Spotlight on Outsider Art: 27 Self-Taught Artists You Should Know About (Part 3)
We asked nine experts in the field to talk about their favorite self-taught artists.
By Art in America Guide to Museums, Galleries, and Artists
January 17, 2020
With the 28th edition of the New York Outsider Art Fair in town, we asked nine experts in the field to talk about their favorite self-taught artists.
TOM DI MARIA
Director, Creative Growth Art Center, Oakland, California
Latefa Noorzai has been working with Creative Growth now for three or four years. Originally from Kabul, she’s a refugee from the war in Afghanistan. She had never made art before coming to us, and she creates images of women she remembers from her previous life, as well as fantastic self-portraits.
Last fall we presented an exhibition that showed work by Creative Growth artists with disabilities alongside work being made by Aboriginal artists—some with disabilities and some without—at the Mangkaja Arts Resource Agency in Western Australia. This year we brought paintings by two Mangkaja artists, Sonia Kurarra and Tommy May, to the Outsider Art Fair. The piece by May below is a depiction of, and hope for, rain—which is very timely given what’s going on in Australia right now.
Another artist whose work I fell in love with when I saw it in Paris is the French artist Caroline Demangel, who began making art during a hospitalization in 2008. Her drawings are beautifully stylized and very compelling.
Latefa Noorzai (b. 1960), Untitled, 2018, ink and acrylic on paper copy, 15 x 22 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Creative Growth, Oakland, California.
Sonia Kurarra (1952), Untitled, n.d., acrylic on canvas, 59 x 59 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Creative Growth, Oakland, California.
Ngarralja Tommy May (b. 1935), Untitled, n.d., engraving on metal, 47 1/2 x 47 1/2 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Creative Growth, Oakland, California.
Caroline Demangel (b. 1982), Un poisson célèbre (triptych), 2018, acrylic, colored pencil, pastel on paper, 31 1/2 x 78 3/4 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Cavin-Morris Gallery, New York. Photo: Jurate Vecerate.
For full article, visit artguide.pro.