Just around the bend from Harbor Place on Baltimore’s rapidly gentrifying waterfront, the American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM) is one of the best small museums in the country. Operating on relatively minimal funding, AVAM makes a virtue of its limitations by presenting one major exhibition annually, starting in October & running through Labor Day the following year. I have never seen a show there that didn’t completely knock me out – this year is no exception.

 

AVAM’s focus is outsider art, a category (like “visionary”) that is open to a lot of interpretation & latitude. Over its ten year history, the museum has shown all of the usual suspects, the gradually emerging canon of self-taught, inner-directed artists who operate, in large part, outside of the economy of the gallery system: Henry Darger, Howard Finster, the Philadelphia Wireman (so called because nobody knows his or her name, the oeuvre having been discovered literally discarded in a vacant lot), Grandma Moses.

 

The theme this year is water & the majority of the galleries in AVAM’s main building – it has three, all of which need to be seen – are devoted to works somehow entailing the role of water in life & culture. The absolute centerpiece of the exhibition – tho not necessarily the best or most moving work – is an extensive series of Vodou related works focusing on La Siren, “the Queen of the Sea,” mostly by Nancy Josephson, a Vodou-initiate from Wilmington, Delaware, sometimes in collaboration with others. Josephson’s works, complete rooms & shrines, is stunning in its use of beads & sequins to complete massively complex environments – the image of the mermaid queen at the center of the shrine above is created entirely through beadwork.

 

But to suggest that Josephson is in any way an outsider in her art is something that calls into question the nature of such categories. Curtis Faville, my constant commentator, thinks I’m completely nuts on the subject of categories, but in fact schema, frameworks provide all the extraneous detail that converts raw image into a meaningful construct – it’s the social dimension of any work of art. I would insist on the integrity of that social dimension & I think that Curtis largely wants to negate it – he would love for the work to be the thing in itself, the purely self-consuming artifact. It’s the impurities that interest me. So a border case like Josephson is especially compelling.

 

Josephson’s art may be driven by her interest in Vodou, but she herself is hardly a naïf in the world of the arts. A one-time musician whose son literally learned to walk on Arlo Guthrie’s tour bus, Josephson is married to David Bromberg, another musician who abandoned the on-the-road-all-the-time lifestyle of contemporary folk for a related discipline with a saner lifestyle, the design & manufacture of violins. The multiplicity of their aesthetic concerns reminds me a lot of the dynamics that underlies the great show of Poetry and Its Arts, which is still up for another three weeks at the California Historical Society in San Francisco. That show is at its best when it explores poets as photographers (Allen Ginsberg), painters (Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who paints at least as well as he writes) & installation artists (Norma Cole). If one were to explore poets as painters, one would not put somebody like Ferlinghetti or the late Stan Rice alongside the truly self-taught, as one might Bob Dylan. Josephson likewise may be a visionary but she is hardly an outsider.

 

The other blockbuster collection currently being shown at AVAM underscores the difference. Not a part of the Holy H²O exhibition that otherwise dominates the museum, the tapestries of the late Esther Nisenthal Krinitz eloquently construct a powerful tale, the years of the Second World War when Krinitz, then a 15-year-old girl living in a Jewish town in Poland, & her younger sister Mania hid, sometimes in the woods, sometimes in plain sight, as their family was shipped off to the extermination camps & the Nazis plundered Poland. The thirty-six tapestries of this narrative were sewn by Krinitz to explain to her own children & grandchildren just what she and her sister had undergone during those years & her concern is with the story, the simple wall-hangings devoid of pictorial perspective, presenting horrific details in the most matter-of-fact manner, each picture underscored with a short explanation of three or four sentences:

 

September 1939. My friends and I run to see the first Nazis entering our village, Mniszek. They stopped in front of my grandparents' house, where one got off his horse to rough up my grandfather and cut his beard as my grandmother screamed

 

 

Sewn in the mid- and late-1990s, this is folk art in the best Popular Front sense of the term, conveying an almost unbearable story with extraordinary grace & dignity. It is precisely the gap in tone between referent and the material signifiers of Krinitz’ craft that gives her work its great power. The entire sequence can be seen on the website linked above, which is maintained by her family.

 

The next day I saw another work elsewhere that further emphasized the ambiguous border implicit in the concept of outsider art. Only this piece wasn’t presented as tho it were any kind of art brut experience. Richard Cleaver’s massive clay installation piece, Gathering at the Latrobe Spring House at the Baltimore Museum of Art, contains over 100 hand-built and painted ceramic figures mounted on a series of white risers that gives the whole project an air not that dissimilar from Josephson’s shrines. (The detail below contains perhaps half of the top layer.)

 

 

Though Cleaver began as a child whose parents disapproved of a boy making, literally, dolls (he had to hide them under his bed), he has gone on to get his MFA and is thoroughly embedded in the world of contemporary ceramics, able to support himself from his work. Part of what is unique about this installation, however, is that Cleaver has envisioned the community that once lived & worked on & about the old Oakland Farm estate in Baltimore, whose spring house – a building for keeping food cool,literally by placing it in or by the water of an underground stream allowed to surface there – was constructed complete with columns. That spring house was rescued as the estate turned into a development, and sits today on the grounds of the Baltimore Art Museum. Thus Cleaver’s project is being displayed in the very building it envisions (you can see it at the bottom of the detail above). Cleaver himself now lives & works in the neighborhood created out of the estate grounds.

 

At what instant did Cleaver – whose project has as much of a community focus as does Krinitz’ or Josephson’s – stop being the self-taught boy interested in making art & become the knowing professional? Once he got a formal education? Once he was able to support himself entirely by his work? That latter definition would exclude Howard Finster. Cleaver’s art school training is not that removed, frankly, from Josephson’s ability to travel to Haiti to study indigenous Haitian forms of an art practice that is clearly at some remove from her own upbringing & background. Nor could one invoke the question of the purpose to which the work is put, tho it may be a better register than these other indices. Josephson is represented by a gallery as is Cleaver. Henry Darger & the Philadelphia Wireman had no idea that their works ever would be seen by anyone.

 

So there isn’t ultimately a single definition, so much as a web of implications that places one in, on the edge, or beyond a series of plausible concepts: is/is not visionary; is/is not professionally trained; is/is not professionally situated in the discipline; is/is not producing for a community, etc., etc., etc. And how, when you come down to it, is the world of art buyers moseying the streets of Chelsea any less of a community than Esther Krinitz’ family?