Seeing Out Loud: The Best Things I Saw at Frieze New York and the Outsider Art Fair

Source Vulture by Jerry Saltz
The Art Fairs are over for now. The gallerists have packed up after reportedly racking in big sales; many have moved onto other fairs somewhere else. Most will reconvene in Basel in June, and the cycle will begin anew in September. I've learned to look a little harder at art fairs, using them as essential Band-Aids when I can’t get to other scenes around the world. In Berlin a couple of weeks ago, however, when the subject of art fairs came up, more than a few dealers said to me that many European artists prefer the fairs to gallery shows. They explained that although there are many great galleries in Berlin, they’re poorly attended. (I’ve heard the same about L.A.) Art fairs afford more eyes on the artist’s work. This breaks my heart a little, but it does mean that art fairs are with us for the foreseeable future, and I made it my business to go to two of them this week. The Outsider Art Fair provided the biggest new discovery of the week. In a magical booth organized by gallerist Chris Byrne and Marquand Books, I saw the prescient drawings of Susan Te Kahurangi King, who does not speak. Born in New Zealand in the early 1950s, King stopped speaking at around age 4 but drew prolifically through her 30s.
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Outsider Art Fair 2014 Announces Special Programs on Jean Michael-Basquiat, Henry Darger and More.

Source Broadway World
Following the extraordinary reception of last year's talks, Outsider Art Fair organizers will present several thought provoking talks and panel discussions and a special curated space guaranteed to be of major interest to fans of Outsider Art. On Saturday, May 10, 2014 from 2-3:30 pm, at the Center 548 Rooftop, OAF will present Lost in Translation: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Self-Taught Artist. Panelists will include Brooke Davis Anderson, Eric Fretz, Lenore Schorr, and Xaviera Simmons. Paul Laster will moderate. Reevaluating the life and career of Jean-Michel Basquiat, the panel will look at Basquiat's early interest in art, his breakout work as the graffiti writer SAMO, his poetic use of found materials, his obsessive use of anatomy, the repetition of words and symbols in his work, his embrace of heroic figures, and the influence of Outsider artists on his work.
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Raw Vision, the premier magazine of Outsider Art, partners with Rei Kawabuko of Comme des Garçons to celebrate the magazine’s 25th Anniversary

Source Artfix Daily
Raw Vision and Comme des Garçons constitute two of the world’s most individualistic creative exemplars: visionary art as reflected in the pages of Raw Vision and the imaginative mind of fashion designer Rei Kawakubo. To celebrate its quarter-century of success, Raw Vision has granted exclusive rights to its vast reservoir of images and layouts for use by Comme des Garçons to create 20 to 30 mini-magazines that will be dispersed around the globe. Launched in 1969 in Tokyo by Rei Kawakubo, Comme des Garçons has for the past 45 years proudly cultivated a reputation for outré designs, making the label highly relatable to Outside Art. The fashion designer is planning multiple installations featuring Raw Vision at their stores and Dover Markets in New York, London, Paris, Bejing, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Singapore next October.
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The Puzzle of the Outsider Art Fair

Source Art Net by Ben Davis
Saying that “outsider art” is an uncomfortable category is nothing new. A way of celebrating certain artists while at the same time stigmatizing them, the “outsider” category lumps together a lot of different things for unclear reasons. Still, it’s a successful brand, and the Outsider Art Fair—freshly moved to May from January to take advantage of the Frieze week whirl, and currently taking over three floors at 548 West 22nd Street in Chelsea—does a good job showing what makes it so. As with any type of art, there are “outsider” superstars, and the Outsider Art Fair has ‘em: Henry Darger, Martín Ramírez, Morton Bartlett. Ames Gallery has some amazing drawings by A.G. Rizzoli (1896–1981), fresh from being crowned an art star, of sorts, at the Venice Biennale.
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The Outsider Art Fair Features a Global Vision

Source The New York Times by Karen Rosenberg
Not surprisingly, the number of booths at the fair has jumped to 47 from 40, 10 of which belong to first-time exhibitors. And the global reach of the big contemporary art fairs is mirrored here more than in previous years; artists from Brazil, Iran, India, Japan and various African countries accompany relatively well-known Americans like Henry Darger and Bill Traylor. At the booth of Yukiko Koide Presents, from Tokyo, the abstract drawings of the developmentally disabled artist Yuichi Saito mesmerize with their cloudlike accumulations of calligraphic marks. At Galeria Estação, a São Paulo gallery, the paintings of the farmer turned artist Alcides present trucks, speedboats and other conveyances in a vivid, streamlined style that seems conversant with Brazil’s history of Neo-Concrete abstraction.Galerie Hervé Perdriolle, from Paris, has an eye-catching display of Indian scroll paintings, made and used by traveling storytellers whose names are not known to us.
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The Manly Pursuit of Desire: Three Timely Awakenings at the Outsider Art Fair

Source Huffington Post by Perry Brass
The third awakening came from discovering Scott Sieher's "Band of Bikers" series of found photographs from Zieher Smith Gallery. The phenomenon of the found work of art or photo is coming into prominence. Sieher's bikers were in a group of gay motorcycle clubs who produced "runs," that is social gatherings, that span pre-Stonewall to the present. "Band of Bikers" documents several runs from 1972. The photos were basically dumped "garbage" found in Scott's basement. His super alerted him to them, after a tenant had died leaving no real directive for dispersing his effects.
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Going Inside: Outsider Art Fair 2014

Source Hyperallergic by Mostafa Heddaya
This anxiety of exclusion is the defining feature of so-called “outsider art,” a genre in which there has been a resurgence of interest in recent years, from institutional platforms such as The Encyclopedic Palace exhibition at the Venice Biennale and the Hayward Gallery’s Alternate Guide to the Universe to roving affairs like the Museum of Everything and the Outsider Art Fair, which is staged annually in New York and Paris. Though outsider art’s claim to being is grounded in a theoretical rejection of art-historical power structures, those artists canonized as outsiders by major institutions remain suspiciously homogenous — of the Hayward exhibition’s 23 artists, two were women, for example. But the Outsider Art Fair, coinciding with Frieze for the first time in its 22-year history, nonetheless delivered an interesting-enough antidote to the “insider” work on view elsewhere during Frieze Week. Which, I guess, is the consolation (or inoculation) that outsider art is meant to provide. Spread out across three floors, usual suspects like Henry Darger, William Scott, A.G. Rizzoli, Thornton Dial, Marcel Storr, Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, and so on were interspersed with a healthy international mix of lesser-known folk and outsider practitioners. The minimalism of Asian meditative art in particular — from the Greenbergian reverie of Tantric Indian paintings from Rajasthan at Galerie Hervé Pedriolle to the organic simplicity of a Suiseki stone at Yukiko Koide Presents — offered a welcome relief from the frequently encountered narrative of the clinically insane, often white, often male outsider as solitary art genius.
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Reflecting on the present...

Source The Hindu interview Shailaja Tripathi/Jitish Kallat
I have begun with the intent that the biennale should produce themes rather than re-produce a single premeditated theme. My curatorial focus is dispersed among artists by the process of sharing prompts rather than by suggesting the themes under which artworks will be organised. One suggestion is to reflect on the present through a process of recall… thinking back to the moment often referred to as the “Age of Discovery”, a period that began in the early 15th century and continued till the 17th century. With great acceleration in maritime activity, it heralded an era of exploitation, conquest, coercive trading, commercial rivalry and colonialism, animating the early processes of globalisation. We can trace back several of the themes that proliferate our lives globally to this embryonic moment in human history. With the arrival of Pedro Alvares Cabral and Vasco da Gama, it was also the time when Kochi was reborn. The other suggestion is a reflection on our present moment from a distant cosmic glance. As we evoke the thought that right now planet earth is hurtling through space at a dizzying speed in a direction we are unaware of, we can perhaps induce a degree of incomprehension about our very existence and recognise our interdependence as cohabitants of a single journey whose destination is unknown.
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Tate Liverpool: Mondrian and his Studios - Nasreen Mohamedi

Source e-flux
This summer Tate Liverpool presents Abstraction into the World, a pairing of exhibitions which interrogates architecture, the urban environment and the natural world, placing abstraction in dialogue with these contexts. Tracing the careers of Piet Mondrian and Nasreen Mohamedi—artists working in different eras and continents—the season explores how each arrived at similar non-figurative styles, suggesting correspondences between their practices and a parallel interest in bringing abstraction into reality.
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A wider canvas for public art

Source Mid-Day
2014 is being hailed as the year of public art, according to Mumbai’s city galleries and museums who have lined up big shows for aficionados. the guide picks the best shows to plot on your art itinerary.
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Sun and Moon and the God of Rain

Source Artfilms
Artfilms releases a visually mesmerizing documentary on Indian Warli Painting. With an emphasis on the changing face of traditions, the film explores Indian Warli art from the perspective of its essential functionality, It`s role within the tribal community, it`s roots in rituals and worship. Featured on several film festivals internationally, this documentary by Anna Pitscheider will provide you with a view on art and creativity in its most innate form, as a fundemental element of human life.
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Art Basel Hong Kong retains Asian flavour: Magnus Renfrew

Source Times of India by Neelam Raaj
There was a significant boom in 2007-08 but the downturn really negatively impacted the Indian market. However, the moderns are still doing very well. In the contemporary market, it takes time to rebuild trust. As with other art scenes in Asia, it is important for there to be benchmarks for evaluation other than the market. Curatorial and critical acclaim are crucial to building a sense of confidence. Often when you have a new market — India or China—and things are auction driven, there can be irrational exuberance and people may not one have the grounding of curatorial and critical acclaim which helps them understand which artists are going to be interesting in the long term. That's fundamentally important. As time goes on, these values are going to be widely recognized. This is certainly already the case in the Chinese contemporary market. People are looking to see beyond the latest auction star.
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Outsider Art Fair New York

Outsider Art Fair New York May 8-11 Center 548, 548 West 22nd Street.
Hervé Perdriolle Gallery Booth 311 works exhibited Hill Korwa, Jadupatua and Patua, Jangarh Singh Shyam, Jivya Soma Mashe, Kashinat Chavan, Ladoo Bai, Mritu Pat, Ram Singh Urveti, Shantaram Tumbada, Shine Shivan, Tantra Paintings, Vyakul…