With 64 exhibitors from around the world, the Outsider Art Fair opened its 2023 edition on Thursday afternoon at the Metropolitan Pavilion in New York.
Filled with both bewitching art and visitors and dealers to match, the fair is always a fun ride and this year is no exception, with some truly exceptional works of art on offer—many of which are at accessible prices.
Below a look at the best booths at the 2023 Outsider Art Fair, which runs until March 5.
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O.L. Samuels at Nexus Singularity / Aarne Anton
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Born in 1931 in Wilcox County, Georgia, O.L. Samuels had various jobs over his life, from a prize fighter in New York City to a tree surgeon in the South. While working as a tree surgeon, Samuels had a serious accident that made him no longer able to work. That sent him into a depression that he ultimately began soothing via art-making.
Upstate New York dealer Aarne Anton first visited Samuels’ home in Jacksonville, Florida in the early 2000s, which he described as an environment that included several wood-carved sculptures of animals in the entryway, as well as the fixings for a church (Samuels was also a minister). Samuels, who died in 2017, worked collaboratively with his community to create his highly decorated sculptures; they would help him affix marbles, confetti, or paint dots to these sculptures. On view here is a spectacular sculpture of an elephant, with its trunk flared in midair. There’s more than meets the eye, however. Samuels’s home had frequently been broken into and he created this elephant work as a safe: pull down the elephant’s head to reveal a secret hiding spot.
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Nana Yamazki and Yuki Fujioka at Yukiko Koide Presents
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Kyoto’s Yukiko Koide Presents has a two-person booth in which everything seems to be unraveling. Cutting paper is almost an obsession for Yuki Fujioka, who uses regular scissors you might get at any convenience store to make the tiniest of cuts on paper. There’s likely upwards of a hundred cuts on these scraps of paper that measure no more than a few inches. On view here are cuts he did to brochures for an exhibition of his own art. Nearby are pieces by Nana Yamazki in which she hand-sews hundreds of frayed yarn, creating whimsically delightful sculptures.
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Denver Ferguson at Kishka Gallery & Library
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews For a solo presentation titled “Through the Eyes of the Cosmos,” Vermont’s Kishka Gallery & Library is presenting intricate colored-pencil drawings by Denver Ferguson produced over the past few years. Ferguson was born in St. Lucia and grew up in St. John in the US Virgin Islands.
In 2017, he moved to the Upper Connecticut River Valley, where his daughter was already living, after Hurricanes Maria and Irma battered St. John. Ferguson soon started working as a cashier at the Upper Valley Co-op and would make these drawings during his breaks and other quiet moments on the job. Kishka Gallery discovered Ferguson’s work, when a gallery worker saw him drawing in the co-op’s parking lot, and it immediately moved to exhibit his work.
Ferguson’s highly stylized drawings mix his love of 1980s comics and 20th-century science fiction, with Yoruba and Caribbean references and nods toward Afrofuturism.
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Timothy Wyllie at New Discretions
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Trained as an architect, Timothy Wyllie might best be known as a founding member of the Process Church of the Final Judgement, a religious cult active in the late 1960s and ’70s that became known for its “seminal uses of psychedelic culture and celebrities in their promotional magazine, as well as catchy phrases that gave equal credent to Satan and Jesus both,” according to a release.
Serving as Process’s creative director, Wyllie contributed heavily to their magazine and was a prolific artist in the years after Process dissolved. He lived in the Dakota and claimed to have given the Beatles their first hit of acid before moving to New Mexico. Throughout his life, Wyllie also said he was able to have telepathic communications with dolphins, aliens, and angels.
New Discretions’s founder Benjamin Tischer was introduced to Wiley’s work by late artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge; he left behind some 300 drawings, the vast majority of which have never been shown publicly before. On view here are a mix of trippy landscapes and semi-abstract pieces, including one that features a flying saucer at its center.
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Valton Tyler at Valley House Gallery & Sculpture Garden
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Born in 1944 in Texas City, Valton Tyler witnessed the 1947 chemical explosion known as the Texas City disaster that killed more than 500 people. For much of his life, Tyler retreated into drawing and, in the 1960s, Tyler’s older brother brought his work to Dallas’s Valley House Gallery to ask what they made of his drawings. The gallery’s founder Donald Vogel immediately fell in love with them and helped Tyler get into Southern Methodist University’s printmaking program. Beginning in the 1970s, Tyler moved into painting, creating large-scale canvases that feature enchanting forms that seem to be both human and otherworldly.
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Renata Berdes at Arts of Life / Circle Contemporary
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Arts of Life is an Illinois-based nonprofit that supports artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities; Circle Contemporary is the non-profit’s exhibition space. One of several similarly focused nonprofits presenting at the fair, Circle Contemporary is exhibiting several works by Renata Berdes, who has a fascination with medical and hospital equipment, which she often collects via thrifting.
On view here are several drawings and sculptures by the artist that reference these instruments, from beds to canes. The artist’s favorite color is turquoise, which reoccurs in several works. In one corner is a fascinating sculpture made from plastic tubing that Berdes has then wrapped with tin foil and affixed variously colored glass tiles to create a stunning cane.
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Gregory Horndeski at bG Gallery
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews One of the loudest works on view at this year’s fair comes courtesy of a painting–cum–pinball machine by Santa Fe–based artist Gregory Horndeski. The artist was on hand during the fair’s VIP preview to offer a demonstration: you load a ball into a contraption on the painting’s right side and launch.
“Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t—just like life,” he said after one attempted wasn’t successful. The ball then darts and bounces around the canvas, down a random path, which Horndeski also equated with life: no matter where you go, you ultimately end up in the ground, so you might as well enjoy the ride.
Using mostly knives (with some brushes for the finer details), Horndeski has presented a large-scale landscape painting that features an older couple standing at an outlook point observing the sunset. Around the canvas is the musical notation of excerpts from Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons.