New York City and the Outsider Art Fair

After years of talking about it, a friend and I went to the Outsider Art Fair in New York City in early March.

It was my first visit to the fair and my third visit to NYC.

Loved the show, loved the city (again).

Went back to the show for two days straight just to make sure I had absorbed all the content.

Here are a few shots:

My new favourite artist is Della Wells. The piece above is Souls Bloom in this Garden (2022).

The environments she creates for her self portraits are rich and packed with meaning. I spoke a fair bit with a rep from her gallery, the Portrait Society Gallery in Milwaukee.

From the website: Della Wells born in, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is a self-taught artist. As a child, she invented stories and characters based on her mother’s recollections of growing up in North Carolina during the 1920s through the 1940s. Wells used these stories to escape the uncertain realities created by her mother’s mental illness and her father’s rage and eventually used them to inspire the collage art she creates today.

Her work is exhibited in Europe and throughout the U.S. in folk art and outsider art galleries. Portrait Society Gallery presents her work annually at the Outsider Art Fair in New York. A play about her life, “Don’t Tell Me I Can’t Fly” was written for a performance at The Kennedy Center in Washington, D. C. and it was also presented in Wisconsin. She has illustrated two children’s books.

Very inspiring! I left New York feeling infused with culture, new ideas, and a better understanding of what is being celebrated in the world of outsider art.