Outsider Art
Renegades: Outsider Art at KickArts is the first in a planned series of exhibitions of work by people creating art in unlikely places. The clear focus of the exhibition is the art rather than the creator’s circumstances, and the exhibition literature draws attention to the artist’s creative history rather than their credentials as outsiders. KickArts partnered with Arts Project Australia in Melbourne and Weave Arts Centre in Sydney to organise this touring exhibition, and the curators ‘called upon illiterate people, people with an experience of mental illness, hermits and those marginalised through disabilities’, as well as artists from remote Indigenous communities, hospitals, homes and community centres.1
If you come to this exhibition not having heard of ‘outsider’ art you would not be alone. While there is a group of dedicated collectors and a not insignificant exhibition history in Australia for outsider art, there is not the same level of public visibility as in Europe and North America. There it has featured in large public exhibitions, had books written about it, including one which offers ‘guidelines for aesthetic and collecting judgements’,2 is represented by specialist commercial galleries, features regularly in the sales rooms of large auction houses and has been showcased annually since 1993 in the Outsider Art Fair in New York, and, in 2013, for the first time in Paris.
There are no strict definitions of what exactly constitutes outsider art, which makes for some degree of confusion. Art critic Roger Cardinal first used the term in 1972 to describe art created in unlikely environments by self-taught individuals. French artist Jean Dubuffet first drew attention to the genre in the 1940s when his interest in art created by