Category: Outsider Art

“Great and Mighty Things: Outsider Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection,” Edited by Ann Percy with Cara Zimmerman; With contributions by Francesco Clemente, Lynne Cooke, Joanne Cubbs, Bernard L. Herman, Ann Percy, Colin Rhodes, and Cara Zimmerman, Yale University Press, 288 pages, 245 color illustrations and 1 b/w, 2013. ISBN 978-0-3001-9175-2. Hard cover $60 This is a blockbuster catalog for a blockbuster exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, yet like a parade of similar volumes it is built around samples of work by mostly well-known artists, each equipped with a one- to two-page biography, followed by essays

Groundwaters: A Century of Art by Self-Taught And Outsider Artists, Charles Russell, Prestel, 256 pages, 180 color illustrations, 2011. ISBN: 978-3-7913-4490-4. Hardcover $65.00 Charles Russell’s Groundwaters has the look and feel of a conventional coffee table book, and it can indeed be appreciated simply for its many beautiful plates representing the work of important self-taught artists of the 20th Century. Start reading the text, however, and another kind of book emerges. Those pictures aren’t there just because they’re striking. Each one is referenced in the text to make or elucidate a point, and Russell has many to make. Their density

Mary Nohl Inside & Outside: Biography of the Artist, by Barbara Manger and Janine Smith. University of Wisconsin Press, 134 pages, 165 color images, 145 b/w or sepia images, 2009. ISBN 978-0-6152-5118-9. Soft Cover $29.95. See my Mary Nohl photos, circa 1990