a depth of feeling and a fraternal love among young American men that hadn’t been displayed before Hinton put her experiences on paper.

“I’ve known many men in my life with an availability of compassion underneath that they’re afraid to show, which is not the case with Susie’s main characters,” says Rilla Askew , an author who has written multiple novels set in her home state of Oklahoma, including the award-winning Fire in Beulah . “They have a tenderness and a decency about them, and it’s probably not a coincidence that it was a young female author writing young male characters.”

Bringing the book to the public

Not long after Hinton finished the manuscript, a friend of a friend advised her to send it to an agent named Marilyn Marlow. In response, Marlow wrote that the novel, originally called A Different Sunset (other rejected titles include The Switch-Blade Boys and The Leather Jackets ), had “captured a certain spirit.” On Hinton’s last day of high school in 1966, she learned Viking Press wanted to publish her book. It came out in 1967—Hinton’s freshman year at the University of Tulsa—with “S.E.,” a gender-neutral name suggested by editor Velma Varner , on the cover. Susie Eloise went out and bought herself a Camaro.

The Outsiders: 50th Anniversary Edition

Celebrating 50 years of the novel that laid the groundwork for the young adult genre, this is the ultimate edition for fans of "The Outsiders."

Initially marketed as a dime-store paperback alongside books by pulp fiction writer Mickey Spillane and the like, The Outsiders saw sluggish sales. Eventually, Viking caught on that the book was selling well where teachers were teaching it. Students and educators kept sales growing year after year through word of mouth, proclaiming that this was the book in which teenagers could see themselves.

“I think The Outsiders is the biggest of all my books because I wrote it at the right time in my life,” Hinton says. “By the time I wrote [the companion novel] That Was Then, This Is Now four years later, I could well remember what it was like being 16, but it’s still not the same as being 16. The Outsiders still resonates because it captures how teenagers feel—the mix of over-the-top emotions and idealism.”

After years of turning down offers from film studios, Hinton eventually sold the rights to The Outsiders to Francis Ford Coppola , an Oscar-winning director in need of a hit. Soon, a large cast of fresh-faced young actors—a future “who’s who” of Hollywood—descended upon Tulsa. The movie would find a whole new audience for Hinton’s debut novel and permanently alter the city for the better.

Bringing The Outsiders to the screen

In 1972, Jo Ellen Misakian was a parent with a new job as a librarian at the Lone Star School in Fresno, California. She gave the book to her 13-year-old son, later telling the New York Times , “I had been so frustrated because the kids, the boys especially, didn’t read. Somehow, The Outsiders caught on.” Misakian decided the book should be turned into a movie, so she contacted a Fresno Bee newspaper columnist who pointed her to Parade magazine’s movie editor. The editor, in turn, suggested contacting Hinton, who never responded.

Undeterred, Misakian wrote a letter to Coppola, who had recently produced The Black Stallion , a 1979 film adapted from the classic 1941 children’s book. She pitched him on The Outsiders with an enclosed paperback copy of the novel. Luckily for her, she mistakenly sent it to his New York City office, where he received almost no fan mail. Coppola handed the book off to producing partner Don Roos, who found the cover illustration tacky and didn’t crack it for weeks, but eventually decided to give it ten whole pages on a flight to see if it was any good. Roos read it cover to cover. Not long after, he flew to Tulsa to meet with Hinton. She wasn’t dazzled by Coppola’s cinematic pedigree, including films like The Conversation , The Godfather and Apocalypse Now , but as Roos explained when The Outsiders was released in March 1983, “she likes horses and felt The Black Stallion showed we had some affinity for young adult fiction.”

Coppola began filming in March 1982, secure in knowing The Outsiders could be completed on the cheap. He’d just blown $26 million, a huge sum at the time, directing One From the Heart , a wayward musical that grossed a mere $636,796 at the box office and eventually bankrupted Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios . The director found salvation in the Socs and the greasers, once saying , “I used to be a great camp counselor, and the idea of being with half a dozen kids in the country and making a movie seemed like being a camp counselor again. It would be a breath of fresh air. I’d forget my troubles and have some laughs.”

A wide-net call that auditioned virtually every known Hollywood actor— a grueling process for all—produced a cast that is, in hindsight, remarkable for its talent: Matt Dillon, Tom Cruise, C. Thomas Howell, Macchio, Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez and Diane Lane. The nimble, stripped-down nature of shooting The Outsiders allowed for a lot of back and forth and a lot of down time, creating a real bond between the actors (or the greasers, anyway).

“It always does something when you take a group of people out of their own element and stick them in a new space. It forces them to turn to each other for support,” says 56-year-old Howell , who played narrator Ponyboy Curtis and will soon appear in the Netflix series “ Obliterated .” “On the weekends, we were playing football and basketball against the Socs. Coppola set it up in good nature, but subconsciously and psychologically, it was creating a real competitive atmosphere and a dislike that wasn’t malicious by any means but definitely gave us a needed sense of rivalry.”

Photojournalist David Burnett saw the insular vibes firsthand after being asked to take publicity stills. Photos that weren’t used for promotion at the time were placed in a reject box and stashed away in a file cabinet. Some 35 years later, Burnett, now 76, heard about the opening of the Outsiders House Museum in Tulsa and offered to dig up and donate some snapshots. This, in turn, led to Burnett’s new book, The Outsiders: Rare and Unseen , a collection of long-shelved stills of the bright young cast. Burnett, whose illustrious career has taken him all over the globe, shooting events like the liftoff of Apollo 11 , the Iranian Revolution and a Bob Marley tour , has fond recollections of his week in Oklahoma.

“It was a very low-key operation, so I just hung around, and every time an actor had a break, I’d ask them for five minutes to get a few shots,” he says. “Nobody knew who these guys were, so they were happy to do it. They were all striving to do something interesting and career-building in ways they didn’t even realize.”

The Outsiders: Rare and Unseen

Photography by David Burnett. This book showcases never-before-seen photos from the set of the 1983 film.

Burnett adds, “If The Outsiders were filmed today, they would be bulkier and in peak physical shape, but what the movie called for was a cast of skinny, innocent-looking, young working-class boys. Tom Cruise didn’t even hide his gnarly teeth . [These were] different times. Being part of it was a real pleasure.”

Howell recalls Hinton’s presence as an important part of the process. She offered wardrobe and hairstyle tips, answered questions about Tulsa back in the day, gave personal insights, offered character motivations, explained the differences in the everyday lives of Socs and greasers, and generally acted as the group’s den mother. She still keeps in touch with most of her “guys,” which is why she acquiesced to Macchio’s overtures to join him on stage last fall.

Though neither Hinton nor Coppola received a screenplay credit—it went solely to Kathleen Rowell , an early drafter of the project—the duo shaped the story and the scenes to keep it authentic to the author’s world.

As a reward for getting the book into Coppola’s hands, Misakian and her Fresno community got their own early screening attended by cast members including Howell, Macchio and pop star-turned-Soc Leif Garrett . Misakian received a standing ovation, calling the experience a fairy tale—and her story didn’t end there.

In September 2021, the name “Jo Ellen Misakian” went up in lights on Tulsa’s Circle Cinema marquee, where the librarian appeared as a guest star at a special screening of the movie she made possible. Misakian also autographed the celebrity wall inside the Curtis brothers’ home, a gathering place for Hinton devotees that was rebuilt by a former hip-hop luminary repaying The Outsiders for helping to save his life.

Preserving The Outsiders ’ legacy

Located in North Tulsa’s Crutchfield neighborhood at 731 North St. Louis Avenue, the 1920s Craftsman bungalow looks more or less the same as it did when Coppola used it as the home of Darry, Sodapop and Ponyboy Curtis. It’s a simple one-story dwelling, a cream-and-white wooden abode featuring a concrete porch dotted with midcentury metal porch furniture to ride out those steamy Oklahoma nights. A rusty chain-link fence surrounds the modest property, where the 1949 Plymouth Special De Luxe driven by Two-Bit Matthews (played by Estevez) rests on the lawn and personalized donation bricks encourage guests to “ stay gold .”

In 2009, Danny Boy O’Connor , whose defunct hip-hop group House of Pain hit it big with “ Jump Around ” in 1992, was touring in Tulsa when inspiration struck. He paid a cabbie $100 to drive him around in search of Outsiders filming locations. Discovering that the Curtis brothers’ house still existed led him to found the Delta Bravo Urban Exploration Team (“Delta Bravo” sounded less corny than “Danny Boy,” he thought), a group of online friends who make pilgrimages to pop culture and true crime sites to photograph them for posterity. It was a way to reconnect with his life, which had spiraled into the abyss after House of Pain broke up in the mid-1990s.

O’Connor was born into a rough Brooklyn life. His father was in and out of prison and would eventually die drunk on the street, he says. After remarrying, his mother moved her son to Los Angeles for a fresh start, but two years later, his alcoholic stepfather died of cirrhosis of the liver. It was the type of upbringing that would culminate in the hip-hop artist burning through millions of dollars on alcohol and drugs.

The young O’Connor found solace in The Outsiders ’ story of orphans and brotherly sensitivity. Unable to afford the house when he first encountered it, he sprang into action and bought it when he saw it go up for sale in 2015.

“If I didn’t save the [house], I knew I was going to be miserable for the rest of my life,” says O’Connor. The property was in terrible condition, he recalls, likening its look to the home of the serial killer in David Fincher’s Se7en . He didn’t have the $150,000 it would take to turn it into a livable home; despite the fact that his only memorabilia from the film was a poster, he decided to turn it into a museum. Preserving the Curtis brothers’ home became his reason for being, a chance to give back and be of service in his new surroundings. Before he undertook the project, however, he needed to connect with Hinton.

“Danny called and asked if we could meet up. I didn’t know anything about his musical career, or even what he looked like, but I knew by the end of lunch that we were going to end up close friends,” Hinton says. “He asked if I had any interest in buying the house. I said, ‘God no, I can barely keep up with my own house,’ but I told him to go ahead if he wanted to.”

Hinton gave more than her blessing. She made the first large donation, $10,000, and provided O’Connor with a brown leather jacket worn by both Dillon and Howell in the film. O’Connor’s original estimate was that it would take six months to get the museum up and running. It took more than three years and $175,000, but for all involved, it was a labor of love.

Today, the 1,400-square-foot interior is filled with furniture, memorabilia, paintings, foreign editions, Burnett’s photographs, multiple switchblades, wardrobe pieces like Estevez’s sleeveless Mickey Mouse shirt (and a faux chocolate cake to boot), and Ponyboy’s desk. An obscure period detail honors another famed Oklahoman: a 1958 record album of Mickey Mantle’s favorite hits (fortunately not sung by the Yankee slugger).

In August 2019, the Outsiders House Museum officially opened its doors, welcoming school groups during the week and the general public on the weekends. O’Connor estimates that some 20,000 people visited in 2022—a sizable uptick from the previous pandemic-plagued years. Private tours allow docents like Donnie Rich to explain their personal connections to the book. As a teenager who didn’t do the reading for class, Rich says he knocked on Hinton’s door in an unsuccessful attempt to secure her help with a book report on what he calls the “Oklahoma Bible.” The museum also hosts concerts, movie screenings and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. True Curtis brother diehards can even crash across the street at the Greaser Hideout Airbnb or, for the full experience, in the still-vacant lot where Macchio’s Johnny slept under a pile of newspapers.

“Danny has done a great job with the Outsiders House,” says Hinton. “People come from all over the United States, and even the world. He said teenage girls have walked in and burst into tears. It floors me.”

For O’Connor, the museum has been a life-changing experience, offering a sense of direction as well as a literal place to live. He relocated from Los Angeles to be the full-time keeper of The Outsiders ’ flame. He was integral in the publishing of Burnett’s photo book and recently signed a contract with Penguin to write the film’s oral history. Nearly everyone from The Outsiders , extras and big stars alike, have dropped by the museum (excluding Cruise, at least so far). So have fanboys like musician Jack White, Leonardo DiCaprio (while filming Martin Scorsese’s upcoming Killers of the Flower Moon ) and the members of Green Day. O’Connor is such a fixture around Tulsa that Mayor G.T. Bynum gave him a key to the city.

Hinton’s life today

Apart from a few years spent in Northern California, Hinton never left Tulsa. She still lives in the house where she and her husband, David Inhofe, a software engineer by trade, raised their son, Nick Inhofe, who now works as an audio engineer in the movie business. She’s down to earth and not wild about discussing herself (Hinton makes it abundantly clear there will “never be a memoir”), but she also chats with fans on Twitter and in the neighborhood writ large. Tulsa provided all she ever needed, and she’s comfortably woven into the fabric of the community, walking unknown through the halls of her alma mater before bringing the local house down.

“I still get recognized sometimes at the grocery store. It’s not a J.D. Salinger situation. I haven’t got the temperament for that or the talent to deserve it,” says Hinton, adding dryly, “You might not know it from reading my books, but my sense of humor is a strong part of my personality.”

Teresa Miller can attest to Hinton’s fun-loving, grounded personality, as well as her central role in the local literary scene. In 1994, Miller founded the Center for Poets and Writers at Oklahoma State University-Tulsa. She spent two decades running it and hosting the PBS television show “ Writing Out Loud .” Along the way, she and Hinton became professional colleagues and close friends—but before they even met, Miller, 70, was thrilled that somebody had upended the standard perception of who Oklahomans are.

Miller explains, “I come from a little Cherokee community called Tahlequah and began working in Tulsa before moving here decades ago, so I’ve lived both a rural and urban life. Growing up, Oklahoma was known for the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical and The Grapes of Wrath , both of which my father hated because of the Okie stereotypes.”

She adds, “ The Outsiders changed that. It took the Oklahoma story to a different level. [Hinton] showed Tulsa as a regular city with regular city problems and handled it in a unique but universal way. She wrote a [novel about] Oklahoma that had nothing to do with singing cowboys or the Joads . It didn’t eliminate the stereotypes … but The Outsiders and Susie’s subsequent books changed how the outside world viewed us and even how we viewed ourselves.”

It certainly changed how Okie transplant O’Connor sees himself. It’s become his life’s work—and he’s just getting started. Renovations are underway at the iconic DX gas station featured in the film, and he’s aiming to raise enough money to restore other abandoned locales like the Rexall Drug Store . He also has designs on something bigger for his favorite author.

“I want to open, for lack of a better name, the S.E. Hinton Museum, which she absolutely hates,” says O’Connor. (Hinton replies, “I’ll believe it when I see it.”)

The former hip-hop star adds, “I was lost after House of Pain. [Hinton’s] brilliant work gave me purpose. Bringing her legacy to the people is what I’m meant to do.”

If O’Connor’s vision ever comes to fruition, it will honor Hinton’s full literary career, not just the book that put her on the map. At the end of the day, though, the author understands the significance of The Outsiders .

“I’m known best for the first thing I’ve written, but it’s better than not being known at all,” she says. “I just don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

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Patrick Sauer | | READ MORE

Raised in Billings, Montana,  Patrick Sauer  is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer who primarily covers sports, history and sports history. His work has appeared in the New York Times , Smithsonian , Defector , Los Angeles Times , Montana Quarterly and countless publications that no longer exist.

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The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton Poster Project

The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton demonstrates the value of family and true friendship as a rivalry amongst the Greasers and the Socs reaches a boiling point in this unforgettable coming-of-age journey.

Ponyboy, Sodapop, Dally, All Unforgettable

Ponyboy, Sodapop, Dally…these are just some of the names of the unique cast of characters that makes up The Outsiders. If you’ve ever read this timeless novel The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, then these names stick with you forever.

I have taught this book a couple of times and no matter the age, whether middle or high school, the school’s location, from rural to metropolitan, all students end up loving this book.

Outsiders of Society

It’s a classic tale of one side of the streets versus the other. The privileged vs the down-and-outs. The Greasers make up the kids who have had a rough life. They are the “outsiders” of society, who have formed their own group. They dress “tuff,” with slicked back hair and too-tight t-shirts. They carry switchblades and commit crimes. The Socs, or the Socials, wear madras shirts, drive expensive cars, and are always getting away with whatever crime they commit. Both of them have one basic need: to belong.

The Greasers are their own family in a way and so are the Socs. They support each other. Their friendships know no limits, not even the limit of killing someone to protect one of their own.

The Socs and the Greasers are young boys, with hard exteriors who fit into a mold that their society has made for them.

The Outsiders Discussion Ideas

This year, I am just now wrapping up teaching The Outsiders to my eighth graders. We have had many discussions on so many themes prevalent in the novel. Here are some that we have discussed:

• Identity and the Need to Belong
• Stereotypes of Cliques
• Limitations of Friendship
• Being Pigeonholed into One Group
• Appearances are Deceiving
• Does Belonging Contribute to Happiness?  

I believe one of the reasons students end up cherishing this book so much has to deal with how they connect to the idea of groups and stereotypes. Every school has groups, whether it’s the athletes, the boarders, the academics….the list goes on and on. Every student feels like they may fit into one of those groups or a couple of those groups. There are some kids, however, who feel they may not fit in any of them. These kids can relate to The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton as they may feel that they are an outsider themselves. 

Each of these groups holds stereotypes that other groups think about them. For example, one group may believe the academic group always reads, studies, and wears glasses. Academics may believe the gamers only play video games and never study. 

As a class, we discussed how some stereotypes can be true, and how some individuals can shatter the stereotypes of that group. We delved into how some people don’t fit into a mold of any of those groups and may feel alone. We talked about how to be friends with others, despite feeling different than them and having different interests.

I just love this book! It has so many layers to it that can offer up discussions for days and days!

Every time I teach this novel, we do a quick project. Sometimes, I’ve assigned it as a partner project and sometimes it’s done individually.

Nonetheless, this project is always a winner with my classes. 

Students either create a group or choose a group that they feel they belong to. Some students like to morph individual groups into one for this project or completely create their own. Then, they delve into the various stereotypes of the group, what the group normally does together, what they wear, and what the group is known for. 

Students then create a poster that displays this group. This year, due to hybrid learning, students created a “poster” using one Google Slide. 

Once my eighth graders presented their groups, I learned about new cliques I had never heard of from The Hot Cheeto Girls to the Stock Market Gang. It was a chance for me to learn even more about my students’ interests and what bonds them together. There was even a Rob Lowe Fan group formed from showing my students the movie characters of the book! It was fun for both the students and myself. 

We have made The Outsiders Google Slide project FREE for you. Just click!

If you’ve never taught The Outsiders or even read it, I highly recommend this novel. There are so many topics to discuss and activities to complete throughout the reading of this book. It will be a favorite among your students for years to come. 

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Articles & Features

Art Beyond Boundaries. The Raw Appeal of Outsider Art

By Naomi Martin

“We are witness here to the completely pure artistic operation, raw, brute, and entirely reinvented in all of its phases solely by means of the artists’ own impulses.” Jean Dubuffet

An Enigmatic Label

The phenomenon of Outsider Art has gained tremendous popularity in recent years, featured in international auctions , galleries, fairs , and engendering an ever-increasing number of specialist collections. Its appeal is universal, and so is the controversy surrounding its exact definition – is Outsider Art a synonym for self-taught art or folk art? Does it stand for naïve art of faux naïf? The perimeters of the genre are certainly intricate to define, but today, the phrase feels clichéd since it has almost become an umbrella term encompassing all forms of art made by folks outside of the more mainstream, contemporary art sphere. It even has its own hashtag, #outsiderart , with more than a million posts on Instagram, fueling a worn-out misapprehension of what it actually represents.

Authentic Outsider Artworks transcend genres. They are often peculiar and whimsical, and they defy our own perceptions of art, with a raw and almost alien quality which cannot solely be explained by an absence of conventional art-schooling. One detail not up for debate is the fact that Outsider Art emerged from psychiatrists’ researches on asylum inmates in the early 20 th century, who discovered that creative expression could flourish beyond the pre-established conventions of art. In the 1920s, the world was thus introduced to a number of astonishing artworks, products of the uncanny and powerful products of a naïve creative strength, emerging from the channelling of a sincere and unbiased intuition.

Self-taught art is undeniably the category which overlaps the most with Outsider Art, as it alludes to artworks produced without prior artistic education or training, thus straying away from any particular style, or the standard definitions we have come to accept in the framing of fine art. But, unlike true Outsider Artists, the self-taught ones might just be enthusiastic amateurs, and may also have had more opportunities to visit museums, learn about art history and techniques via the internet or even by meeting with established artists. Outsider Artists on the other hand are creating without an audience in mind, and without any assumptions of style or aesthetic inclinations. Through their art they mirror their rawest and most powerful emotions, and often have no idea that their work could be seen by others – herein lies the most essential principle of the genre.

The term “Outsider Art” was first coined in 1972 by British writer and art historian Roger Cardinal , originally meant to stand as the English equivalent of “Art Brut”. But by the 1980s, the label had broadened, especially in the U.S., resulting in the ambiguity and sometime controversy surrounding the term today.

In the early 20 th century, two doctors produced highly influential writings on art created by patients in psychiatric hospitals, originally intended for medical research. Swiss psychiatrist Walter Morgenthaler was enthralled by the artworks of one of his long-term patients, Adolf Wölfli , which he analysed in his book A Mental Patient as Artist (1921); while German psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn documented and collected thousands of artworks by his patients in Artistry of the Mentally Ill (1922). The latter became a tremendous influence on the Surrealist movement and other artists of the time, in particular Jean Dubuffet.

Dubuffet was one of the most influential French artists of the post-World War II era. After studying Prinzhorn’s essays, he became utterly fascinated with the art of the mentally ill, which held, in his eyes, incomparable qualities and represented the purest form of artistic creation. Entirely immersed in the concept, Dubuffet found an inexhaustible source of inspiration for his own art, and founded the Compagnie de l’Art Brut in 1948, with one of Surrealism’s most acclaimed figure, André Breton.

With this organisation, Dubuffet sought to collect the works of these untrained artists, celebrating the raw quality untouched by academic rules and current trends with exhibitions and publications. He maintained that, because of its spontaneity and innocence, Art Brut was far superior to any other established genre marked by art-history. Although it might have been considered as such, Art Brut was not solely the art of the psychologically troubled. Many works were indeed produced by asylum inmates, but Dubuffet explained in his manifesto that mental illness was not a criterion. Art Brut was instead meant to encompass the artistic creativity of minds sheltered from external influences, able to produce spontaneous and immediate artistic responses to their surroundings.

“By this [Art Brut] we mean pieces of work executed by people untouched by artistic culture, in which therefore mimicry, contrary to what happens in intellectuals, plays little or no part, so that their authors draw everything (subjects, choice of materials employed, means of transposition, rhythms, ways of writing, etc.) from their own depths and not from clichés of classical art or art that is fashionable.” (Jean Dubuffet, extract from: L’art brut préféré aux arts culturels )

Over the years following the foundation of the Compagnie de l’Art Brut, Dubuffet continuously looked for the “outsider” artists that would produce the raw artworks he marvelled at. His collection grew considerably, and was eventually exhibited in the Museum of Decorative Arts of Paris in 1967, with approximately 700 works by 75 different artists. Dubuffet then donated the entire Art Brut collection – around 5000 pieces – to the city of Lausanne, Switzerland, and in 1976 the Collection de l’Art Brut was permanently established.

Roger Cardinal’s 1972 study of Art Brut which led him to coin the term “Outsider Art” was a significant milestone in the history of the genre, as it helped garner international attention and a new global following. A few years later, in 1979, Cardinal organised the exhibition Outsiders: An Art Without Precedence or Tradition at London’s Hayward Gallery, developing Dubuffet’s initial vision even further, by including the works of American artists such as Martin Ramirez and Henry Darger.

With this exhibition, Cardinal opened the door to more artists and thus challenged the stricter limits previously imposed by Dubuffet; Art Brut and Outsider Art merged into an international sensation, unifying a greater variety of artworks, but still retaining the same pioneering core and values. By the 1980s, the term “Outsider Art” stretched to include all kinds of works produced by marginalized artists, including those who had been previously labelled as Folk Artists.

Throughout the 1990s, the rise and recognition of Outsider Art became unquestioned. Mainstream museums and galleries started to pay attention to the genre, acknowledging its worth and accepting it as “serious” art. Most recently, a number of events solely dedicated to the works of Outsider Artists started to emerge, such as the eponymous Outsider Art Fairs of New York and Paris, and the representation of the genre in established exhibitions, most notably with the 55 th Venice Biennale or the retrospective on Henry Darger at the Museum of Modern Art of Paris.

Today, despite its misleading label, Outsider Art is booming. Pieces that would have gone for a few hundred dollars in the 1970s are now reaching six figures – Christie’s 2019 sale of Outsider and Vernacular Art even brought in over $4m, consolidating the idea that Outsider Art has now been accepted and recognised by the art market, from collectors to mainstream museums.

Raw, “uncooked” by the art world, Outsider Art continues to amaze and surprise today, as its boundaries are becoming more and more fluid. Minorities, migrants, disabled, mentally ill, self-taught – all these “outsiders” are essentially united by a powerful personal desire to create primarily for themselves, depicting without formal training entire worlds of their own, in the purest and rawest form. Outsider Art is here to stay, now considered a fundamental branch of the art historical canon and every bit an established insider of the art world.

Relevant  sources to learn more

Learn more about Outsider Art on the Outsider Art Fair website Nine Outsider Artists to know, by specialist Cara Zimmerman Read about Jean Dubuffet’s sculptures

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Outsider Art: The Projects to Know About Before They’re Lost to History

With The Keepers Project, David Clegg is documenting British art environments made by self-taught artists, allowing viewers to immerse themselves in a fast-vanishing world

A flint grotto filled with fantastical creatures; Italianate buildings recreated in concrete on a remote Welsh hillside; a garden crammed with enormous wooden constructions… The Keepers Project, a new online archive, details the rich seam of so-called “outsider art” sites tucked away in homes and outdoor spaces across the United Kingdom .

The tradition of untutored art is long established within Europe and in the United States : figures such as Henry Darger, Bill Traylor, and India’s Nek Chand are the subjects of major retrospectives and command impressive figures in the saleroom. Sales at January’s Outsider and Vernacular Art sale at Christie’s New York totaled $2,137,750.

“Outsider artists create original, direct, and deeply personal works that are often based on life experiences, religion, and popular culture… The work appeals in its honesty and its fresh perspective,” says Cara Zimmerman, Vice President, Head of Outsider and Folk Art at Christie’s, who oversaw the sale.

In Britain, outsider or self-taught art is less revered. David Clegg believes this does a disservice to the range and scope of the work being produced, and is contributing to its rapid disappearance. The East Sussex-based artist launched The Keepers Project in an attempt to turn the tide.

Part of the impetus for starting The Keepers Project was to show that there are amazing artists making work here and now—David Clegg

“The Tate’s website lists only one outsider art site in the U.K. ,” says Clegg. “There’s this idea that it isn’t really something we do here. Part of the impetus for starting The Keepers Project was to show that it is. There are amazing artists making work here and now.”

Clegg follows leads to arrange visits to each of the sites, interviewing the keepers—sometimes the original maker, often a guardian—in an attempt to discover the real-life stories behind their creation, accompanied by photographer Thierry Bal.

Related: Discover How to Invest in Outdoor Art for Your Garden

Previous documentation of such sites has often been scant, but by combining audio and transcripts directly from each keeper, with photographs sequenced in the order the sites are intended to be viewed, Clegg hopes to offer a fuller sense of each artist’s vision.

Bal says: “What I liked about this project is that it allowed us to immerse ourselves in the idiosyncratic worlds of the artists and to actually visit the places where they spent years of their time grafting and experimenting.”

Inspired by the Landscape

While often dismissed as the creations of eccentric loners, Clegg found the various sites to have “a far higher level of sophistication than most people would assume. They are more conceptually realized—and much more interesting.”

He cites the example of Rory McCormack, the artist behind a fenced-off grotto of flint sculptures on Brighton’s seafront. Wild rumors circulate about their mysterious creator, yet Clegg discovered a fisherman whose passion for Etruscan pottery and Neolithic and Greek art inspires him to build his own tributes out of the materials found in his coastal environment.

Related: Read About How Artist Tunji Adeniyi-Jones Evokes Feeling Through Figures

“Rory’s work definitely ties into a sort of landscape art. What he says about his work being ‘made of the beach’ could equally have been said by [sculptor] Richard Long—even Antony Gormley.”

It’s all about making something amazing out of nothing. Anyone can make art out of diamonds and butterfly wings—David Clegg

Clegg was impressed by the imaginative and playful way McCormack and others used found materials, from East Sussex’s “anarchist boatbuilder” Hamish McKenzie, who turns fighter plane parts into dramatic floating sculptures, to London’s “Lithuanian Chinese flamenco-dancing barrow boy” Ron Hitchins, who covered the walls and ceilings of his London home with his Modernist ceramics.

Liverpool’s Ron Gittins, meanwhile, transformed his modest house into a Roman villa complete with life-sized centurions made from pulped telephone directories and a chariot built from a rusting baby-carriage. “It’s all about making something amazing out of nothing,” says Clegg. “Anyone can make art out of diamonds and butterfly wings.”

Related: Explore the Colorful Artworks of Andrea Marie Breiling

Few of those featured identify as artists. McCormack describes himself simply as “a restless person with itchy fingers who couldn’t help but keep going.” But there is no doubt in Clegg’s mind that what they have created is art, a natural continuation of French artist Jean Dubuffet’s Art Brut, which he described as work created “from solitude and from pure and authentic creative impulses.”

The staggering work of Gerry Dalton—who filled his West London public housing home with handmade models of British buildings, busts of historical figures, and miniature tombs—was only discovered after he died in 2019. He had created all of it at night, in secret, purely for himself. “There is no sense of making a product, of making something for someone else,” Clegg says. “These people do what they do entirely for their own reasons, and that’s exciting to me.”

Related: Learn How to Find and Collect Work from Up-and-Coming Artists

But working outside mainstream culture comes at a price. While the fight to preserve Dalton’s home has been the subject of campaigning by prominent curators such as Hans Ulrich Obrist and former Tate Gallery director Sir Nicholas Serota, many of the other sites have yet to be afforded the same recognition. Upkeep is often left solely to relatives, some of whom are struggling to maintain them.

Vanishing Treasures

Joan Hillier, widow of Tony Hillier, talked to Clegg about her attempts to rehome her husband’s giant metal animals, originally designed for the couple’s Cambridgeshire garden. Redevelopment threatens the London house of Ben Wilson, renowned for his intricate paintings on blobs of chewing gum but less well-known as the creator of intriguing autobiographical wooden constructions that fill his garden.

And the relatives of John Fairnington Sr., who created a menagerie of concrete animals in his Northumberland home, spoke of their sadness at seeing his work fall into disrepair. Sometimes Clegg and Bal will be tipped off about a site only to find it has been demolished before they can get there. “These are unique spaces that are of their time and place, but they’re disappearing at a pace,” says Clegg.

Related: Immerse Yourself in the Playful, Poignant Sculptures of Polish Artist Przemek Pyszczek

He and Bal intend to keep adding to The Keepers Project and will shortly begin 3D scanning some of the sites. “The plan is to document the environments in a way that allows people to walk through them virtually, and hopefully to understand how all the spaces connect. It will allow people to make their own discoveries and experience a little of what it’s like to actually be there,” says Clegg.

He hopes they can afford these artists at least some posterity through The Keepers Project, which he sees as “an archive of things that are about to be lost.” It is a natural development of an idea that began with The Trebus Project, a huge collection of verbatim memories and insights given by people with dementia, for which Clegg was awarded a British Empire Medal by Queen Elizabeth II.

“Both projects stem from the same impulse—an attempt to capture something precious before it is lost forever,” he says.

thekeepersproject.com

Banner image: A Welsh hillside is the unlikely home of this Italianate landscape, constructed by Mark Bourne out of materials such as concrete and chicken wire. Image: Thierry Bal

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Art Brut and Outsider Art

Summary of Art Brut and Outsider Art

Driven by an unflinching creative intensity combined with a talent for rousing humanity's deepest desires and fears, Outsider Artists present a visionary interweave of the fabric of life. As a way to categorize the artwork that he loved made by introverted, isolated, and exceptionally imaginative characters, the French artist Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut, or "raw art"; also known as Outsider Art, this latter term provides the most succinct way to reference the artist within the movement. Although Dubuffet's own art sought to imitate freedom from societal constraints - both in subject and in technique - in the same way as the art that he admired and collected - his position and status within the art world makes him far from an Outsider Artist. In many ways, founding a movement in this case is the very antithesis to the art gathered within it. However, the grouping he championed does help to direct attention onto a body of art made by people who have no interest in self-aggrandizement or self-promotion. Outsider Artists usually experience some sort of revelatory moment, akin to a religious calling when they become "artists". They typically have no formal training within an art institution and exhibit in their work a sense of heightened connectivity within the intricate system of universal balance. Without having necessarily experienced tragedy, these artists hold within an acute awareness of the forces of darkness as well as those of light. The Outsider Artist deals incessantly with a war in mind (which is often mistakenly labeled as mental illness), always navigating emotional conflict in order to create outwards paths to find inner peace. The closest more conventional movement comparable is Surrealism , as the premise of the latter is also based on the power of the human unconscious. Indeed, as well as Dubuffet, other famous artists, including Picasso , heralded this work as inspirational. The Outsider Artist however does not feel the same impetus to share and disseminate ideas, often they only ask, humbly and without expectation, to be left quiet and uninterrupted to make art.

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

• As they were coined by theorists thinking in particular about the usefulness of the terms in relation to art and artists, the definitions Art Brut and Outsider Art are used in this article interchangeably. The term, Outsider Art, was introduced in 1972 (eight years after Art Brut) by the English academic, Roger Cardinal, and like Dubuffet he intended to shine a light on art made by artists usually untrained, living quietly, and possibly somehow sheltered. Related terms that are also introduced here, such as Folk Art, Naïve Art, and Neuve Invention, have some more specific characteristics and will not be used generally. Primitivist Art will be avoided, as this is bound to problematic social and ethnological dimensions.
• Outsider Artists almost always employ techniques of pattern, and obsessive repetitive design features. There is an attempt to create simple and satisfying order when they themselves are typically touched by an awareness of chaos. The repetitive mark making also reveals a profound understanding of the passage of time, of the continuum of a cycle, and the eternal linkage between past, present, and future. The tendency towards the repetitive is highlighted not only in endless similar marks made in drawings, but also through the acts of sewing, knotting, and binding.
• Within Art Brut we discover a rare understanding of the key paradox that resides at the heart of being human; that is, that as individuals we are at once nothing and everything (one tiny fleck in a vast cosmos, and also with only one point of reference). Through the ongoing use of portraiture within this movement, Outsider Artists expose an effortless personal knowledge of philosophical connectivity that most people must study at length and even then do not really grasp the concept.
• Materials used by Outsider Artists are not necessarily art materials. It is rare for artists categorized in this way to make straightforward oil paintings or sculptures from bronze or clay. More typically, and thus showing an unusual and robust resourcefulness, "outsiders" use whatever they can get their hands on, be it mud, blood, crayons, or a simple ink pen. This immediacy of material exposes the intense need to create, and furthermore illustrates that the works made are very much extensions of an ongoing reflective selfhood, rather than separate art works.
• Religion and spirituality play a huge part in the oeuvres of most Outsider Artists. Whilst Madge Gill signed her works with the name of her spiritual medium rather than with her own, it is often the case that artists working in this realm incorporate biblical quotations, ancient hieroglyphs, and indeed their very own languages into the work that they produce. The result is clarification that such art really does provide insight to another world, to a dimension beyond reality from which there is much to learn.
• There is a big question, perhaps even a problem, as to who should be termed an Outsider Artist, especially because many artists work very close to the edge of this definition; Niki de Saint Phalle , Hilma af Klint , Yayoi Kusama , and Joseph Cornell (with Kusama and Cornell interestingly having had a relationship) are all good examples. It seems that extreme rawness in art, and thus true Art Brut, can never become part of a convention, even if that convention starts to promote unconventionality. The artists mentioned above perhaps have the ability to shift in and out of the art world according to situation and need, whilst for an outsider this capacity to adapt is more painful and sometimes impossible.

Key Artists

Artworks and Artists of Art Brut and Outsider Art

Mental Asylum Band-Copse (From the Cradle to the Grave, Book 4, p. 203)

Artist: Adolf Wölfli

After a traumatic childhood, Adolf Wölfli was arrested in 1890 for the attempted sexual assault of two young girls and sentenced to two years in the St. Johannsen prison in Berne. In 1895 he was arrested once again for the attempted molestation of a very young girl. At this point he was committed to the Waldau Mental Asylum for evaluation, and diagnosed as schizophrenic. He would remain a "patient" there until his death in 1930. During his institutionalization, he was reportedly often violent and uncontrollable, and was frequently placed in solitary confinement. Some years after his admission to the Asylum, in 1908, he began to draw. At first he was allowed only one pencil per week, which he always quickly wore down to a nub. However, staff soon realized that drawing and writing helped to subdue his temper, and so they provided him with more supplies. Wölfli soon began work on his 25,000-page illustrated narrative life story which, upon his death, measured six feet high when stacked up. In this work, he constructed a new history of his childhood and a described a glorious future with its own uniquely personal mythology. The first book of Wölfli's imaginary autobiography, comprised of 3000 pages, is titled From the Cradle to the Grave (1908-1912). The image pictured here comes from this first book, in which Wölfli re-narrates his tragic childhood into a magnificent travelog, which recounts how a child named Doufi traveled "more or less around the entire world." The narrative is ornately and densely illustrated with intricate drawings of geometric shapes, fictitious maps, portraits, palaces, churches, kings, queens, animals, and speaking plants, and also incorporates text and musical notation. In the second book, titled the Geographic and Algebraic Books (1912-1917), Wölfli describes how to build in the future "Saint Adolf-Giant-Creation", a huge "capital fortune" that will allow for the purchase, renaming and urbanization of the planet, and eventually the entire universe. In this narrative, Wölfli renames himself St. Adolf II. The third and fourth books, Books with Songs and Dances (1917-1922) and Album Books with Dances and Marches (1924-1928), celebrate his "Saint Adolf-Giant-Creation" not only through drawings, but also sound poetry, songs, musical scales, and collages. Finally, from 1928 until his death in 1930, he worked on the fifth and final book, the Funeral March . In this substantial volume, totaling over 8,000 pages, he (as the website www.AdolfWoelfli.ch writes, with information collated by the Museum of Fine Art in Bern, Switzerland) "recapitulates central motifs of his world system in the reduced form of keywords and collages, weaving them into a infinite tapestry of sounds and pictures", creating "a fascinating requiem."

Pencil and colored pencil on newsprint - Prague City Gallery

Le Palais Idéal (the "Ideal Palace")

Artist: Ferdinand Cheval

This architectural project serves as an example of a "Visionary Environment", in which an Outsider Artist constructs a large-scale architectural or landscape site. Set in a lush garden, Cheval's Palais draws architectural inspiration from an eclectic variety of sources. Architectural authors Ulrich Conrad and Hans Sperlich described the Palais Idéal as "half pagoda, half robber-baron's castle, half nymphaeum, half tomb; not Baroque, not Hellenistic, not Buddhist, not Indian, and yet all of them at once." The Palais also includes grottos, waterfalls, subterranean chambers, and soaring towers. It even bears sculptural elements representing a variety of animals such as octopi, caiman, elephants, bears, and birds, as well as mythological creatures such as giants and fairies. One of the Palais walls bears the inscription "I was not a builder, I had never handled a mason's trowel, I was not a sculptor. The chisel was unknown to me; not to mention architecture, a field of which I remained totally ignorant... Everything you can see, passer-by, is the work of one peasant, who, out of a dream, created the queen of the world..." Cheval was a French postman with little formal education who set forth on his project in April of 1879 despite having no experience in architecture or engineering. He later recounted how "I was walking very fast when my foot caught on something that sent me stumbling a few meters away, I wanted to know the cause. In a dream I had built a palace, a castle or caves, I cannot express it well... I told no one about it for fear of being ridiculed and I felt ridiculous myself. Then fifteen years later, when I had almost forgotten my dream, when I wasn't thinking of it at all, my foot reminded me of it. My foot tripped on a stone that almost made me fall. I wanted to know what it was... It was a stone of such a strange shape that I put it in my pocket to admire it at my ease. The next day, I went back to the same place. I found more stones, even more beautiful, I gathered them together on the spot and was overcome with delight... It's a sandstone shaped by water and hardened by the power of time. It becomes as hard as pebbles. It represents a sculpture so strange that it is impossible for man to imitate; it represents any kind of animal, any kind of caricature. I said to myself: since Nature is willing to do the sculpture, I will do the masonry and the architecture". For the next thirty-three years he collected stones that he found on his daily 18-mile mail route and took them home to add to the project, often working at night with the light of an oil lamp. At first he put the stones in his pockets, but he later began using a basket and eventually a wheelbarrow. It took him twenty years just to complete the outer walls. He carried out the entire project without any assistance. Cheval wished to be buried in his Palais , but French law forbade it. He thus spent the final eight years of his life constructing his own mausoleum at the Hauterives cemetery. The mausoleum was constructed using similar materials and style to the Palais Idéal . Toward the end of Cheval's life, artists such as André Breton, Pablo Picasso, and Max Ernst developed an interest in his Palais . Ernst even created a collage titled The Postman Cheval in 1932. In 1969, Minister of Culture, André Malraux, declared the Palais a cultural landmark and granted it official protection. In 1986 Cheval and his magical ingenuity was commemorated on a French postage stamp.

Stone, lime, mortar, cement - Hauterives, France

The Tree of Life

Artist: Séraphine Louis

Séraphine Louis, born in 1864, and also known as Séraphine de Senlis (the French town where she lived and worked) was a prolific painter of large and luscious floral arrangements. Sometimes she painted what appears to be a conventional bouquet or a typical still-life, but more often than not her images are surreal hybrids between trees and flowering bushes. Séraphine added ripe fruits to her dreamlike foliage, and created heavily patterned, sometimes even dotted leaves that begin to look more like feathers. There is no botanical accuracy to the project; it is a frenzied attempt to show something of life's beauty. Indeed, as a visionary, Séraphine suffered from mental health instability and took solace in her religious faith saying that it was often stained glass windows that had inspired her paintings. Interestingly, although the artist used oil paints, her pictures are unusually waxy in appearance and experts cannot be sure what other ingredients she added to the mix. Her work was discovered by a German art collector called Wilhelm Uhde, who whilst visiting the small town of Senlis saw one of Séraphine's paintings hanging in his friend's home; his friend told him that the picture had been painted by his cleaner. Uhde immediately befriended Séraphine, encouraged her to work large-scale, and quickly included her work in a selection of group exhibitions. Sadly, the artist did not get a chance to experience her success as she was permanently institutionalized from 1932 onwards. In this particular asylum Séraphine had no access to art materials or any outlet for her creativity.

Oil paint and unknown added substances

Artist: Auguste Forestier

Forestier's sculptures of beasts were likely inspired by the legend of the Beast of Gévaudan, a large man-eating wolf-dog that terrorized the former province of Gévaudan in south-central France between 1764 and 1767. Forestier's beasts are frightful, baring their real teeth. In particular, Untitled appears as if it could be a trophy head of the actual beast, with its patchy pelt of leather and furs and the large horn protruding from its snout. Forestier, like many Outsider Artists who lived in institutions, was resourceful in his use of found materials. For instance, the teeth used in this sculpture were pigs' and horses' teeth, which he scavenged from the on-site farm at the hospital to which he was committed. Auguste Forestier was born on a farm in Southern France in 1887. He was fascinated with trains from a young age and frequently stole away on trains for long journeys, only to be returned to his family by the police. In May 1914, when he was 27, his curiosity led him to place some pebbles on train tracks, which caused the next passing train to derail. Upon his arrest, he stated simply "I wanted to see how the stones got crushed, and it didn't occur to me that I could derail the train". He was then placed in the St. Alban psychiatric hospital in Lozère, where he remained for 44 years until his death in 1958. While hospitalized, he began to draw portrait busts and medallions, and later began carving wooden toys for hospital employees' children. According to art historian Jenifer P. Borum, Forestier's work "became increasingly complex, as the artist went to greater lengths to shape and adorn his imaginary boats, winged creatures, and decorated generals with cloth, buttons, string, tape, leather, and even the bones and teeth from pigs or horses retrieved from the trash. Each one of his finished creations vibrates with a life of its own." At the time of Forestier's incarceration, the hospital was being run by Maxime Dubuisson, a physician who took an interest in the artistic work produced by the patients and eventually put together two volumes of drawings, many of which were by Forestier. According to curator Savine Faupin, "Forestier's wanderlust was unbroken: he ran away a total of five times between 1914 and 1923, yet he gradually began substituting his real travels with other forms of departure. His drawings and sculptures took him on fictitious journeys through history [...] Because he no longer ventured outside the hospital walls, Forestier, the stationary traveler, invented imaginary means of travel. Although he never saw the sea, he devised ships and set them to sail on the roads of Lozère by selling and trading them." Similarly, psychiatrist Jean Oury, who worked at Saint-Alban from 1947 to 1949, commented about Forestier that "This transformation from a nomad into a sedentary man can only be the logical result of the transformation of a traveler into a producer. But Forestier's work will always bear traces of the ideal of the traveler."

Wood and mixed media - Collection of Art Brut, Lausanne, Switzerland

Artist: Scottie Wilson

Scottie Wilson was born in Glasgow in 1888. He enlisted with the Scottish Rifles and fought in The Great War. Afterwards he changed his name (his given name was Louis Freeman) and emigrated to Toronto in Canada where he opened a second-hand shop. At age 44 Wilson started to doodle on his counter top with one of the used fountain pens that was for sale. He had an epiphany and said of the experience, "I'm listening to classical music one day - Mendelssohn - when all of a sudden I dipped the bulldog pen into a bottle of ink and started drawing - doodling I suppose you'd call it - on the cardboard tabletop. I don't know why. I just did. In a couple of days - I worked almost ceaselessly - the whole of the tabletop was covered with little faces and designs. The pen seemed to make me draw, and the images, the faces and designs just flowed out. I couldn't stop - I've never stopped since that day." Wilson received recognition relatively quickly and by 1945 he had decided to return to London. During the early 1950s, Jean Dubuffet became aware of Wilson's work and the two met in Paris, along with Pablo Picasso. Both Dubuffet and Picasso loved Wilson's work and squabbled over who would buy which piece. Wilson was resolutely and unwaveringly uncommercial, for although he did show his work in London galleries, he typically sold his work to friends, acquaintances, and people on the street for a fraction of the price that the gallery suggested he asked for the pieces. Wilson's style is typically repetitive and often symmetrical. He completed intricate scenes using hundreds and thousands of strokes and lots of cross-hatching. He had a love for fish and birds, for totem type arrangements, and for portraits, all of which often reoccurred. As in the above image, he made many mask-like images, where countless faces can be found within one larger visage. The faces unite many cultural flavors - Indian, Celtic, and North American - and sit fittingly at the time when many artists, including Picasso, were exploring the art and objects of other indigenous peoples.

Pen and Ink on paper

Artist: Madge Gill

Madge Gill is a relatively new and wonderful discovery to be added to the remarkable canon of Outsider Artists. Gill was born in 1882 in East London and suffered a miserable childhood because she was illegitimate. At age 9, her mother placed her daughter in the care of St. Barnardo's orphanage because of the prejudice and stigma that she continually encountered haven given birth to a child out of wedlock. When Gill was only fourteen years old she was transported across the Atlantic on a boat bound for Canada as part of large-scale child-labor scheme. She worked as a domestic servant and lived in poor conditions, but by age eighteen had saved enough money to buy her passage back to England. Living once again in London she trained as a nurse and married her cousin, Tom Gill. The union was not a particularly happy one but the couple had four children together. Two of the children survived to adulthood, but tragically, one was lost as a baby to the influenza pandemic of 1918, and the last of the four children, and the only girl, was stillborn. It was after the culmination of such great loss, tragedy, and hardship that Gill finally started to draw. She was 37 years old at the time and experienced starting her artistic practice as a sort of spiritual revelation. Gill had already shown interest in spiritualism and mediumistic practice, as shared by her Aunt Kate, but by 1919 this had developed into the dramatic and all embracing experience of being 'possessed' by a companion spirit guide called 'Myrninerest'. Gill experienced trace states and moments of ecstasy from this point onwards and did not stop making art, be it in the form of drawing, weaving, knitting, or writing, until her death at age 79. Her images typically depict many faces of women and one asks the question as to who are these figures? Does Gill make repeated self-portraits, or does she reveal to us the face of 'Myrninerest'? The images also contain celestial and geometric shapes likely related to Gill's love of astrology and astronomy, as well as to the spiritual predictions that she would make following the outcome of many séances held at her home.

Black Ink on card - col

Totem Double Face

Artist: Gaston Chaissac

This sculptural painting, representing a human figure comprised of puzzle piece-like segments of bold, flat colors, stands just over six feet tall. The artist, Gaston Chaissac, serves as an example of an artist that Dubuffet originally categorized as Art Brut, due to his being an autodidact, untrained in the formal art world, but then later recategorized as a "Neuve Invention" artist, as he had greater awareness of and interaction with the mainstream art world than other artists that Dubuffet considered as more "purely" Art Brut. Chaissac was born to shopkeeper parents and raised in Avallon, France. In the 1920s, he and his sister took drawing lessons from a woman named Mademoiselle Guignepied, who also happened to teach Jean Dubuffet (although the two would not meet for another twenty years). In the 1930s, Chaissac lived in Paris where he befriended his next-door neighbors, German abstract painters Otto Freundlich and Jeanne Kosnick-Kloss. Freundlich and Kosnick-Kloss introduced Chaissac to the Modern art of the time, and supported/promoted his painting career. Their influence can be seen in Chaissac's use of distinct segments of a single flat color, although Chaissac's paintings differ from theirs in his use of thick black outlines between colored segments. The influence of Picasso and other Cubists can also be seen in the way that Chaissac experimented with various perspectives when depicting his figures.

Oil paint on carved wooden board - Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

Personnage pour Washington Parade

Artist: Jean Dubuffet

This sculptural work features an abstracted human form whose body has been segmented with strong black lines. Some of the segments are white, while others have been painted solid red or blue, or striped red or blue. The work was produced by Dubuffet during his Hourloupe cycle which lasted from 1972-1974, during which he wished to give a sculptural or "architectural" dimension to his paintings. It is evident from this, and other works, that Dubuffet drew inspiration from one of his favourite Art Brut artists, Gaston Chaissac, who created similarly segmented, colorful paintings and sculptural figures. A comparison of Dubuffet's Personnage pour Washington Parade and Chaissac's Totem Double Face (1961) show extreme similarities, and in fact, Chaissac accused Dubuffet of plagiarism. (This was not the only case in which an artist made such an accusation of Dubuffet). It is important to note that many scholars, such as art historian Antonia Dapena-Tretter, do not consider Dubuffet to be an Art Brut or Outsider Artist (even though his work is, erroneously, most-often associated with these concepts). Although he drew inspiration from the Art Brut works that he collected, and was a strong advocate for Art Brut, his own art does not qualify as art brut as he himself defined the category. First, as he has stated, Art Brut artists "do not consider themselves to be artists and they do not designate their production as art," nor do they have any interest in exhibiting or receiving money from the sale of their artworks. However Dubuffet was very aware of himself as an artist, and worked hard to promote his work. Second, Dubuffet specified that Art Brut artists work without knowledge of the mainstream art world and do not have any formal arts education. However, Dubuffet was well-acquainted with the mainstream art world, and studied painting at the Académie Julian in Paris. Thus, by his own definition, he does not actually fit into the category.

Polyurethane paint on epoxy figure - Pace Gallery, New York

Artist: Howard Finster

This birdhouse, painted with green and red plants, is a good example of a piece of folk art, an object created by an untrained working-class person with a primarily utilitarian and decorative purpose. However, while much folk art is created by unknown makers, we do know the "artist" of this work. Howard Finster was born in 1916 in Valley Head, Alabama as one of thirteen children. When he was three years old, he had a vision of recently deceased sister Abbie Rose who told him, "Howard, you're gonna be a man of visions." He grew up on his family's farm and stopped attending school after the sixth grade. When he was thirteen, he was "born again" at a Baptist revival, and three years later he began to preach at local churches. In 1940 he became a full-time pastor at Rock Bridge Baptist Church. He also picked up work as a bricklayer, carpenter, plumber, and bicycle and lawn mower repairman in order to support his wife, Pauline, and their five children. In 1965 he retired from preaching in order to work full-time on a visionary environment titled Paradise Garden in Pennville, Georgia, which he intended "to show all the wonderful things o' God's Creation, kinda like the Garden of Eden." In 1976 he had another vision. He recounts how "...one day I was workin' on a patch job on a bicycle, and I was rubbin' some white paint on that patch with this finger here, and I looked at the round tip o' my finger, and there was a human face on it... then a warm feelin' come over my body, and a voice spoke to me and said, 'Paint sacred art.' And I said to it, I said, 'I cain't do that. I know professionals can, but not me.' And it comes to me again and it says, 'How do you know?' I said, 'How do I know that I cain't paint.' I tuck a dollar out of my wallet, and I pasted it on a piece of plyboard and went out in front of my shop, and I started drawing George Washington off that dollar bill." Finster believed that God had asked him to create 5,000 sacred paintings, and by the time of his death in 2001, he had far exceeded this number. (A 1995 article in The New York Times noted that he was finishing up his 36,892nd piece of art.) His colorful paintings caught the attention of Athens, Georgia-based rock group R.E.M., who collaborated with Finster on the cover art for their second album Reckoning . He also participated in the 1984 Venice Biennale, as well as making appearances at folk music festivals and art schools around the United States. It is reported that he slept in his clothes and only took twenty-minute naps, in an effort to get out all his ideas.

Wood and enamel - Cavin Morris Gallery, New York

Artist: Judith Scott

Judith Scott was an American with Down Syndrome, who was also deaf and never learned to speak. She lived in an institution from the age of 7 until 42, at which point her twin sister became her guardian. Two years later, Scott began attending the Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, California. In the first two years of going to the center she showed almost no interest in art making. It wasn't until she attended a class by a visiting textile artist that she began to take a strong interest in artistic creation, which endured until her passing in 2005. Scott's instinctive, meditative, and so-called "obsessive" art practice involved wrapping found objects (such as coat hangers, office supplies, shopping carts, chairs, and whatever else she could get her hands on) in colored string, yarn, and fabric strips. Scott's sculptures took weeks, even months of methodical work to complete, and once finished, the spectacular cocoon-like creations completely concealed the hidden treasures inside. Over the course of eighteen years, she created over two hundred of these Trojan Horse-like sculptures, ranging in size from miniature to monolithic. Tom di Maria, director of Creative Growth, believes she was finally "learning to speak". Her early pieces thus acted as her first words after decades of severe isolation. Scott's sculptures act as powerful symbols of her experience. Yet they also appear to represent an effort on Scott's part to create a protective casing for items of value. In one instance, when assistants were moving her particularly large sculpture she had created, several tiny objects fell out of the work. It was then ascertained that the night before, Scott had secretly broken apart her necklace and put the beads inside her sculpture.

Twine, yarn, and found objects - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

The Windmills

Artist: Gregory Blackstock

Gregory Blackstock creates what cultural critic and writer Maria Popova calls "astonishing visual lists," and has what Roger Cardinal refers to as "obsessive interest in inventories and taxonomies". In this example of his work, he has produced diagrammatic grayscale illustrations of eighteen types of windmill, each neatly labeled underneath. Born in the United States in 1946, Blackstock was first diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, but the diagnosis was later changed to autistic savant. He obsessively reads encyclopedias, can speak a dozen languages, can play hundreds of songs on the accordion by memory, and can recall the names of nearly every one of his childhood schoolmates. Several of his drawings have been published in Blackstock's Collections: The Drawings of an Artistic Savant (2006). His taxonomic drawings range in subject matter from types of animals, plants, industrial tools, vehicles, buildings, stringed instruments, and mariners' knots. Within each drawing, each subtype of the category being studied (for instance, various types of crows of the world, American owls, or Italian roosters) are, as Cardinal describes, "diagrammatic, each item being presented plain and simple as the variant of a general type: thus, four dozen kinds of saw are squeezed into a single page, catering to a desire for symmetry as well as completeness." Thus, although Outsider Artists tend to be associated with fantastical imagery and imaginative scenarios, we see that there are some who produce realistic representations of objects and cityscapes with an astounding level of detail and verisimilitude.

Graphite, colored pencil and permanent marker on paper

Beginnings of Art Brut and Outsider Art

Early interest in the art of the mentally ill.

The first noted case of interest by artists in the art of the mentally ill is traced back to the Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) group who were active in Germany from 1911 to 1914. Wassily Kandinsky , Franz Marc , August Macke , Alexej von Jawlensky , Marianne von Werefkin , Gabriele Münter , Lyonel Feininger , and Albert Bloch , believed in the expression of spiritual values through color and form. In this quest, these artists were interested in the linkages between music and painting, as well as the concept of synaesthesia, whereby the stimulation of one sense can cause an involuntary reaction in one or more other senses. In 1912, the group published their Almanac, Der Blaue Reiter Almanach , which included theoretical essays by Kandinsky and Marc, as well as over 140 reproductions of artworks, the majority of which were classified as "primitive" art , folk art, children's art, and art of the mentally ill. In this way, they demonstrated their belief that the traditional Western Art Historical canon was suffering a particular lack that could be remedied by turning to sources outside of its purview.

In 1921, Dr. Walter Morgenthaler published his book Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler ( A Psychiatric Patient as Artist ) about Adolf Wölfli, a psychotic mental patient in his care who had turned to art making (particularly drawing), which seemed to have the effect of calming him down.

Then, in 1922, Prinzhorn published Bildnerei der Geisteskranken ( Artistry of the Mentally Ill ). This book included formal analyses based on thousands of artworks by mentally ill patients at various European institutions, which Prinzhorn also amassed into a great collection (now housed at the University of Heidelberg). Both the book and the art collection received a great deal of interest from avant-garde artists of the time, including Paul Klee , Max Ernst , and Jean Dubuffet . The book remains even today one of the seminal and most important works published on this subject.

Dubuffet and Art Brut

After reading Bildnerei der Geisteskranken in 1923 (although he was unable to read German so the book's main influence upon him came from the images themselves), French artist Jean Dubuffet began his own collection of such art. However, Dubuffet expanded the scope of his collection to also include works by other eccentrics and social misfits making art on the fringes of society, not just those suffering from mental health issues. The collection grew to include about 5,000 works by 133 creators, including Aloïse Corbaz and Adolf Wölfli. He named this type of art Art Brut (which literally translates as "raw art"). He defined Art Brut as "the works executed by people untouched by artistic culture, works in which imitation - contrary to what occurs among intellectuals - has little or no part, so that their makers derive everything (subjects, choice of materials used, means of transportation, rhythms, ways of patterning, etc.) from their own resources and not from the conventions of classic art or the art that happens to be fashionable. Here we find art at its crudest; we see it being wholly reinvented at every stage of the operation by its maker's knack of invention and not, as always in cultural art, from his power of aping others or changing like a chameleon."

In 1948, Dubuffet and other artists (including Jean Paulhan, André Breton , Charles Ratton, Michel Tapie, and Henri-Pierre Roche) formed the Compagnie de l'Art Brut, with artist Slavko Kopač designated as the collection's curator. The organization was intended to serve as a center point for further research and curatorial activities. In 1949, the first exhibition of Art Brut was held at the Galerie René Drouin in Paris, and included over 200 works. In 1951, just before the Compagnie's dissolution (due in part to a disagreement wherein Dubuffet accused Breton of attempting to co-opt Art Brut into the "huge cultural machine" of Surrealism), painter Alfonso Ossorio offered to house the collection in his home in East Hampton, near New York. While visiting the United States, Dubuffet delivered a lecture at the Art Institute of Chicago, titled "Anti-cultural Positions," in which he accused Western culture of suppressing true creativity. The collection remained in New York for ten years, before being repatriated to Paris where Kopač once again served as its curator and archivist. In 1962 the Compagnie de l'Art Brut was reformed, with over 100 members dedicating themselves to the discovery and collection of works of Art Brut. In 1964, Dubuffet began publishing the first eight editions of Art Brut booklets, which continue to be produced today. In 1967, another major exhibition of over 700 Art Brut works by 75 different creators was mounted at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. In 1971 Dubuffet donated his collection of Art Brut to the city of Lausanne, Switzerland.

Dubuffet found Art Brut to be an important inspiration for his own art, as he believed it to be a more pure, sincere, and authentic expression of emotion, immune to the assimilating influences of mainstream culture. He attempted to emulate the childlike naiveté that he saw in Art Brut, however his training in painting at an arts academy as well as his self-awareness as an artist and his knowledge of the mainstream art world mean that he should not be considered himself as an Art Brut / Outsider Artist (as a number of art historians assert). Instead, his work is better defined within primitivism, pseudo-naïve art, and faux naïve art.

Mainstream Artists' Growing Interest in Art Brut

There are a variety of factors that contributed to the interest in Art Brut in the first half of the twentieth century. Many mainstream artists were attracted to Art Brut in what they saw as the "Primitive" art of faraway cultures. This may have come about because of growing dissatisfaction with the mainstream art world, and more broadly speaking with a distrust of mainstream society in the period surrounding the two World Wars. Artists in the Western world at this time witnessed the utter devastation and upheaval that had resulted from widespread ideologies centered upon technological, industrial, and rational routes of "progress". People living during this period also saw the tragic and inhumane implementation of social philosophies, including Eugenics, which claimed to improve quality of life for the general public by eliminating undesirable traits such as mental illness, disability, and criminal tendencies. The multiple atrocities carried out for the duration of World Waw II caused many people, especially artists, to become skeptical and wary of grand theories and ideologies, both beyond and within the art world itself. Many artists hoped that a celebration of the irrational and a turning for help to individuals on the margins of society could offer new sources of inspiration regarding different ways of understanding, relating to, and representing other people and the world around us. In this way, celebrating Outsider Art was an alternative way for artists to "fight" against political injustice. As artist and author David Maclagan asserts, "Art Brut can be seen as the continuation and intensification of a widespread and typical feature of Modernism: the quest for new and original forms of creativity in areas considered immune from conventional culture."

At the same time, many within the art world continued to operate with the romantic notion of the "mad genius". Commonly referred to as the "genius-insanity" theory, the idea that (as German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer expressed) "genius is nearer to madness than the average intelligence" can be traced back to Aristotle. The idea began to pervade common thought during the Renaissance , peaked during the Romantic period, and, MacGregor wrote in 1989, "has not yet been laid to rest". The result of this preoccupation with the insane genius during the Romantic period led artists to turn their attention toward madhouses, making frequent visits and recording their observations of insane artists at work, in order to answer the question "could the madman give birth to art?" Indeed, as MacGregor writes, "artists were beginning to note that under the impact of mental disturbance individuals who had never displayed any involvement with art developed an unexplained inclination to make images, to draw." Into and throughout the twentieth century, this notion of the insanity of genius endured, contributing to the popular notion of the creative artist as social outcast. This is perhaps a misguided line of enquiry, because it is so often wrongs committed by society that ultimately cause mental illness.

The rise in interest in Art Brut, particularly of the "mentally imbalanced", was aided by simultaneous developments in the field of psychiatry, and later the realms of Art Therapy. Medical professionals who worked with mentally ill and cognitively disabled patients (such as Dr. Walter Morgenthaler and Dr. Hans Prinzhorn) began to turn to patients' artworks as potential clues that could grant them insight into the nature of their ailments and disturbances, or, at the very least, into ways in which these afflictions could be differentiated and categorized. This led many doctors to begin collecting and analyzing patient artwork rather than merely discarding it, and many of these artistic samples eventually found their way into the public sphere and the hands of mainstream artists who hoped to find inspiration from these works. As art historian John MacGregor writes, "The role of the physician as interpreter of this new type of image was very influential, determining to some extent the way in which it was received at first by the lay public. Nevertheless, as was the case with Primitive Art , the creative artist saw these images in his own unique way."

Roger Cardinal and Outsider Art

The term Outsider Art was coined in 1972 by Roger Cardinal (professor emeritus of literary and visual studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury), who sought an appropriate English equivalent for the French term Art Brut. Just as Dubuffet described Art Brut, Cardinal described Outsider Art as creative works produced by self-taught artists (that is, artists with no formal arts training), that do not follow traditional or academic artistic conventions and that convey "a strong sense of individuality". Both Dubuffet and Cardinal have specified that while Outsider Art and Art Brut tend to be associated with artists who are mentally ill (such as schizophrenics), it also includes art "by individuals who are quite capable of handling their social lives but who recoil, consciously or unconsciously, from the notion of art being necessarily a publicly defined activity with communally recognized standards," including children, and social recluses.

According to Cardinal, Outsider Art's "ambit of use rests on the notion that art making is a widespread human activity reaching far beyond the world of public galleries, teaching institutions and culturally marked art production." He insists that an artist's work's status as "Outsider" must be centred upon the "anti-conventional nature of the art making itself, its idiosyncrasy, its often unworldly distance from artistic norms as well as from commonplace experience," in addition to the "thrilling visual experience" it offers to its audience.

Art Brut and Outsider Art: Concepts, Styles, and Trends

Art Brut is not a movement with which artists self-identify, but rather a label assigned, often posthumously, by historians, critics, and collectors to self-taught creators with little or no contact with the mainstream art world and its institutions. MacGregor explains, "It is a totally heterogeneous collection of images and artists, with no underlying unity or common purpose." Likewise, artist and author David Maclagan writes that "The spectrum of Outsider Art is now so broad that it is hard to find any obvious common feature, except that it is something that strikes us as extraordinary, both in the choice of materials [...] and in its content [...] and that it seems to have been created out of the blue." Indeed, this work is believed to be the expression of an individualized psyche, possessing a uniquely innate authenticity or "purity". One way that we can subcategorize Art Brut / Outsider Art is based on type of media (painting/drawing, sculpture, visionary environments). However, there are other terms commonly linked to Art Brut / Outsider Art which differentiate between types of creator (Folk art, International art, and Neuve Invention). These terms often overlap, and are at times incorrectly used synonymously. To say that the art is disparate and not unifiable is correct, although Outsider Artists do share a tendency to certain themes and motifs. For example, there is an interest in portraits, fish, birds, repetition, binding, linking, and entirely filling a given space.

Art Brut and Painting/Drawing

As said, there is no one style or aesthetic that defines Art Brut / Outsider Art works. Many artists, like Gaston Duf, Adolf Wolfli, Heinrich Anton Müller, and Jeroen Pomp, create fantastical images derived from their vivid imaginations (including cities, people, animals, all often incased within geometrical shapes). However, there are other Outsider Artists, like Stephen Wiltshire, Gregory Blackstock, and James Castle, whose images offer extremely realistic reproductions of existing things or places. What sets these latter artists apart is that they do not follow any pre-existing artistic style or movement, such as Cubism or Expressionism (although coincidentally, similarities sometimes exist). They also, despite making more "realistic" pictures on first glance, like the more classic outsiders (Wolfli) do fill designated space, and do attempt to create order by using art. As Colin Rhodes, Professor of Art, writes, "One of the most striking features of Outsider Art is its general tendency to present the world in transcendent or metaphysical terms [...] Almost invariably artists develop a structured cosmology that underpins the 'reality' of their worlds, although the viewer does not always have access to the language of their articulation. Indeed, individuals often deliberately engage in obscurantism or develop complicated iconographies in order to protect themselves and their ideas from perceived threats."

Art Brut and Sculpture

As with painting and drawing, Art Brut / Outsider sculpture can take many forms and styles. However, as many of these artists create(d) their works inside the confines of institutions (such as mental asylums and prisons), the materials to which they had access tended to be more limited. Thus Art Brut / Outsider sculptures often demonstrate resourcefulness on the part of the artist, who uses whatever found objects and materials they can get their hands on, including animal teeth, bones, and pelts found in asylum farms, and other sorts of refuse such as string, cord, and wire. Outside of institutions and without enforced restriction, outsider artists making sculpture tend to continue the theme of using waste and disregarded objects. The Cornish artist, David Kemp, uses entirely found materials, often harmful debris washed up by the sea to make his sculptures. As such the final pieces are at once a slap in the face to greedy and ignorant consumer culture and a testament to outsider artists who defy fashions and trends to always prioritize meaning.

Art Brut and Visionary Environments

Visionary environments include large-scale environments or architectural projects created by Outsider Artists, such as Simon Rodia's Watts Towers , SP Dinsmoor's Garden of Eden , Ferdinand Cheval's Palais Idéal , and Nek Chand's Rock Garden . As editor of Raw Vision magazine, John Maizels, explains, Visionary environments tend to be "unusual structures, full of strangeness and individuality" which "are often the results of years of committed toil" and "represent one of the most extraordinary forms of human creativity." These environments tend to be created from a vast array of found materials, such as stones and garbage / found objects, and they often contain a mixture of styles, drawing from various forms of architecture. A significant proportion of these projects are found in France and the United States.

Art Brut and Folk Art

Folk Art is a term that has been widely used in North America originally to refer to the handmade crafts of indigenous peoples and peasant communities in Europe, and later to the simply-made practical objects of colonial days, including objects such as weather vanes and quilts. These objects tend to be purely utilitarian or decorative in purpose. This category sometimes overlaps with the categories of tribal art and primitive art.

Art Brut and Naïve Art

The term "Naïve art" is frequently used as a synonym for Art Brut and Outsider Art, describing artists who received no formal arts education, although Naïve artists tend to be understood as bringing a greater level of artistic craftsmanship to their work. They often work closely with other artists but adopt a more childlike approach to conventional and technical ways of seeing. Dubuffet differentiated Naïve art as the art of "Sunday painters [that is,] people who are filled with respect for cultural art, and their work is strongly influenced by its traditions. They desire to form part of cultural art, and borrow from it their methods, imitating it to the best of their ability. (They do so badly, of course, because of their inexperience, a fact which results in their efforts being of more interest that the originals which inspire them.)"

Perhaps the most famous artist to be placed in this category is Henri Rousseau , an entirely self-taught French painter whose lavish and free dream-like images were celebrated by the likes of Picasso and other notable artists living in Paris at the time. Rousseau developed a highly recognizable signature style whereby most of his pictures depicted tropical jungle scenes; either this or cityscapes with foregrounded portraits that the artist termed his "portrait landscapes". Most remarkable is the fact that Rousseau never himself saw the jungle. He drew inspiration from children's books and from his regular visits to botanical gardens in Paris. His style of painting was typically flat and made with simplified perspective. Indeed, the legacy of Rousseau can never be underestimated; he became a primary inspiration for the Surrealists, and since then until the present day, for countless other creative minds.

A notable wave of Naïve Art also flowed from Cornwall, UK during the early-twentieth century due to the visionary work of Alfred Wallis. Wallis was a fisherman who painted coastal scenes with no regard for conventional scale or perspective. He painted on found wood, so the shape and size of his picture plane was also unusual. Fellow local artists Ben Nicholson and Christopher 'Kit' Wood discovered his work and as such his influence quickly spread to the large artistic community living in St. Ives at the time.

Art Brut and Neuve Invention

Dubuffet created the category of Neuve Invention in 1982 to categorize untrained artists who demonstrate Art Brut tendencies in their art, but who do have more contact with society and greater awareness of the art world. As editor of Raw Vision magazine, John Maizels, explains, "Dubuffet recognized that there were many creators who, although self-taught, were closer in their connections to conventional society than were the genuine artistes bruts . However, these artists found themselves on the margins of mainstream cultural art, set apart from the normal art world, often shunned by galleries and colleges." The category thus serves as a sort of middle ground between Insider and Outsider Artists. In many ways, changing his classification of some artists from Art Brut to Neuve Invention served as a sort of demotion, with Neuve Invention artists being seen as possessing less of the pure creative impulse of full-fledged Art Brut artists. Examples include Gaston Chaissac, Mario Chichorro, Rosemarie Koczy, Gerard Lattier, Albert Louden, and Frederich Schroder-Sonnenstern.

Later Developments - After Art Brut and Outsider Art

Art brut / outsider art today.

Art Brut and Outsider Art remain labels given, not by the artists themselves but by others, often posthumously and mainly to gather together artists as operating outside of any sort of art historical tradition, rather than in an attempt to describe a common style or ethos in their works. These terms continue to be employed, for instance, at exhibitions like A Special Touch - Straight from the Heart , held at the Kunstcentret Silkeborg Bad in Silkeborg, Denmark (2016); World Transformers: The Art of the Outsiders , held at the Schirn Kunsthalle Gallery in Römerberg, Germany (2011); Inner Worlds Outside at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, the La Caixa Foundation Exhibition Hall in Madrid, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin (2006); and In Another World at the Kiasma Gallery in Helsinki (2005), as well as at the Outsider Art Fair held annually since 2013, alternating venues between New York and Paris. The terms have also inspired a steady increase in the use of Art Therapy as a reputable means to support and rehabilitate individuals suffering from mental health difficulties.

Criticisms of Art Brut / Outsider Art

Although the category of Art Brut / Outsider Art has carved an art historical niche for visual artwork by the mentally ill and others living on the fringes of society, the category has been criticized for contextualizing this type of work in such a way as to present it as heavily exoticized, and thus contributing to further Othering and marginalization of its creators. For this reason, many Disability Rights activists and Critical Disability Studies scholars prefer to locate art made by contemporary mental health sufferers and intellectually/developmentally disabled artists within the nascent, and politically conscientious category of Disability Arts, while others do not see any reason for a separate genre to be created for this work, preferring instead for all artists to be included within mainstream trends and dialogue. Art critic Jerry Saltz argues that Outsider Art only serves as a discriminatory boundary preventing untrained artists from taking "their rightful places in the canon". Others, like humanities professor Rita Elizabeth Risser, criticize the quickly rising popularity of art explicitly made possible by mental or physical suffering as a form of voyeurism. Yet proponents of the category of Outsider Art maintain that it is only meant to demarcate "self-taught or non-academic work," as Rebecca Hoffman, director of the Outsider Art Fair in New York, explains.

Furthermore, the increased recognition and exhibition of Art Brut / Outsider Artists serves to negate the "Outsider" aspect of their identities and their artwork. As well, many previously institutionalized Outsider Artists are living back in their communities following the de-institutionalization movement. Many of them are even creating art in collaborative environments and/or with the mentorship of professional "Insider" artists at specialized arts centers such as Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, California. Therefore, their practices do not follow Dubuffet's and Cardinal's vision of Outsider Artists as wholly cut off from society and from the mainstream art world. Thus many scholars and critics are coming to see "Outsider" as an obsolete categorization. There is an argument though that recognizes these categories as crucial at the time they were coined - shining a light onto hidden talent - but now there is gradual recognition that labels and prejudices are ideally better dissolved.

Useful Resources on Art Brut and Outsider Art

• Henry Darger By Klaus Biesenbach, Brooke Davis Anderson, Michael Bonesteel, and Carl Watson
• Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal By John M. MacGregor
• Judith Scott: Bound and Unbound By Catherine Morris, Matthew Higgs, Lynne Cooke, Joyce Scott, Kevin Killian
• Madness and Art: The Life and Works of Adolf Wölfli By Walter Morgenthaler
• The Art of Adolf Wölfli: St. Adolf-Giant-Creation By Elka Spoerri, Daniel Baumann, Edward Gomez, Gerard Wertkin
• Blackstock's Collections: The Drawings of an Artistic Savant By Gregory L. Blackstock, Karen Light-Pina, Darold A. Treffert
• Jean Dubuffet: Anticultural Positions Hardcover By Anny Aviram, Kent Minturn, Mark Rosenthal
• Bildnerei der Geisteskranken. Ein Beitrag zur Psychologie und Psychopatologie der Gestaltung (The plastic activity of the mentally ill. A contribution to the psychology and psychopathology of formal configuration) By Hanz Prinzhorn
• Art Brut: The Origins of Outsider Art Our Pick By Lucienne Peiry
• Art Brut in America: The Incursion of Jean Dubuffet By Valérie Rousseau, Jean Dubuffet, Sarah Lombardi, Kent Minturn, Jim Shaw, and Anne-Imelda Radice
• Outsider Art Sourcebook: International Guide to Art Brut and Outsider Art By John Maizels
• Outsider Art: Spontaneous Alternatives (World of Art) Our Pick By Colin Rhodes
• The Discovery of the Art of the Insane Our Pick By John M. MacGregor
• Outsider Art: Visionary Worlds and Trauma Our Pick By Daniel Wojcik
• Outsider Art Our Pick By Roger Cardinal
• Outsider Art: From the Margins to the Marketplace Our Pick By David Maclagan
• Raw Creation: Outsider Art and Beyond Our Pick By John Maizels
• Fondation Jean Dubuffet
• In Switzerland, Art Brut Goes Back to Its Roots by Edward M. Gomez / Hyperallergic / July 16, 2016
• Jean Dubuffet & Art Brut: The Creation of an Avant-Garde Identity by Antonia Dapena-Tretter / Platform / Autumn 2017
• Jerry Saltz on the Outsider Art Fair - and Why There's No Such Thing As 'Outsider' Art by Jerry Salz / Vulture / February 1, 2013
• Howard Finster, Folk Artist and Preacher, Dies at 84 by Roberta Smith / New York Times / October 23, 2001
• Gaston Chaissac and the Mystery of his Solitude by Michael Gibson / New York Times / August 26, 2000
• Journeys Into The Outside with Jarvis Cocker (Feature-length documentary) Our Pick
• The Secret Life and Art of Henry Darger Our Pick
• Make: Outsider Art Documentary
• Turning The Art World Inside Out (Feature-length documentary)
• Off the Grid - Outsider Artists or Bad Artists?

Similar Art

Self-Portrait (c. 1910)

Grand Maitre of the Outsider (1947)

Crucifixion (1963)

Related artists.

Related Movements & Topics

Content compiled and written by Alexandra Duncan

Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Rebecca Baillie

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Sensitive to Art & its Discontents

The Insider’s Guide to Outsider Art

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Horace Pippin, “Interior,” (1944) oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Meyer P. Potamkin, in honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery (all images courtesy the National Gallery)

WASHINGTON, DC — Does it really make any difference if outsider artists are called “outliers” instead?

It’s a new term proposed in Outliers and American Vanguard Art ,  the National Gallery of Art ’s new exhibition of work by outsider artists and the mainstream artists who promoted them while also parroting outsider art styles. Featuring 250 works by more than 80 artists, the exhibition will travel to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art later this year.

Organized by National Gallery senior curator Lynne Cooke, the exhibition features some compelling artwork, but it falls into the same traps and stereotypes that have plagued many museum exhibitions featuring outliers (if that’s what we’re supposed to call them now). You also could pick from a long list of alternative titles, including folk artists, visionary artists, primitive artists, naïve artists, or just plain, old self-taught artists. I’m sticking with outsider artists for this article.

This museum exhibition, like many others, bemoans the segregation of outsider artists into a lower class, but the National Gallery perpetuates this trend of confining outsider artists inside their own artistic ghetto even when there is little connecting this diverse group of artists hailing from a wide range of backgrounds and artistic traditions. The exhibition also sticks mostly to the “greatest hits” of outsider artists who have already been stamped with the art world’s seal of approval.

Bill Traylor, “Men Drinking, Boys Tormenting, Dogs Barking” (c. 1939-1942)opaque watercolor on card with dark gray prepared surface, overall: 36.2 x 55.25 cm (14 1/4 x 21 3/4 in.) Collection of Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz, promised gift to the Philadelphia Museum of Art

The exhibition focuses on three periods when mainstream artists helped promote outsider artists or appropriated their styles. But the chosen time spans, which encompass most of the 20th century, seem arbitrarily drawn to include stretches from 1924–1943, 1968–1992, and 1998–2013. There’s no explanation why outsider artists fell off the art world’s radar from 1993 to 1997, or in other intervening years.

The mixing of work by outsider artists and mainstream artists in the exhibition creates a confusing layout for visitors who aren’t familiar with the artists or their pedigrees. In another stereotypical trend, the outsider artists’ life stories and travails are prominently featured in the wall text, often at the expense of their artwork. To score points in the art world as a “true” outsider artist, it helps if you suffer from mental illness, poverty, or self-imposed isolation.

The exhibition opens with five of Judith Scott ’s 1990s untitled abstract fiber sculptures wrapped in yarn, rope, and string. The wall text promptly alerts visitors she is an outlier because she was deaf, had Down Syndrome, and grew up in an institution where she remained for 35 years.

Judith Scott, “Untitled” (2004) fiber and mixed media, overall: 53.34 x 40.64 x 40.64 cm (21 x 16 x 16 in.) (courtesy of The Museum of Everything, London)

The next gallery features mainstream artists who appropriated outsider art styles, including Marsden Hartley’s 1918–19 painting “Santos, New Mexico” when he explored Hispanic and Pueblo Indian themes after a visit to New Mexico. Folk art-ish paintings by New York modernist painters Charles Sheeler and Yasuo Kuniyoshi also are on display, including Kuniyoshi’s 1923 oil painting “Boy Stealing Fruit” featuring a pudgy boy planning his getaway with a purloined banana. Their work is contrasted with paintings by outsider artists, including John Kane’s spare and haunting 1929 “Self-Portrait” showing a bare-chested man with a dead-eyed stare and a body marred by the ravages of time. Henri Rousseau’s 1910 “Tropical Forest with Monkeys” from his engaging series of jungle paintings is featured with two less interesting paintings. Rousseau is portrayed as an outsider artist even though his work was exhibited regularly in the Salon des Indépendants in Paris during his lifetime, and Pablo Picasso held a banquet in his honor in 1908.

Marsden Hartley, “Adelard the Drowned, Master of the ‘Phantom’” (c. 1938-1939) oil on board, unframed: 71.12 x 55.88 cm (28 x 22 in.) framed: 67.31 x 78.11 x 6.35 cm (26 1/2 x 30 3/4 x 2 1/2 in.)

The most fundamental problem with the exhibition is the unstated assumption that work by outsider artists is only good or worthy of notice if it’s promoted or parroted by artists who are already ensconced in the art world. That stereotype triggers more questions. Are outsider artists still outsiders (or outliers) when they become darlings of the art world? Do they lose their street cred when they produce work geared toward the art market rather than being driven by holy visions or the vagaries of mental illness?

I may be overly sensitive to this taxonomic debate because I am an outsider artist. Maybe. It depends on who you ask. I am a self-taught artist who began making mixed-media work in Santa Fe, NM, after my TV broke and I sought a more creative outlet. I scavenged rusty bed springs and auto parts from dusty cracked-clay arroyos in northern New Mexico and cobbled them together into large sculptures. Does that make me an outsider artist or just a self-taught artist? I have suffered on and off from major depression, but my mental illness only reduced my artistic output. I never saw a vision of God’s face on my fingertip that told me to paint sacred art like Howard Finster , who has several rough-hewn pieces in the National Gallery exhibition.

I also didn’t grow up poor and uneducated on a remote farm — an outsider artist bio that the art world adores. And no one will discover a secret cache of prodigious artwork in my home after my death like Henry Darger ’s fantastical In the Realms of the Unreal drawings of the superhero Vivian Girls (whose work also is featured in the National Gallery exhibition). To most art world insiders, I’m just a self-taught artist or an “emerging artist,” even though I’ve been emerging for more than 15 years now, from what I’m not sure. “Emerging artist” is another patronizing term that excludes or diminishes the work of artists who haven’t been accepted by the insular art world’s elite group of wealthy collectors, gallery owners, museum curators, and critics.

John Kane, “Self-Portrait” (1929) oil on canvas over composition board, overall: 91.7 x 68.9 cm (36 1/8 x 27 1/8 in.) the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund, 1939 (digital image (C) the Museum of Modern Art/ licensed by SCALA/ Art Resource, NY)

The American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore does a better job than most museums at displaying work by outsider artists. AVAM obviously focuses on outsider or visionary artists, but they aren’t obsessed with their life stories. Group exhibitions focus on novel or light-hearted themes, including mystery, parenting, or food as in YUMMM! The History, Fantasy, and Future of Food . (I defy you to find an exhibition in a “serious” art museum titled YUMMM!)

AVAM isn’t a stickler about the definition of outsider artists or whatever we’re calling them now. My artwork was featured in 2014 in a solo exhibition titled Ghosts in the Machine in the museum’s independently operated former restaurant, Mr. Rain’s Fun House. In the YUMMM! exhibition last year, artist Wendy Brackman displayed a captivating 10-feet-tall spinning mandala featuring a cornucopia of food crafted from colorful paper plates. She taught herself how to make elaborate paper-plate sculptures and now runs a successful handcrafted party-hat business as Wacky Wendy . Is she an outsider artist, a self-taught artist, or a savvy businesswoman? It depends on who you ask.

Outliers and American Vanguard Art ,  continues at the National Gallery of Art (East building, concourse galleries, between 3rd and 9th Streets, along Constitution Avenue NW, Washington, DC) through May 13.

Brendan L. Smith

Brendan L. Smith is a mixed-media artist, freelance writer, and arts educator in Washington, D.C. In past lives, he was a staff reporter for newspapers across the country, a wildland firefighter in New... More by Brendan L. Smith

3 replies on “The Insider’s Guide to Outsider Art”

Another outsider or visionary artist worth mentioning is St. EOM (Eddie Owens Martin) who built the outsider art site Pasaquan, in Buena Vista, GA. It is a beautiful place, restored by the Kohler Foundation a few years ago. It is now being run by the Art Department at Columbus State University in Columbus, GA.

Re this comment: “The next gallery features mainstream artists who appropriated outsider art styles, including Marsden Hartley’s 1918–19 painting ‘Santos, New Mexico’ when he explored Hispanic and Pueblo Indian themes after a visit to New Mexico”-— it is hard to imagine any art form that less “Outsider” than the traditional arts of the Pueblo and Hispanic peoples of New Mexico, which are completely rooted in community.

What great observations. I too am confused by the terms, outsider, outlier, self taught, emerging and mid-career, just to name a few. Of course, I’m old enough to remember the plethora of ‘isms’ that used to permeate critical and academic discussions. I’d be grateful if curators and historians would move beyond labels and recognize the arts and artists as more fluid and complex than a simplistic slots or categories

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• Visit Casco
• Access Note
• ⟶ Nederlands

The Outsiders

An artist collective exploring agricultural heritage in urban areas to cultivate knowledge and skills for an ecological, resilient life..

• 30 April 2021

Travelling Farm Museum Podcast

• 1 April 2020
• –30 May, 2021‏‏‎

Travelling Farm Museum Depot

• 7 March 2020
• –7 May, 2020‏‏‎

Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills – Public research phase 1

Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons wants to contribute to a sustainable societal transition in which the commons play a central role. Since 2017, Casco Art Institute, in collaboration with the artists’ collective The Outsiders, has been actively implementing this transition through long-term partnership projects in the Leidsche Rijn district in Utrecht.

The Outsiders started through creating a space for commoning in an old farm named Hof ter Weyde, situated in the heart of a residential area. Originally part of a large agricultural area, the farm is now enclosed by the Terwijde shopping center and overlooks the train station of the same name, both of which are named after the farm. At the beginning of 2018, Casco Art Institute and The Outsiders moved into the farm and were inspired by the many questions and stories that surround the building.

Why is the farm empty? Where did the farm move to? Where does the food of the inhabitants of the Leidsche Rijn district actually come from, now that almost all agricultural and livestock farms have disappeared from its region? 

The project started by giving local residents the opportunity to think along about these kinds of issues, to express themselves about the possible future of the farm, and they could commonly contribute to it. In our highly urbanized and industrialized society, we urgently need to get started with ecology. A broader definition of what constitutes an ecological practice and the representation thereof by artists and designers were the starting point. Local entrepreneurs, schools, social institutions and government made use of this cultural commons.

“…How a little barbecue could evolve into a garden rave, how left-over materials were made into chicken shelters, how borders were getting crossed by slides or doors, how I felt I became part of the ‘farmhouse family’. Everything was growing.” – Merel Zwarts, taken from this publication

A farm on wheels

The success of this project in Leidsche Rijn created more questions and ambitions. However, the farm transferred to a new owner in the course of 2019 with no time for us to organize a possible co-ownership of the farm. With this change, the choice was made to move around the farm, into the neighborhood, connecting more with other surviving farmers, residents, especially children and environments. This is how the Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills came into being. A “farm on wheels’’ with whom we have been able to visit different farm sites in the area and re-experience how residents can be involved in the issues of farming, ecology and heritage, and thus the commons. Not fixed by location, the mobile installation consists of a black cargo bike, with on its front-end a roaming architecture taking the shape of a farmhouse, made of mirror glass. The Travelling Farm Museum is a tool for connection, preservation, and mutual learning which lives in seasonal cycles using an accessible structure in size, movement and scale. 

Unearthing forgotten stories and skills

In response to the changing conditions, the project team defined the year 2020 as “the time of plowing and sowing” – activities that, while less visible, are fundamental for natural growth. With the motto, “food for health, health for the planet,” Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills focuses on ecological cultivation skills for food for health and finding ways to connect with local farmers in Leidsche Rijn and in the broader Utrecht area. The environmental catastrophe during the pandemic times reconfirm the convictions of how critical it is to preserve and disseminate agro-ecological stories and skills. Learning from the past and understanding the present – in order to imagine a future where we can survive well together. During Winter, we research, plan and design, organizing the collection, as Spring starts appearing we sow the seeds of our activities that grow throughout the Summer, and in Fall harvest comes to help us prepare for the Winter ahead. These research and action phases inform each other, oftentimes blending into each other following the energies of the community’s activities. 

Welcoming and able to integrate everywhere she arrives, by putting up a mirror on the environments she encounters, Travelling Farm Museum remains non-intimidating in its simplicity and utilitarian design. By reflecting her surroundings, she evokes curiosity and is designed to make the different activities and production processes that take place in the area visible by building a collection and connections. Through workshops, storytelling and exploring the materiality of food production and environmental processes, the project makes meaningful connections between the different members of the Leidsche Rijn community, inhabitants, farmers and growers alike. When not on the move, the museum is parked in a temporary depot, a storefront in the Terwijde shopping center, the complex that encircles the farmhouse, and has open doors during its working days. 

This project and the continued dialogue with the (international) public has shown us that the stories of the farmers we have learned are global. Climate change due to corporatist agriculture but also to the contemporary urban lifestyle, is a fact. We want to take a step back and gather these stories by transforming them into valuable material, audio-visual, graphic and architectural language is needed to work further and grow the collection with a wider perspective. We think that we need time to translate the experiences into an exhibition that could stimulate sustainable co-living, working with old and new participants through (re)discovering their proximities and cultural identity. Eventually the museum would like to find a land… let’s see what the future has in store.

Contributors The Outsiders: Asia Komarova, Txell Blanco, Merel Zwarts, Leonardo Siquiera Artist Farmer: Sun Chang Music & Sound: Maxim Yesodharan Podcast Contributors: Tom Dello, Jasmine Yesodharan Utrecht University: Corelia Baibarac-Duignan, Nanna Verhoeff, Melisse Vroegindeweij, Tamalone van den Eijnden Neighbours: Marieke Doubbelman, Jan Fedinger, Jesse van Boheemen

Team Binna Choi, program lead Marianna Takou, support and producer Erik Uitenbogaard, support and funding Lara Berkeveld, education coordinator Kim van der Zijde, education coordinator Luke Cohlen, Rosa Paardenkooper, communication Anna Dupont-Crabtree, research intern

Expore more projects

Leidsche rijn listens, unmapping eurasia, nina bell f. house museum, group affinity, chicago boys, while we were singing, they were dreaming, seeing studies, future park, lying freely, come alive, stadtstaat. a scenario for merging cities – episode 2, i will arrange everything. it will be the best film ever, an atlas of radical cartography, electric palm tree, generale staten (general states), animal estates 6.0: utrecht, travel stories, re-projecting (utrecht), the speculative diagram, forms of inquiry, hidden curriculum, what’s left to its own devices (on reclamation), undecided utopias, to live outside the law you must be honest, design solutions, camp for oppositional architecture 2006, maurits script, the power and illumination project, story space on gift economies, what do you look like a crypto demonic mystery, re-thinking engagement, super-utrecht: in search of a neighbor, register confusing uses of intellectual property, documents 1 and 2, mud / slip / rally, daria martin trilogy, publish and be damned, designing truth, design attitudes, four easy pieces, darkness at noon, uncontrolled effects, funky baskenland, past imperfect, killer queen, iraq dialogs, uto: the technology of tears, zagen koken drogen, three d.j. sculptures, in out up down, friend of the magic torch, snowflakes falling on the international dateline, fin de siècle – end of a century, foundnation (tout ce que je vous ai volé), fools don’t play that, i hate sports, your coloring book, texaco love, aural contract: the whole truth, latent stare, japan syndrome, practice international, how to live together, arts collaboratory, the common sense phase 1, in the year of the quiet sun, projects in 1995, projects in 1994, projects in 1993, projects in 1992, projects in 1991, projects in 1990, casco coffee communication, casco art institute: working for the commons, the library of unread books, army of love, to become two, parasite lottery, entanglement, grand domestic revolution, white paper: the law, (un)usual business, we are the time machines: time and tools for commoning, evolved in shared relationships & erfgoed (agricultural heritage and land use), readingroom, two rubatos & footnotes on equality, het is of de stenen spreken (silence is a commons), commons • art, assembly for commoning art institutions, c4r (cultures for resilience), common grounds, stay updated on our activities about art and the commons, casco art institute: working for the commons
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the netherlands  , general mail: [email protected] press: [email protected] 
phone: +31 (0)30 231 9995, consider donating to casco and help the ecosystem flourish. your financial contribution of choice, be it €1 or €1000 (any amount is greatly appreciated), can be sent by immediate bank transfer to stichting casco at iban nl62rabo0166320765 with as subject line ”donation to collective pot”., if you have questions about tax deduction, please consult our legal page ..

Known as one of the most significant self-taught artists of the 20th century, this is one of Henry Darger 's beautiful but strange panoramic paintings, created to illustrate his epic 15,145-page written narrative The Story of the Vivian Girls - a tale about a world torn apart by war. Darger created over 300 watercolour and collage paintings to tell his story, his work now being one one of the most celebrated examples outsider art.

02. George Widener

The artwork of George Widener is a direct result of his extroadinary mathematical capabilites. The self-taught artist uses his calculating skills to find patterns in dates and then creates artwork from his findings. This particular piece was developed following Widener's interest in architecture and time. Not always being able to afford paper, Widener created parts of this artwork on napkins and stuck them together to make the whole canvas.

03. Howard Finster

The motivation behind Howard Finster 's artwork was to spread his visions, which he believed came directly from God. During his lifetime, Finster created over 40,000 pieces, his early artwork created soley in paint before adding magic markers into the mix later on. There's many to choose from, but this Black Cat of Desert Storm is one of our favourite of his pieces.

04. Gerard Cambon

Self taught artist Gerard Cambon lives and works in Paris, creating constructions composed primarily of found materials, including wood, leather and old iron. His work is both light and dark, representing joy and freedom, with others expressing feelings of confinement and detention. This piece, titled Manege Aux Citrons was exhibited at the Outsider Art Fair in January this year.

05. Marc Boulier

Born in Saigon in Vietnam, artist Marc Boulier spent his younger years travelling through Africa, South America and Asia. This early life experience saw Boulier develop an eye and appreciation for colours and textures of the natural world.

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Beginning with paints, then a decade of working exclusively with corrugated cardboard, the talented artist has since moved onto developing his artwork with driftwood. The human element at the heart of his approach, his little beings each asserts its own expression, including tenderness, humor, sadness and complacency.

06. Chris Mars

The youngest of seven children, when Chris Mars was five, his eldest brother Joe was institutionalized at a state mental hospital, diagnosed with Schizophrenia. Since then, self-taught artist Mars has created a significant and impressive body of work that reflects a family affected by mental illness. The former drummer of '80s band The Replacements, private collectors of Mars' work include musicians Tom Petty, Michael Stipe and Dan Murphy.

07. Morton Bartlett

Photographer and graphic designer Morton Bartlett devoted almost 30 years of his life to his dollmaking hobby. No training in sculpture, Bartlett used books on anatomy as reference to create at least 15 dolls out of clay and plaster. He then dressed and posed each before taking photos of them in staged scenarios.

His work first became public in 1963, but the attention and praise surprised Bartlett, leading him to pack his work away and remain unseen for the next 30 years. Made public again after being discovered in 1993, Bartlett's work has received wide acclaim, with his work featured in major museums and private collections.

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The Outsiders Project was set up by Nell Leyshon- novelist, playwright, and deputy chair of Shakespeare’s Globe. It started with one piece of work made for BEAF Festival in 2018. Since then we have grown and created multiple performances, toured our work to prisons, and produced publications and exhibitions. We run weekly workshops in both creative writing and photography, and host regular scratch events to support our artists- helping them find their voices and creating a welcoming creative community.

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Photos: First Look at THE OUTSIDERS on Broadway

The Outsiders is running on Broadway at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre.

Previews are underway for the Broadway premiere of The Outsiders , the new musical based on the novel by S.E. Hinton & Francis Ford Coppola ’s film, which opens Thursday, April 11, 2024 at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre. Check out a fist look at the cast in action below!

The cast features  Brody Grant  as Ponyboy Curtis, Sky Lakota-Lynch as Johnny Cade,  Joshua Boone  as Dallas Winston,  Brent Comer  as Darrel Curtis,  Jason Schmidt  as Sodapop Curtis,  Emma Pittman  as Cherry Valance, Daryl Tofa as Two-Bit Mathews,  Kevin William Paul  as Bob Sheldon, and Dan Berry as  Paul Holden . The company also includes  Jordan Chin ,  Milena J. Comeau , Barton Cowperthwaite , Tilly Evans-Krueger , Henry Gendron , RJ Higton , Wonza Johnson ,  Sean Harrison Jones , Maggie Kuntz ,  Renni Anthony Magee , SarahGrace Mariani , Melody Rose , Josh Strobl , Victor Carrillo Tracey , Trevor Wayne .

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1967, the hardened hearts and aching souls of Ponyboy Curtis, Johnny Cade and their chosen family of ‘outsiders’ are in a fight for survival and a quest for purpose in a world that may never accept them. A story of the bonds that brothers share and the hopes we all hold on to, this gripping new musical reinvigorates the timeless tale of ‘haves and have nots’, of protecting what’s yours and fighting for what could be.

Photo Credit: Matthew Murphy

Brody Grant , Jason Schmidt , Brent Comer , Sky Lakota-Lynch

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Ron’s Place: Birkenhead flat of outsider art granted Grade II listing

Victory for campaigners and conservators as elaborately decorated property is honoured with protected status

A ground-floor rented flat in Birkenhead which was crafted over a period of 30 years into an extraordinary palace of outsider art has been given Grade II-listed status.

The flat in Wirral, known as Ron’s Place , is thought to be the UK’s only example of outsider art to be nationally listed.

From the outside it looks like what it is: an attractive but unremarkable Victorian semi-detached house. Inside, the late Ron Gittins created a remarkable fantasy world with brightly coloured historical murals, handmade costumes, and fireplaces sculpted into a minotaur, a lion’s head and a Roman altar.

To step inside the flat is something else. Jaws generally drop. It’s not conventionally great art, but that’s not the point.

One fan is the Pulp singer Jarvis Cocker. “A small number of people on this planet have known for a while that Ron’s Place is a very special place – but from now on it is official,” he said.

“The work of one unique gentleman in the north of England has been recognised nationally. Globally even. Hallelujah!!”

The flat was saved from being stripped of its interiors when campaigners managed to buy the whole house a year ago , thanks to Tamsin Wimhurst, who read about it in the Guardian .

Gittins’ niece Jan Williams said the idea of it being listed was originally a “ploy” to put off other bidders. For it to actually happen “is absolutely brilliant … it has been a long old journey”.

Williams said she thought her uncle would be “absolutely thrilled. He just felt he was on to something, that he was on a mission to create. He said to my dad once: ‘I will not be ignored.’

“Just how audacious is it to stick a great big concrete minotaur fireplace in your rented flat. Other people fret about Blu-Tack stains on the wall.”

Gittins, who died in 2019, aged 79, was a complicated character who most people would have regarded as eccentric.

Alison Bailey Smith, a volunteer and neighbour, used to bump into him when she was pushing her young children round in their pram. He usually had a wig on and gaiters flapping around above his wellington boots which he had fashioned from newspaper. He also had a pram.

“I never thought to look inside it but apparently he was going off to the local DIY shop to buy concrete or cement to make his amazing structures,” she said.

Like most people, she had no idea what Gittins was up to inside his flat. “I could see that there was creative stuff in the garden and there were two totem poles outside his front door which were interesting.

“His front garden was full of junk but it wasn’t junk, it was his art store, really.”

After Gittins died and she went inside the flat, Bailey Smith said she could hardly believe her eyes. “It was incredible, absolutely incredible … those fireplaces, the colours, the proportions in the murals. You have to see it really to believe it. Who does that in a rental property? It is important that it’s protected because there is nowhere else like it.”

The listing by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) on the advice of Historic England (HE), is a recognition of “Ron’s creation as an examplar in this country of large-scale outsider art”.

It gives Ron’s Place extra protection as well as helping to unlock new sources of funding for the custodians hoping to use the property to inspire creativity and improve wellbeing.

The flat is not yet open to the public but it is hoped that small guided tours will be possible in a year’s time.

Catherine Croft, the director of the Twentieth Century Society, said Ron’s Place was “2oth century heritage unlike any other, the first example of outsider art to be nationally listed”.

Outsider art is a term often applied to work done by people on the margins of society, making art for themselves not an audience. There are many individual examples of the genre in UK gallery collections, including the Tate and the Whitworth in Manchester, but entire properties like Ron’s Place are more commonly found in Europe and the US.

Martin Wallace is a Ron’s Place patron and film-maker who made an outside art documentary series with Cocker . He said to go in the flat was “a rare and strangely beautiful immersive experience”.

“I’ve spent time in many outsider art environments around the globe and Ron’s Place ranks with the best of them,” he said.

Other examples of outsider art around the world

Das Junkerhaus , Lemgo, Germany

Handyman Karl Junker (1850-1912) was regarded as a solitary, eccentric man who had few visitors.

The strange house he created, with unique paintings and sculpture, was his life’s work and has been called “one of the quirkiest, most idiosyncratic architectural sites in Germany, if not Europe” .

Watts Towers , Los Angeles

In a poor suburb of the city are 17 tower-like structures created by Saboto “Simon” Rodia , a semi-literate Italian immigrant who worked alone on them from 1921 to 1954.

Rodia covered steel bar frames in concrete and whatever items he found, including broken bottles, tiles and old crockery. The closest Rodia ever came to explaining his work was to say : “I had in mind to do something big and I did it.”

Le Palais Idéal , Hauterives, France

Ferdinand Cheval was a village postal worker who built a fantasy palace from rocks he found in the village.

The resulting structure is strange, like “a Monet painting with small pebbles” , according to one visitor, and “like an insight into an archaeologist’s unconscious,” said another.

Garden of Eden , Lucas, Kansas, US

Retired civil war veteran and free thinker SP Dinsmoor began constructing his cabin home and sculpture garden in 1907.

He hoped his art would continue for ever as an appeal for a more just society. To that end, he built a pyramid mausoleum with a glass-fronted concrete coffin where his embalmed corpse keeps watch.

• Architecture

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