disparate minds

www.disparateminds.org

[progressiveartstudios]

Beverly Baker at Institute 193

Underlying Colors is a striking selection of drawings by one of Latitude Artist Community's most tenured artists, Beverly Baker, who has been supported to maintain a creative practice in their studio since its founding in 2001.

Baker’s primarily black works on paper aren’t explicitly conceptual in a typical sense, but are also not simply formal. They’re sublime objects that possess an idiosyncratic history; what remains visually, surfaces richly saturated in various sheens of ballpoint pen, are the conclusion of those events. This history isn't necessarily important for how it informs the ultimate result, but rather as a record of her persistent ritual. Institute 193 describes her quiet and deliberate process:

"Every Baker drawing begins with the repetitive rendering of a limited set of letters and numbers. B, her first initial, is by far the most common. Other letters and numbers may appear at this early stage, and she will occasionally use a complete word inspired by the carefully chosen magazines she keeps on her desk. In time, Baker begins to apply intense, curved pen strokes to cover the surface of the paper. Her lines sweep across the page, arc upward and veer to the right of the sheet. As she works to fill the surface, her marks gradually obliterate the foundational letters and words that lay beneath."

Baker, much like Grace Coenraad, exemplifies an approach to art-making that’s typically not found outside progressive art studios - a practice that challenges foundational ideas about the nature of art and how it’s experienced. Understanding this work begins with dismissing the purpose of its creation, which is unknown, and instead understanding that they’re not just projects, conceived to engage with an esoteric cultural dialogue, but the extension of a life-long endeavor.  

In the course of our work, we’ve known artists who will "air paint" if not provided a surface, or whose drawings extend beyond the paper onto the table, without regard for any distinction - creative practices focused entirely on process, not as a performance, but as an act of value. This paradigm may be important in considering the relationship of Baker’s opaque surfaces to the initial, formal exercise in written language she first applies. It is, however, equally important to recognize that despite this unique origin, these works in effect share similarities with those that have a highly academic origin.

Brooklyn-based artist Vincent Como, who has also centered his practice around the investigation of black abstraction for the past twenty years, describes his affinity for this material and subject matter: 

"This thing-in-itself, this monochrome, acts as an object rather than an illusion, even if it presents an illusory space due to its depth of surface. That’s an issue with the organ or tool perceiving the object though, not the object itself. This object is a mark, in toto, a statement of information or intention made by human hands to convey an idea. This idea doesn’t necessarily fit within the context of our existing language-structure and so it becomes its own language. The language of painting, the language of abstraction, the language of the monochrome."

From the transition of image to act, to the consideration of marks and language, Como relates an experience with black monochrome that reveals a remarkable and undeniable conceptual kinship with Baker beyond the obvious visual one.

Baker’s drawings are modest, yet commanding - striated, enigmatic landscapes formed from a dynamic accumulation of textural marks. Despite their serial nature and outward sameness, each work is a distinctive, highly personal manifestation of her steadfast vision.

The first solo exhibition of Baker’s work in Lexington since 2003, Underlying Colors is on view at Institute 193 through July 1st and will then travel to LAND in Brooklyn.

Beverly Baker (b. 1961, Versailles, Kentucky) has exhibited previously at Christian Berst, the Dallas Museum of Art, DOX Center for Contemporary Art, Carreau du Temple, Le Garage, Carrousel du Louvre, and the Outsider Art Fair. Her work is included in the ABCD and Hannah Rieger collections.

[progressiveartstudios]

Marlon Mullen at JTT Gallery

Marlon Mullen’s second solo exhibition at JTT Gallery is an expansive collection of recent works by this San Francisco-based hero in the progressive art studio movement. Mullen’s recent works are more delicate in terms of color and design than previous paintings, creating the effect of being more reduced or refined, although they aren't any less complex . They are toned down, but no less colorful, lush, and satisfying. Heavy, intentional brushstrokes recorded in matte plastic surfaces index Mullen’s distinctive bold, but measured touch. Mullen’s mark-making isn’t concerned with appearing effortless; it leaves behind a record of the careful labor of seeking and defining a specific image.

The content of Mullen’s work has remained relatively consistent over the course of his career thus far, but as the context in which he is seen has changed, the significance of his subject matter inevitably has as well. Mullen is an autistic artist who is a supported by NIAD, one of the original progressive art studios founded by Elias and Florence Katz in the Bay Area. Over the past several years, NIAD and Mullen have been the quintessential example of such a studio’s role in the ongoing narrative of so-called outsiders merging into the mainstream.

Mullen’s use of art magazines as source material is in part a consequence of progressive art studios’ inherent subversion of traditional ideals of outsiderism; they have long been affiliated with Outsider Art due to disability, but in fact their core intentions are in direct opposition to the historically romanticized notion of outsider artists. NIAD, an exceptionally forward-thinking program, is an environment where artists with disabilities are not only given resources to be artists, but to be a part of the broader contemporary art community, both locally and internationally. The facilitation staff is composed of professionally trained, practicing artists and contemporary art periodicals like those that Mullen references are made readily available. A section of the studio’s gallery space is dedicated to exhibiting local contemporary artists, the intended audience for which is primarily, Timothy Buckwalter explained during a visit, the artists working at NIAD.

In the context of Outsider Art, Mullen’s translations of art periodicals are a subversive element and even an occasional subject of criticism. The way that the content of his work subverts outsiderism may never have had anything to do with his personal intentions, and likewise, the viewer can only speculate about the meaning of his work. Mullen doesn’t speak about content or intention abstract of the works themselves, as the exhibition’s press release explains:

[Mullen] is for the most part non-verbal. It isn’t entirely clear how much he can read in the same sense that you are reading this press release right now, but he certainly has his own understanding of meaning when it comes to words. Specifically regarding the content of his paintings, he has not verbally communicated at length his intent or fascination with the images that he copies. However, his paintings are sufficient in informing us of the nuances of what he sees.

Dana Shutz’ controversial depiction of Emmett Till at this years Whitney Biennial initiated a wide ranging conversation about Identity and culture, the rights of an artist, and significance of their intentions. Schutz apologists framed her as an innocent, individual voice, responding in earnest to an image that affected her. Her critics questioned her authenticity and right to commandeer and redefine something sacred, which she could never really understand. If nothing else, one insight that must be drawn from this controversy is that the narrative of the relationship of an artist’s identity to the nature of a subject is inevitably consequential, regardless of the artist's intentions. Bringing that perspective to works for which the intention of the artist can not be explicitly known, such as Mullen’s, consider how his depiction of the Kerry James Marshall painting as it appeared on the cover of ARTFORUM, provides a vantage point to rethink Mullen’s subject matter, his identity, and his place in the conversation.

From this perspective, an important component of Mullen’s current exhibition, and especially this work, is its role as a representation of the relationship of disability to contemporary art. It seems fair to see Mullen in his version as we see Marshall in the source image. To imagine or wonder to what extent Mullen (by accident or by design) exists in this depiction of a painter, and to consider what intentions and mechanisms his subject becomes a reflection of himself. Whatever Mullen’s intentions, seeing this painting in the unprecedented context of Mullen’s rising career as a nonverbal autistic artist, there are parallels between Mullen and Marshall worth recognizing. In a recent interview published by Interview Magazine, Marshall’s description of his strategy and intentions could also be applied to Mullen’s career as well:

When you see a black figure, the way the critical establishment operated, you can only imagine that figure having a sociological value. They never say the ways in which their aesthetics were equally worthy of consideration. That was the thing that always kept black artists outside of the discourse—not whether the work was relevant, but was it engaged in the modernist and avant-garde practices white artists were engaged in? I think the approach that I've taken, which is fairly instrumental and strategic, is to deploy the principles that the people who theorized the value of artwork said were important. 

Marlon Mullen is on view at JTT in NYC through May 7th, Wednesday - Sunday, 11am to 6pm

Marlon Mullen (born 1963) lives in Richmond, California, where he maintains a prolific studio practice at NIAD. Mullen is represented exclusively by JTT in New York and Adams & Ollman in Portland, Oregon. He has exhibited widely throughout the US; previous exhibitions include solo shows at NIAD (2017), Adams & Ollman (2016), Jack Fischer Gallery (2016), Atlanta Contemporary (2015), JTT (2015), and White Columns (2012). Group exhibitions include NADA Art Fair in Miami with White Columns (2014), Under Another Name, organized by Thomas J. Lax at the Studio Museum of Harlem (2014), and Color and Form at Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco (2013). Mullen is a 2015 recipient of the Wynn Newhouse Award.

[progressiveartstudios]

Storytellers: Sara Malpass

We first encountered Sara Malpass’ work at NIAD in her solo exhibition What Are Words For, and have included her work in our latest curatorial project Storytellers, currently on view at LAND in Brooklyn. Selections by Malpass are featured in this exhibition in order to highlight the important perspective she offers in the discussion of narrative. Her works, particularly the daily lists on notebook paper, isolate an exploration of written language in visual art that is uncommon in that of mainstream contemporary artists, but prominent in the works of so-called outsiders. Malpass’ reductive, pragmatic language most often culls words from her current reading material or immediate interests, her piles of lists culminating as a living personal archive central to her prolific creative practice. 

These are uses of written language, not as an appropriation of typography aesthetics, but for the utility of expressing ideas - handwritten text that affords a presence to language as marking-making as well as its hermetic, phonetic, and conceptual function, as in the works of Carlo Daleo, Kenya Hanley, and William Tyler, who pair it with imagery.

Currently, text in this form is already used more by mainstream artists than ever before, notably in the works of Deb Sokolow, Raymond Pettibon, or Dan Attoe. They owe this precedent largely to artists like Malpass throughout history - Joseph Yoakum, Henry Darger, and Gayleen Aiken, among many others. Malpass illustrates that this is not just an oddity, novelty, or merely a more simplistic or didactic activity than the contemporary mainstream engagement of text. Rather, it can be understood as much broader practice, which has been overlooked.

Read in sequential order, her ink on paper works transcend a mundane list of words and become hermetic poetry. The sound, form, and meanings of the text have an undeniable aesthetic identity. In her lists there are recurring qualities; mysterious phrases such as “castle work” and “circle work”, the complex phonetics of “payment check”, or densely packed syllables of “ordinary” and “television”. Malpass’ evocative cadence is reminiscent of the listing that occurs within Whitman’s Song of Myself: “Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread” and ”Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary.” The reader follows along a deliberate path that feels both intuitive and intentional. Rationalizing her process, one wonders if she is considering certain concepts such as long and short syllable pairings “inside”, “on stage”, “up date”; or collecting particular kinds of articulatory forms “reasons”...“bookish”.

These lists aren't explicitly devised or executed as poems, but rather as singular objects, composed of the diligent cursive script of a writer who, as is declared in the piece above loves “...to write letters” and “...to write words”. Making this distinction could seem like splitting hairs, but is absolute and highly consequential - drawn in an aesthetic largely informed by principles and practice of penmanship, but implementing visual elements as drawing that are inextricable. Confronting, owning, or living with a Sara Malpass list establishes a relationship with a singular art object conceived with no known further intention or publication.

Malpass (b. 1967) has maintained a studio practice at NIAD in Richmond, California for many years. Selected exhibitions include Sara Malpass (2017), Never Shout Never organized by Jeffrey Cortland Jones (2015), What Are Words For (2014), Serenade: Lists, Poems and Missives (2013) and A Light That Never Goes Out: Continuing Traditions in Abstraction (2013), all at NIAD Art Center.

[progressiveartstudios]

Storytellers: Living Narrative

Storytellers brings together works anchored in narrative from disabled artists working in progressive art studios across the country, these selections providing an expansive view of manifold and highly original approaches. The pieces featured in this exhibition provide entry points into bodies of work that construct robust narratives, representing ongoing projects and life-long dedications of twelve artists maintaining practices with the essential studio support of LAND in NYC, Hozhoni in Flagstaff, Creative Growth and NIAD in the Bay Area, First Street Gallery Art Center and ECF in Los Angeles, and Creative Vision Factory in Wilmington, Delaware.   

Much like our previous curatorial projects, this exhibition is informed by our intention to not only advocate for the continued support of these studios and the recognition of these artists as contemporary, but also to indicate the unique contributions and influence these artists have had on the contemporary art discourse and culture in general, as artists and members of our community. In this interest, we have striven to present two seemingly contradictory ideas.

Firstly, disabled artists are producing narrative work that is just as diverse in the concepts, methods, and aesthetics employed by mainstream artists. This exhibition ranges from the explicit visual storytelling of Carlo Daleo, Larry Pearsall, or William Tyler, to the more abstract explorations of Garrol Gayden, Sara Malpass, and Kenya Hanley. 

Secondly, these artists’ works originate from a unique perspective directly informed by their disability and the remarkable role that narrative plays in their daily life. Using a broad understanding of the function of narrative in visual art, even the most reductive or opaque work focused on process and materiality has a narrative element, while not explicit. What denotes mainstream artists as “insiders” is their contributions to the shared story of western culture and art history, which provides the context for their works. It’s intuitive to understand then that this common narrative is what “outsiders” are exterior to. Furthermore, it’s natural that these self-taught artists would be inclined to create narratives of their own invention to provide context in which their work may exist. Fabricating a story out of necessity or doing so in a manner detached from the shared mainstream, is essentially different from contriving one in order to interact with an existing narrative. 

Considering the way that narrative art tends to interact with popular culture (a quality LAND’s artists have been noticed for), Michael Pellew’s references are diverse, but tend to focus on musicians, specifically heavy metal band members. His drawings communicate an earnest, idiosyncratic relationship with pop culture (an imagined fiction), as opposed to a reflection or commentary. Mainstream references to pop culture in the works of artists such as Eric Yahnker or Rachel Harrison are insider works due to their clever nods to art history and current politics. Although lauded as elevated commentary and critique, it is the “outsider” elements of these works, however, that is most compelling; they depend on a DIY assemblage aesthetic in the case of Harrison, and an earnest affinity for 80’s B movies and trash celebrity culture in that of Yahnker to be endearing or authentic. From this perspective, consider the Storytellers artists who employ methods to relate identity driven narratives, such as Los Angeles based artist Hugo Rocha, whose colored pencil works are drawn from screenshots of telenovelas, or Miranda Delgai whose wool weavings recall her personal history, using materials and processes rooted in memory and centuries of her family’s Navajo tradition. 

Sara Malpass began compiling lists on notebook paper long before pursuing art as a career at NIAD. Her hand-written daily records, whose reductive, pragmatic language serves as a striking and often humorous personal archive, are central to her creative practice and oeuvre. Much like Malpass, many of these artists engage in inventing one's own narrative not just as an approach to art-making but to navigating everyday life, intrinsically connected to their ways of being. Ultimately these stories can function as a bridge to the viewer, creating common ground between disparate modes of thinking.

[progressiveartstudios]

A Conversation with Sophia Cosmadopoulos

Our conversation with Sophia Cosmadopoulos is the first in a series of interviews with dedicated leaders, advocates, and facilitators within this field - those directly championing the great works of artists maintaining creative practices in progressive art studios. Cosmadopoulos is currently a coordinator and facilitator at LAND Studio and Gallery, a progressive art studio provided by the League Education & Treatment Center in DUMBO, Brooklyn. Her valuable perspective is also informed by an uncommonly dynamic career in this field, with direct experience at several other studios including Creativity Explored in San Francisco and Pure Vision Arts, YAI Arts, and the former HAI in New York CIty.

Sophia graduated from Oberlin College in 2006 with a degree in art history and a focus in studio art. Sophia has worked in art studios for adults with developmental disabilities for over 10 years. She joined the LAND team in May of 2015. In her free time, she is a freelance writer focusing on Outsider Art. She also teaches independent art classes to artists with disabilities at YAI Arts.

DM: How did you become involved in this work?  Meaning, both : How did you become interested in art? and How did you get started working with people with disabilities?

SC: I have made art since I was young. I took particular interest in high school where I was enrolled in a higher level studio art class though the International Baccalaureate program. I continued studying studio art and art history at Oberlin College, but became somewhat disenchanted by how exclusive and alienating it could be. In 2006, I volunteered for a month at Creativity Explored where I fell in love with the open, exciting and creative atmosphere it offered its artists. The experience inspired me, and left me looking for similar communities that were creating art in such free environments. When I graduated from college, I began volunteering at HAI working with artists with mental illness, and from then on, have worked in the outsider art field at Pure Vision Arts, AHRC, YAI and now LAND, concentrating primarily on artists with intellectual disabilities.

DM: Artists who work in progressive art studios sometimes experience a distinct moment of revelation, in which they discover that, as artists working with artists with disabilities, they're accessing a peer relationship with people with disabilities that most neurotypical individuals can't imagine, don't understand, or would even deny. Was there a particular moment in your career in this field that you can identify as pivotal, when you first realized that understanding people with disabilities through their art was a profoundly powerful and important thing?

SC: Yes absolutely. I had a moment of “revelation” when I started volunteering at Pure Vision Arts (an art studio in Manhattan for adult artists with intellectual disabilities). It occurred with an abstract artist named Alba Somoza who is quadriplegic and is non verbal. I had been working in the studio with her for over a year, observing her making her large drip paintings. Because she was non-verbal, I had limited interactions with her and spoke in short sentences, asking her yes or no questions which she was able to answer with a shake of her head.  Outside of the studio, she volunteered for an organization supporting children with CP. One day, Alba was preparing for a tour she would lead in the studio and needed to use her communication device. The device followed the direction of her eyes and responded to the tapping of her head on the chair. I distinctly remember when her assistant plugged in the device. It was quiet in the studio and suddenly I could hear Alba’s voice through the machine something I had never heard before. I was blown away by her intricate thoughts related to her art and her process. More than anything, it exposed my own assumptions and misunderstandings of disabilities. I had assumed that someone who was nonverbal must have mental impairments too. It was this moment that made me realize the boundless possibilities of artists like Alba. Since, I have become struck by how essential the medium of art is. I felt strongly that I wanted to dedicate my work to helping others negotiate their voice through art when words fell short.

DM: As facilitators, we're always learning simultaneously as we strive to provide guidance and support to the artists we work with. We wonder, how would you describe the process of facilitation; what is your role as a facilitator and how has your understanding of it changed over time?

Studios like LAND, that service adults with intellectual disabilities, operate in a variety of ways. Over the years I have realized my preference is a hands-off model where artists receive little instruction and instead work independently using the media and subject matter of their choosing. When given this freedom, I see the quality (and authenticity) of their work increase exponentially. I prefer my role as a facilitator to be predominantly behind the scenes. My job, in addition to the roles of a day hab coordinator, is essentially one of curator and promoter. I work to increase the artists’ visibility by marketing their art to contemporary galleries, museums, fairs, and publications. Our goals as staff are to assist our artists in discovering the depths of their capabilities and passions. Instead of redirecting them from their fascinations, we are here to celebrate and encourage expanding upon them. We have an artist named Michael Pellew who is a heavy metal fanatic, making drawing after drawing of the members of Metallica, Megadeth, Slipknot, etc. As a result, we play metal in the studio. We send cards to his favorite musicians including Dave Mustaine who returned the favor with a photo of himself with Pellew’s art. The staff take him to metal concerts to see his favorite bands live. We even organized (with the help of Ace Hotel’s Ben Sisto) LAND of Metal, an entire evening of live metal music at St. Vitus in Brooklyn to celebrate Pellew and his love of music. The artists thrive in this nurturing and supportive environment, as does their work.

DM: How do you foresee Land developing or expanding over time as a progressive art studio? What sort of impact does our current post-election uncertainty, especially in this field, have on these long term goals, as well as your immediate concerns as an advocate for these artists?

SC: I believe progress primarily lies in inclusion. I have worked in a number of studios and art programs for "at risk" populations. A concern of mine is that programs like these, and the work that comes out of them, often remain in isolation. My goal is to continue to shed light on our artists’ essential cultural contributions and to move away from such insular models. I believe their art is some of the most creative, contemporary and exciting art being generated today. Through constant exposure, I hope the work produced at LAND is not just included in outsider art venues, but in contemporary art spaces as well. It’s time we diversify the artists represented in major museums, galleries and fairs! In this current political climate, I fear that our most vulnerable populations, like those with intellectual disabilities and mental illness, will be at risk of losing the services they rely on. Our program is funded entirely through Medicaid which is being threatened under the incoming administration. If I were to try find the positive in all of this, I would say it might encourage programs like LAND to find alternative and more secure funding sources. We have been astounded by the outpouring of support we have received since the election. Perhaps, in the end, we will see people getting more involved with social services like LAND.

LAND has partnered with many prominent galleries, museums, and other non-profits for the exhibition and collection of their artists' work; they will be exhibiting in the upcoming 2017 Outsider Art Fair, January 19 - January 22 at the Metropolitan Pavilion in NYC.

[progressiveartstudios]

Essential Fall Exhibitions

Throughout 2016, a shift in tone and approach to presenting and discussing artists who exist outside of the traditional or mainstream (that has been crystallizing over the past few years) has continued in force. An unprecedented range of artists working in progressive art studios are being sought out by forward-thinking curators and featured in prominent galleries, including several exciting solo exhibitions - Marlon Mullen’s first solo shows at JTT and Adams and Ollman, Zinzinnati Ohio USA: The Maps of Courttney Cooper at Intuit in Chicago, and Helen Rae’s incredible second solo show at The Good Luck Gallery in LA. This trend continues and accelerates with an impressive array of essential current and upcoming shows during the fall exhibition season - a great triumph for artists with developmental disabilities working in progressive art studios and other unconventional environments.

Billy White, Figures at South Willard in LA, September 2 - 16

Figures, organized by Celia Lesh, features a selection of narrative ceramic sculptures and drawings from the mysterious and magical oeuvre of NIAD’s Billy White. From Lesh’s curator statement:

Billy recurrently creates clay busts that begin as Vincent Van Gogh and morph into several different characters while retaining qualities of each previous personality – a hat, a mouth closed around a cigar, a mustache, a particularly muscular bicep. Vincent Van Gogh becomes Peter Sellers who becomes Redd Foxx who becomes Billy himself. Little Richard and Richard Pryor are married into a single body whose portrait is titled “Little Richard Pryor”. Sculptures of his father wear a hat that is WC Field’s, Yosemite Sam’s, and/or Jed Clampett’s. Identities are both specific and fluid, and exist in a sort of pantheon where the historic, celebrated, anonymous, and personal share a landscape.

Outside at KARMA in Amagansett, NY, September 3 - September 25

Curated by White Columns Director Matthew Higgs, the extensive roster of great artists in Outside includes Joseph Yoakum, James Castle, Helen Rae of First Street Gallery, Marlon Mullen and Danny Thach of NIAD, William Scott, Aurie Ramirez, William Tyler, and John Hiltunen of Creative Growth, among many other contemporary artists. Participating artists (both conventionally trained and not), represent a wide spectrum of processes and media, while all investigate notions of landscape or sense of place.

Alessandra Michelangelo at Shrine in NYC, September 7 - October 9th

The first exhibition of Alessandra Michelangelo’s work in the United States (curated by Chris Byrne), is currently on view at Shrine, New York’s newest space specializing in both self-taught and contemporary art. Michelangelo’s pastel and colored pencil drawings employ contrasts in hue rather than value, which gives these abstracted figurative and architectural works a visual subtlety that softens the tone of their expressive intensity. Previous to her death in 2009, Michelangelo maintained a studio practice at Blu Cammello, an Italian progressive art studio for artists living with mental illness.

The Eloquent Place: New Works by Harald Stoffers and Josef Hofer, Cavin-Morris Gallery in NYC, September 8 - October 8th.

Featuring Harald Stoffers’ abstracted text-based drawings and Josef Hofer’s nude self-portraits, The Eloquent Place is poised to be a raw index of unspeakable vulnerability. Stoffers engages concepts similar to Dan Miller’s, but with a much more romantic tone of personal narrative; his drawings manifest as daily hand-written letters to his mother, which document his activities (both mundane and meaningful) in great detail. These two artists, well-established in the outsider art discourse, both create work in proto-progressive art studio settings in Austria and Germany.

Dan Miller, Click at Diane Rosenstein in LA, September 10 - October 16

A solo exhibition of works on paper by Creative Growth’s Dan Miller, Click includes Miller’s well-known layered text drawings and paintings, as well as selections from a lesser known body of work executed by typewriter, which are essential in understanding the true nature of Miller’s work and process. In these typed works, Miller’s hand, color, and space are reduced, revealing his message and the rhythm of his voice, which are typically obscured by his repetitive layering process while painting or drawing. This is Miller's first exhibition at Diane Rosenstein and in Los Angeles.

Dale Jackson and Danny Thach at White Columns in NYC, September 13 - October 22

Visionaries and Voices’ Dale Jackson and NIAD’s Danny Thach both have solo shows currently on view at White Columns. These exhibitions feature a large installation of Jackson’s poetic, text-based work and a collection of Thach’s re-interpretations of Keith Haring works, which recreate the images faithfully, but are characterized by more personal and exposed paint handling. Matthew Higgs, one of the earliest champions of artists working in progressive art studios (co-curator of the seminal Create exhibition in 2012 with Lawrence Rinder and early supporter of Creative Growth’s William Scott) has continued to support Bay Area studios while also seeking out artists at Gateway Arts, Visionaries and Voices, and other small studios in the Northeast.

Charles Steffen at The Good Luck Gallery in LA, September 3 - October 29

This marks the first exhibition of Charles Steffen’s work in Los Angeles, in cooperation with Andrew Edlin Gallery. Steffen’s graphite and colored pencil drawings on found paper “resemble pages from an idiosyncratic self-referential field guide with sunflowers, crucifixions and figures complemented by scrawled diaristic ruminations. The figures are often transparent, as if their nerve cells and fibers were on display, and surrounded by aureoles of gray light; bodies and flowers often merge into each other.” Steffen originally began a prolific drawing practice during a fifteen year stay at the Elgin State Hospital in Illinois.

Susan Te Kahurangi King: Drawings 1975 - 1989 at Andrew Edlin Gallery in NYC, September 16 - October 30

The gallery’s second exhibition of New Zealand-based artist Susan Te Kahurangi King, curated by Chris Byrne and Robert Heald, is highly anticipated and runs concurrently with her first solo museum show at the ICA Miami. Byrne’s 2014 exhibition of King's work, Drawings from Many Worlds, was widely revered as one of the best exhibitions that year. Known for her colorful, frenetic abstractions of invented characters and appropriated Disney icons that predate Arturo Herrera, Drawings 1975-1989 features a lesser known, primarily monochromatic series of pattern-based drawings in graphite. While more minimal and understated than King's previous work, they remain highly original and compelling.

Courttney Cooper at Western Exhibitions in Chicago, November 12 - December 31

Visionaries and Voices’ Courttney Cooper has a well-deserved first solo exhibition with Western Exhibitions, one of Chicago’s best contemporary art spaces. Cooper's complex bic pen drawings document his intimate experience with Cincinnati, accumulating across increasingly massive surfaces (created by gluing together scrap paper that he gathers while working at Kroger). Cooper creates an authentic network of specific places and structures; his streets are intensely composed of details from memory or observation, cataloging expressions of particular moments or time of year. The relationship of these moments to each other in space is approximated, as in memory - all of which culminates in a dizzying realm of overlapping information that becomes a living record, adorned generously with nostalgic, commemorative expressions of community and identity.   

[progressiveartstudios]

Gateway Arts

   Gateway Arts, in Brookline, Massachusetts (just outside of Boston) is one of the largest and, arguably, the oldest progressive art studio in the country, originally founded in 1973 (just prior to the 1974 creation of Creative Growth by Katz in Oakland). Whereas the Katz west coast programs closely resembled the model we consider most progressive for a fine arts program from their inception, Gateway grew into this model over time and continues to do so. Today Gateway is an exicting and important program, home studio to many great arstis including Roger Swike (who was included in “Mapping Fictions” at The Good Luck Gallery), Joe Howe (recently noticed by Matthew Higgs for a potential solo show at White Columns) Yasmine Arshad, Michael Oliveira  and many, many, others. The studio currently provides workspace and facilitation to over 100 artists.

Gateway was initially founded in direct response to a deinstitutionalization initiative (then named “Gateway Crafts”) as a weaving and ceramics studio for 10 individuals. Over the past 43 years, the program has grown, evolved, and maintained an effort to stay in touch with progressive ideas. A detailed history of Gateway and their relationship to the emerging progressive art studio movement is detailed in the essay “Outsider Art: the Studio Art Movement and Gateway Arts” by Rae Edelson, who has been the program’s director since 1978.

Gateway’s rich history is evidenced in their exceptionally dynamic approach to every aspect of what they do - the populations they support, the kind of art created, and methods they implement to promote and sell artists’ work. Even as they participate in fine art exhibitions at high level galleries, craft continues to be an important part of their program in a way that may be somewhat subversive to traditional ideas of fine art. More effectively than any other progressive art studio in the country, Gateway sells handmade craft objects in their own retail store, while also supporting the professional fine art careers of several of their artists.

The studio (a space they have been using since 1980) is separated into several sections, each of which is lead by a staff facilitator; artists rotate among the various work spaces from day to day on a regular schedule. This approach is conducive to (or strongly encourages) artists to work in a wide range of media. This isn’t uncommon, many studios have workspaces for various uses, usually based on media (ceramics, printmaking, sculpture, etc.). Gateway has an exceptionally large number of spaces, providing a wider range of ideas, which have come into being over a long period of time and aren’t necessarily defined by media in the typical sense.

Gateway’s main studio includes workspaces for “Pottery”, “Folk art”, “Fabric”, “Paper, “Weaving”,  and “Art Making”; in addition to the main studio, “Studio A” provides various creative supports and resources for those with psychiatric disabilities. Each area has a supervisor/facilitator who specializes in its respective media and each artist has a weekly schedule that determines which area they work in daily. A potential problem with this complex structure is that it could distract from an artist’s ability to develop a consistent, independent method of working within any one medium. An artist like Roger Swike, however, demonstrates that Gateway leaves room for artists with a well developed vision to operate independently from this structure when they’re prepared to do so.  While Roger may sometimes dabble in other media if he chooses to, he’s free to engage with his own practice of working on paper, that he has developed over the course of his long career with Gateway.

Learning to understand the unlimited potential value of a work of art is an important aspect of being an artist, and an important concept for progressive art studios to endeavor to communicate to their artists. Intuitively, one might imagine that the creation of lower value craft objects in the same space as fine art may undermine the studio’s ability to communicate that concept (and uphold that principle). For many programs, the fine art standard is considered to be directly in conflict with craft for this exact reason. Craft in Gateway’s studio, however, is rooted in a tradition of understanding craft as art on a higher level. Artistic director, Steven De Fronzo explains that during Gateway’s formative years in the 80s, the creative community in the Boston area embraced craft as an alternative to an art world that felt inaccessible, or elitist. In this way, craft was akin to the outsiderism of the time.

The fine art vs craft conundrum has a complicated history in progressive art studios; at its most problematic, craft programs are designed and operated on the assumption that individuals with disabilities aren’t capable of making fine art. In these cases, the studios can become assembly workshops that produce crafty “handmade” objects. In their best form, however, providing resources in a progressive art studio to engage in craft diversifies the opportunities available to artists in a way that is essential. Programs that don’t have an admissions process based on a portfolio review inevitably have many artists who will find craft processes and creativity with functional ends as a more intuitive or appropriate path.

In practice, what's most essential is how the artist chooses one path over the other, and how the standard is maintained creative projects of any kind are created with as much independence and creative freedom as possible. As the the art world progresses, new facilitators bring new ideas to Gateway - as the use of craft processes becomes more prevalent in contemporary art, the use of craft processes become available in their studio on those terms. Staff facilitators present concepts about art-making in terms of their own expertise; ultimately, at gateway arts, the onus is on artists to staff as examples, not authorities and to make choices about their approach to art independently. The critical element is that this relationship is understood by the staff, and independence or divergence from the structure is encouraged when it begins to emerge.

[progressiveartstudios]

On Identity Politics and Self-Taught Artists

In a recent essay “How Identity Politics Conquered the Art World, An Oral History”, Jerry Saltz and Rachel Corbett strive to make sense of  our current pluralistic era of contemporary art by constructing a narrative in which the 1993 Whitney Biennial marks the establishment of a new direction for art-making, a movement they describe as “the art of the first person”.

“After the ’80s, we seem to have lost the reflex to recognize or name new art movements — maybe because in the sprawling new art ecology there were so many isms sprouting at once; plus we’ve always categorized things by formal, medium-based, and geographical attributes. But something has happened here, over the last 25 years, that I am sure will be recognized with great clarity by art-history students very soon. Art in this era has veered dramatically toward an approach that hasn’t been seen in the West for more than 1,000 years: a concerted urge, almost a rage, to be totally communicative to the largest possible audiences, addressing cognoscenti, novices, and newcomers in the same register, telling stories of social, political, and philosophical conditions. Of course, not everybody today is making this kind of work. But taken together, it does constitute a real aesthetic movement, one that is biographical, autobiographical, personal — the art of the first person.”

In this narrative, "the art of the first person" is the product of an increased focus on identity politics in contemporary art. The ‘93 biennial was “reviled” with an intense rejection of the perceived abrasiveness of its political works, but Saltz and Corbett describe a significant shift that occurs in the 90s as a result of something underlying a new approach to thinking about art and identity.

“For the first time, biography, history, the plight of the marginalized, institutional politics, context, sociologies, anthropologies, and privilege have all been recognized as “forms,” “genres,” and “materials” in art. Possibly the core materials.” 

The narrative that Saltz and Corbett lay out is elaborate, well researched, and very compelling. However, where the emergence of “new forms” and “materials” derived from marginalization and identity is conflated with the “Rage, to be totally communicative to the largest possible audiences”, self-taught artists and Neurodiversity (which often goes unmentioned in the identity politics discourse) are absent from the discussion. In an essay regarding identity politics and disability studies Anna Mollow writes:

Paradoxically, the construction of disability as a minority identity is often impelled by the desire to gain recognition for disability as a concept of universal importance: Siebers, Davis, Thomson, and other disability scholars have called attention to the marginalization of disability within academic conversations and then argued powerfully for its inclusion within these conversations. Following their example, we must continue to foreground academic inattention to disability. At the same time, we must insist upon the relevance of disability to a wide range of contemporary theoretical and political discussions. (source) 

The concept of Neurodiversity emerged in the late 90s from the Autism Rights Movement and its intention to catalyze the recognition and acceptance of those who are neurologically divergent from the majority of the population. Furthermore, it asserts that neurological differences should be respected as a marginalized social category equal to ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. What Neurodiversity proposes, though, is much broader and more profound than autistic self-advocacy or even disability rights advocacy. It sets a new standard for what it means to appreciate the real power and value of diversity, leaving no room for the concessions or weaknesses of past identity politics movements. Neurodiversity doesn’t permit the possibility of assimilation; it requires that individuals in our society not only coexist while being essentially different from each other in profound ways, but actively strive to accommodate those disparities. 

The context of Neurodiversity allows us to understand that "the art of the first person" is actually art made for a “broader” audience as a consequence of making art for an “other” audience. It’s not necessarily the case that an “other” artist aspires to appeal to a “broader” audience, but a “broader” audience choosing to include and accept “others” that has the effect of making the their audience broader.  An “other” artist appealing to an “other” audience was an “outsider” artist, so the “the art of the first person” works toward dismantling the possibility of outsiderism. 

David Hammons, described by Saltz and Corbett as the godfather of this movement, has created work that addresses a broader audience in as much as it engages social issues that we are all familiar with. At the same time though, it expresses concepts that people of color can understand and experience, but that white people can only speculate about from outside. This sets a precedent for including artists who are saying things that not all viewers can experience in the same way, or with the same directness, which permits a new way of thinking about the work of artists like Thornton Dial or Lonnie Holley (who are still marginalized and lumped into outsider categories), no longer as artifacts from a separate world, but as works within our world created by an artist who is present, and which we appreciate across a significant disparity of mind or circumstances. In their case as a result of race, class, and geography, but in the case of artists with disabilities, it is due to brains that function differently. 

Whereas artists like David Hammons actively strive to create a bridge to a broader audience by making works that appeal to mainstream contemporary art (the broader audience) that simultaneously speak in distinctly black voice (to the “other” audience). On a deeper level the inclusion of this work is not driven by social justice alone, but rather the drive of contemporary art to rethink and break down all of its boundaries in the search of ideas and practices that are more deliberate, more absolute, newer, and unrestricted by convention or culture. 

Often described loosely as an outsider by critics and dealers due to his ambivalence toward and rejection of art world protocol, Hammons has always been open about his appreciation for self-taught artists and the influence they’ve had on his work. Outside Insight, a ground-breaking yet under-appreciated 1988 exhibition at MoMA’s Clocktower (that Hammons co-curated with Ed McGowin), championed the work of outsider artists that they sought out in rural North Carolina. 

Although “Outside Insight” has received relatively little critical attention, the exhibition captures an important chapter in the development of Hammons’ artistic sensibility. “Outside Insight” evinces his identification with vernacular African-American cultural forms, self-effacing relationship to authorship, and profound sense of the value of everyday objects and gestures. (source)

Creating compelling contemporary work now requires abandoning convention to the extreme due to the expectation of producing “art of the first person”, which requires contemporary artists to fully re-invent art for themselves - finding new ways of thinking and being while teaching themselves (Theaster Gates' urban planning research for instance) within this new context, they become self-taught. 

Strangely, progressive art studios aren’t recognized as fitting into the increasingly popular social practice/socially engaged fields of art, even as artists who come from this radical model (such as Judith Scott, Marlon Mullen, William Scott, and Helen Rae) are being represented by and exhibited at prominent galleries and museums. Unlike Hammons, many contemporary artists seem hesitant or uncomfortable citing these artists despite obvious influences in their work, or worse, find it unnecessary. Critics, with the exception of Saltz and a few others, are hesitant to write about current work by self-taught artists, especially in the context of contemporary art. As a result, the art historical canon still doesn’t accurately reflect the contributions of these artists (especially those with disabilities). 

Understanding the emergence of “the art of the first person” is incomplete without including the convergence of outsiders into the mainstream, as well as the shift within outsider art to include living artists, especially self-taught developmentally disabled artists facilitated by trained, neurotypical peers in progressive art studios, where the most extreme disparities between the contemporary mainstream and the “other” are simultaneously transgressed and maintained.

[progressiveartstudios]

Mapping Fictions at The Good Luck Gallery

We recently had the honor of guest curating an exhibition at The Good Luck Gallery, an important, new space in Los Angeles. Founded and directed by former Artillery publisher Paige Wery, The Good Luck Gallery is the only space in LA dedicated to showing the work of self-taught artists. Wery fosters the burgeoning careers of artists such as Helen Rae and Deveron Richard, who maintain studio practices in progressive art studios, as well as artists like Willard Hill, that fall into the Outsider, Visionary, or Vernacular categories.  Mapping Fictions opened on July 9th and will be on view through August 27th.

Mapping Fictions presents an arrangement of works by four contemporary artists working in four different progressive art studios; Joe Zaldivar of First Street Gallery Art Center in Claremont, William Scott of Oakland’s Creative Growth, Daniel Green of Creativity Explored in San Francisco, and Roger Swike of Gateway Arts in Brookline, Massachusetts. Each of these artists’ idiosyncratic practices reflect highly original methods of archiving information through text, while also referencing fictional narratives, either from popular culture or their own devising. These approaches to art-making, traditionally ghettoized as eccentric outsider pathology (especially when generated by artists with disabilities) are reframed as relevant contemporary modes of expression. By bringing together a group of artists whose work is overtly informed by distinctly different ways of seeing, thinking, and being, but whose relationship to each other is based on the substance of their work and processes, we begin to see beyond the disparities between these artists and ourselves to discover nuanced messages.

Green, Scott, Swike, and Zaldivar embrace humanity with forgiving optimism, similar in tone and approach to Andy Warhol, but on a deeper level than Pop Art. Where Pop appropriated iconic advertising and popular culture to elevate common aesthetics and blur the line between high and low brow, these artists delve into human works that are more obscure, forgotten, or contemporary than any nostalgic idea of a coherent american culture - considering television schedules, floor plans, video games, and google maps; reiterating print ads and logos for obscure local businesses without cynicism; employing the aesthetics of propaganda to express an earnest hope for a utopian future; or merging lists of song lyrics with television show titles as though they can be appreciated or understood in the same way. 

These artists present to us the systematic nature of our culture through a myriad of surprisingly intuitive, poetic, or prophetic approaches to engage with the landscape of contemporary experience - media, technology, and the humanity to be found within it. 

More about each of these artists: Joe Zaldivar William Scott Daniel Green Roger Swike

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Mapping Fictions: Daniel Green

Daniel Green's process is slow and intimate, quietly hunched over his works in the bustling studio, he draws and writes at a measured pace. Initially, these detailed works are an uninhibited visual index of Green’s hand; when read carefully, they become jarring and curious, slowly leading the viewer to meaning amid the incoherence. Green’s text is poetic and complex - language and thought translated densely from memory in ink, sharpie, and colored pencil on robust panels of wood. Figures and their embellishments are drawn without a hierarchy in terms of space occupied on the surface; they are at times elaborate and at other times profoundly simple. The iconic figures’ facial expressions (Jesus, Abraham Lincoln, Tina Turner, video game characters, etc.) are generally flat with proportions stretching and distorting subject to Green’s intention.

Ultimately, they compel the viewer to internalize and decipher Green’s ongoing, non-linear narrative. His drawings call to mind Deb Sokolow’s humorous, text-driven work, but are less diagrammatic and concerned with the viewer. Much like Sokolow, Green engages in making work that begins with the rigorous practice of archiving information culled from his surroundings and interests, which then develops into intriguing, fictitious digressions. In an interview with Bad at Sports’ Richard Holland, Sokolow elaborates on her process: 

"I’ve been reading Thomas Pynchon and Joseph Heller lately and thinking about how in their narratives, certain characters and organizations and locations are continuously mentioned in at least the full first half of the book (in Pynchon’s case, it’s hundreds of pages) without there being a full understanding or context given to these elements until much later in the story. And by that later point, everything seems to fall into place and with a feeling of epic-ness. It’s like that television drama everyone you know has watched, and they tell you snippets about it but you don’t really understand what it is they’re talking about, but by the time you finally watch it, everything about it feels familiar but also epic."  (Bad At Sports)

Listing of dates and times, tv schedules, athletes, historical figures, and various pop culture references flow through networks of association - “KURT RUSSEL GRAHAM RUSSEL RUSSEL CROWE RUSSEL HITCHCOCK AIR SUPPLY ALL OUT OF LOVE…” Although the text in his work sometimes gives the impression of being stream of consciousness and intuitive in nature, most of it proves to be very structured and complex within Green’s system. Rather than expression or even communication, the priority seems to be the collection of information or organization of ideas; the physical encoding of incorporeal information as marks on a surface is a method for making it tangible, possessable, and manageable. 

From the perspective that Green invents, there’s an endless number of specific times described in sequences that haven’t been considered before. A grid of days and times (as in Pure Russia) imagines time passing in increments of one day and several minutes, then returns to the beginning of the series, stepping forward one hour, and proceeding again just as before. It could be cryptic if you choose to imagine that these times have a relationship to one another, or it could be an original rhythm whose tempo spans days, so that it can only be understood conceptually as an ordered structure mapped through time - the significance of the pattern superseding that of specific moments. 

By blurring the distinction between the articulation of ideas through text and the development of mark-making, Green’s highly original objects become unexpectedly minimal and material, yet simultaneously personal and expressive.

Daniel Green’s work will be included in Mapping Fictions, an upcoming group exhibition opening July 9th at The Good Luck Gallery in LA, curated by Disparate Minds writers Andreana Donahue and Tim Ortiz. Green has exhibited previously in Days of Our Lives at Creativity Explored (2015), Create, a traveling exhibition curated by Lawrence Rinder and Matthew Higgs that originated at University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2013), The Museum of Everything: Exhibition #4 in  London (2011), This Will Never Work at Southern Exposure in San Francisco, and Faces at Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco.

[progressiveartstudios]

Full Life

Full Life in Portland, Oregon (founded by Rachel Bloom in 2004) is a unique and dynamic program whose methods are informed by client choice with more depth and ambition than most service providers of any kind that we have encountered. Full Life is funded as a day program and receives no private donations; they’re technically for-profit, although profits tend to go only into the development of more programming. 

Full Life began as an open art studio and is still centered around this format, but now offers a wide range of daily recreational and vocational programs including work in their own “Happy Cup” Coffee Shop, janitorial assignments, employment in a greenhouse and chicken farm, and a wide range of creative arts classes and projects, among many other options. The Full Life staff, a team of 20+ creative people, are all given agency to develop and introduce new programming and opportunities to offer. The schedule is incredibly diverse (and in constant flux), initiating and retiring activities organically. Because staff working directly with individuals are also involved in developing the programming, what is offered (and when) can be constantly tracked based on demand and interest. The art studio portion of the facility is always open for clients to come to between projects or when they lose interest in a project they’re signed up for. 

The program serves around 160 individuals who attend five days per week, split fairly evenly into two 5 hour shifts (morning and afternoon) with a one hour overlap. Their most impressive achievement is that they offer this wide range of opportunity to their large community of clients with incredible flexibility. Each person chooses his or her daily activities at Full Life (not only with a team in an annual or quarterly planning meeting, but independently every day).

This scheduling board hangs in the reception area; the programming offered is updated daily and each person comes to the reception desk in the morning to plan their day - their name is written under the activities that they wish to attend and then staff use this schedule to understand their own schedules for the day. Opportunities on the board include everything from paid employment in the community to foosball tournaments and karaoke.

Steve the Program Director states “everyone has the right to work, if they want to”, elaborating that an individual granted a subsidy to live on due to unique social, physical, and intellectual struggles should be offered opportunities, but not forced to be employed if they’re satisfied with an unemployed life. Full Life is committed to offering individuals the opportunity to excel in whatever manner suits them, rather than attempting to encourage them to be excellent in some consensus paradigm of what it means to be productive or employed. An individual decides whether or not to work each morning and everybody is encouraged to do well in whatever they choose to do. Ultimately, in spite of this unconventional approach to considering employment, Full Life offers about as much traditional employment as any program of its size serving a comparable population. 

The question of whether art is understood as recreation or career isn’t answered by Full Life, but is instead determined by the ambition of each artist. Full Life sells some artwork, but customers are almost exclusively Full Life staff. Artists are permitted to take works home and to make artwork as gifts for friends.

An important lesson to take away from Full Life is the depth of meaning that some of the projects achieve as a result of the cultivation of a community driven by individual choice. Although they don’t tend to produce cohesive bodies of work for exhibition, they do complete works that have deeply understood meaning within the context of the Full Life community.  A large, collaborative, and ever-changing window display is a voice of the community, that is for many a more intuitive way to speak to the outside than a delicately presented gallery exhibition.

These championship belts also play an important role in foosball tournaments that staff person Rob Gray describes as “a very big deal around here.”  Works like these can be viewed as art objects, somewhat like aboriginal masks in a museum case, where the intensity and adoration with which they are crafted could be well understood and respected. But within the realm of Full Life, they have a greater and clearer meaning than they could really achieve elsewhere. Because work is allowed to be entirely personal, many works are kept by the artists or created for a particular person; one could likely collect from the staff offices a very endearing collection of works.

This philosophy grants the freedom for the facility to become an art studio in a more natural sense. It’s a place that not only creates projects, but also explores ideas. Staff are empowered to develop programming at any time and are therefore able to devise projects that respond to the concerns and interests of the artists in the moment. Some projects are intended to develop skills and introduce concepts that empower, others resemble something more like a collaboration between staff and artist (truly between artist and artist). The result is a committed team of staff, an empowered and satisfied group of clients, and an exceptionally strong culture of mutual respect. There are truly beautiful examples of artists enabled to achieve excellence,  such as the poetic works of Marvin Asino, who is supported by Full life to participate in readings and access local creative writing communities. The culture cultivated by Full Life’s deeply person-directed methodology is described by the various creative projects they produce collaboratively, whose sole function seems to be expression of their community, such as this video, “when you least expect it”

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Marvin Asino

From the Disparate Minds collection: “For all of my friends and one basketball player” is a zine containing 21 poems interpreted from the text works of Marvin Viloria Ariza Asino. It’s sensibility can be described using Marvin’s own words “rhythm; kind, beautiful, friendly.”  Asino writes in a matter-of-fact manner (siding in a space where humor and simple, profound truths meet), so the force of its beauty comes entirely by surprise with a wonderful sense of mystery. 

This anthology was given in the course of a conversation with one of Marvin’s many friends, Robert Grey, at Full Life, in Portland Oregon last year. An updated overview of Full Life, a very different kind of program, will be posted soon.

[progressiveartstudios]

Billy White

The process of evaluating any artwork includes some interpretation of how it functions - mechanisms such as the way gestural brushstrokes communicate movement by indexing the physical action of their application, or the way that arrangements of representational imagery can imply relationships between elements that generate narrative.

The mechanism by which Billy White’s paintings elicit emotion is sharply specific, yet escapes analysis, remaining a wonderful mystery. A loose, fearless application of paint renders forms with a striking physicality and sense of humor. There’s an uncanny affinity with the work of figurative painters Todd Bienvenu and Katherine Bradford (who both have an aesthetic undoubtedly informed by the work of self-taught artists). The impact of White’s work cuts through a vivid alternate world that operates on White’s terms - a highly original set of priorities, passing over image and rendering to achieve an expression of mood and vitality, as though excavating the underlying stories that were already present; impatient mark-making and barely legible imagery find time and space for redolent storytelling and detail. While he typically focuses on painting and drawing, White occasionally creates small ceramic sculptures that are rich in character and evocative of Allison Schulnik’s warped clay figures - slumped postures, elongated, rubbery appendages, intermingling glazes, and sunken, cartoonish expressions.

White’s work is largely influenced by his avid interest in pop culture, often depicting actual and imagined events in the lives of various celebrities or fictional characters, from Dr Dre to Hulk Hogan to Superman. NIAD provides some insight into White’s process: “He might start off painting Bill Cosby, but quickly change his mind by lunch. When that happens, he simply works right on top and doesn’t erase what came before. The new work becomes an extension of the old. By the end of the day this could happen several times and what’s often left is a latticework of figures and stories with interchangeable meanings.”

Billy White (b. 1962) has exhibited previously in Rollergate at the Seattle Art Fair, Telling It Slant organized by Courtney Eldridge at the Richmond Art Center, Undercover Geniuses organized by Jan Moore at the Petaluma Art Center, ArtPad San Francisco at the Phoenix Hotel, and extensively at NIAD Art Center, where he has maintained a studio practice since 1994. He has an upcoming solo exhibition at San Francisco’s Jack Fischer Gallery later this year.

[progressiveartstudios]

Progressive Practices: Materials, Archives, and Inventory

“I am glad that I had the guts to make these things, and that people like them, because I want them to live for a long time after I am gone.” - Patrick Hackleman 

A remarkable aspect of the progressive art studio history is their independent emergence across the world. Creative Growth in Oakland, California is widely regarded to be the first; they were among the first to be established (Gateway Arts in Brookline, MA was founded shortly before) and they were, by far, the first to break into the art market and support artists that are recognized nationally and internationally. However, the relationship of this first program to subsequent programs elsewhere doesn't strictly follow the typical narrative of a pioneering idea. Their legacy is significant; Franz and Elias Katz went on to establish Creativity Explored and NIAD, and many programs have looked to the bay area as they developed (utilizing the example of Creative Growth as a proof of what's possible with this model). However, versions  comparable to the progressive art studio are widespread and usually come into being without any knowledge of Creative Growth or any other studio. It has been and continues to be a naturally occurring phenomenon. 

Art-making is an intuitive and fantastically effective solution to many of the issues that various service providers for adults with developmental disabilities strive to resolve. As those of us who work within the field understand, the endeavor to provide the least restrictive environment isn’t a merely passive endeavor, It requires a proactive, thoughtful, and ambitious effort to provide not just a safe space, but also  independence, validation, and opportunities to make valued contributions in the community. In a setting based on these aspirations, art-making is a perfect answer, and in some form it tends to be introduced at some point, but in most cases with woefully insufficient ambition or perspective. 

Once art is introduced in settings comparable to day programs, a door opens and an important opportunity emerges. From that point on, the success of the program is dependent on how much the staff believe in the potential of the works created to be great, meaningful, and valuable - and how they express that belief. The degree of belief spans a vast spectrum, at one end the artist’s potential is overlooked entirely as they’re encouraged to waste time by following step-by-step instructions to create mediocre craft objects, and at the other end their potential is hindered only by the limitations that the art itself has to be great - a limit that has not yet been discovered by anyone ever. How a progressive art studio demonstrates respect for their artists and belief in their potential is first expressed in tangible terms - how the work is handled and presented (in not only exhibitions, but at all times). The standard of these practices sets the tone for every aspect of the studio’s functioning, permeating the culture of the organization and influencing how the artists perceive their own work and potential.

Because progressive art studios don’t necessarily emerge with the intention of becoming fine art organizations, and often exist within larger organizations for which fine art has not been a part of their history or culture, they tend to reside within a system that isn’t prepared to understand the process of maintaining an art practice. As a result, many basic concepts such as the nuanced quality of materials or the concept that a great piece can be ruined very easily, aren’t broadly understood. Advocating for respecting the work and believing in its potential must be a constant effort, on every level, from the working culture within the studio, to the relationship between the studio and both its parent organization and the community; every choice has to adhere to clear principles with great conviction.  

High Quality Materials       The first expression of belief in and respect for our artists’ endeavors is the investment we make in the materials provided. High quality art materials are expensive and great art can be made using very inexpensive materials; Henry Darger and Joseph Yoakum created amazing bodies of work in this manner. However, their work has yellowed and faded over time, with restoration efforts already being utilized to preserve their original integrity. The principle that a studio should follow is to use the highest quality archival and lightfast materials feasible for each artist; this must be a highly individualized facilitation process. New, very prolific artists, or artists who haven’t yet matured in their practice may work with student grade materials, but it’s not unreasonable to provide a very expensive sheet of handmade paper to someone who routinely spends months dedicated to completing a single drawing. 

A program should strive to develop a budget capable of maintaining a baseline for quality of materials that, at a minimum, accounts for archival integrity while also allowing room for larger investments in artists who demonstrate promise. As often as possible, these investments and the precious nature of materials should be communicated to the artists. Learning to be attentive to the distinctions in quality and craftsmanship of tools and materials is an important aspect of being a visual artist; developing reverence for a beautiful surface or rich pigments can be an important step in an artist's development. 

Great Photo Documentation and an Archival System For a progressive art studio to create a clear and complete archive of works is an ongoing  difficult and time consuming task; even medium or small sized programs easily produce hundreds of individual works each month. No other kind of art organization has such a labor-intensive professional archiving process as the progressive art studio; art schools produce a lot of work without storing or documenting it and galleries, museums, and private collections preserve and document large quantities of works, but they aren't created in house. Therefore, developing a great system to achieve this inevitably requires a bit of thought and innovation. Much like great materials, an archival system can be a huge investment (including proper lighting and camera equipment), but the benefits are equally huge.  

The best and most thorough studio archive project we’ve encountered is NIAD’s inventory, which is available to view online in the form of a Tumblr blog - a great resource for what an inventory should ultimately look like. At first glance, it gives you an impression of the program overall, listing works by all artists, with the most recent work at the top. What makes it really powerful, though, is its searchability. You can search a specific artist's name to access their complete body of work, as well as search by medium or year. 

There are many ways to achieve a similar system offline. The key is that each work have a distinct identity - a unique accession number that’s included in the filename of the digital image and physically written inconspicuously on the back of the work. These numbers can then be used to store Information about the work, including artist name, title, medium, size, framed or unframed, and whether it’s currently part of the inventory or sold previously in a simple searchable document (database or spreadsheet) separate from the images. This can be great resource for the program to track its own progress, to be aware of and critical about its trends. 

An archive such as this makes the difference between being perceived and dismissed as a space for recreation or therapy, and being recognized and revered as a powerful and productive cultural institution. It’s also an extremely beneficial resource for gallerists, collectors, curators, and the press, providing convenient access to an impressive collection of incredible bodies of work.  

As important as these pragmatic benefits are, though, is the statement and attitude implicit in developing an impressive archive is more important; the work is either treated as if it’s worth documenting, or as though it is not.

A Clean, Ordered Storage Space and Clean, Careful Handling Practices

Many years ago I worked with a young woman who was caught up in a network of behavior modification obsessed service providers carefully executing “proven” methods to move arbitrary behavioral metrics incrementally. Regretfully, I was never able to fully support her to escape this pseudo scientific culture she was immersed in, but I was able to have her attend our studio for a few days a week, where she was provided with beautiful sheets of pristine drawing paper, on which she made fantastic drawings that were subsequently stored away carefully. During this period of time I visited her home, a state owned “intensive care facility.”  Standing in her living room, I was struck by what the the physical nature of the space asserted about the relationships existing within. There were small thrift store artworks hung weirdly high on the wall out of reach, thick glass brick windows, and a tv bolted to a quaint, wooden piece of furniture that was also bolted to the floor with a simple, but sturdy iron armature holding a sheet of 1.5” thick plexiglass in front of the screen, to protect it.

The contrast between the sensibility of this environment and the practice of giving her that valuable, delicate sheet of drawing paper, not only without protecting it from her, but with the presumption that when she was finished, it would be greatly more delicate and valuable than before, could not be more stark (and for home staff accompanying her to the studio, this notion was downright counterintuitive). This example is extreme, but defines a stigma that proves to be a significant barrier to any progressive art studio, especially those that exist as a part of a larger service provider. Day hab programs tend to be spaces defined by a preoccupation with safety, filled with reinforced or disposable versions of ordinary objects. Assembly workshop programs avoid jobs that entail the creation of delicate products or handling of delicate parts. In a setting that fashions itself to be a productive environment, the stereotype that those with disabilities are clumsy and careless is insidiously destructive. Progressive art studios’ designs and intentions aren’t just divergent from traditional programs for people with disabilities, but are actually opposed to and incompatible them; as much as they resemble day programs in form, they are, in almost every dynamic, the exact opposite. 

A well-maintained and professionally handled inventory of works makes an important statement against this stigma. Progressive art studios need to learn how to handle, package, and store work with the utmost care, not only for obvious practical purposes, but for the sake of the principles that these practices stand for. The understanding that people with developmental disabilities can also create precious art objects worth treating with the highest standards of care is essential to the vision and message.

Like a great archival system, a robust, dependable inventory opens doors for progressive art studios and their artists. A well cared for body of work is an infinitely more compelling proposition to a gallerist than a handful of works carelessly piled onto shelves, stuffed into flat files, or hung arbitrarily on the studio walls. One of the most prevalent, troubling, and confusing phenomenons we discovered during studio visits across the country was artists who were invested in art-making for years having almost no inventory or documentation of work to show for it. 

[progressiveartstudios]

The Effortless Humor of Michael Pellew

One of the fantastic surprises at the Outsider Art Fair this year was our experience with the work of Michael Pellew. Pellew’s work is unassuming, and in the context of the fair particularly blends in - a style defined by repetition, drawing within a simple system, and the use of unconventional materials (markers). We were more familiar with his series of small original drawings marketed as greeting cards, which typically feature a grouping of four or five figures (available at Opening Ceremony in Manhattan and LA). In a larger scale, the voice only available in snippets in smaller works unfolds to become an astonishing comedic performance.

The repetition and economy of visual language is necessary to the humor - each figure articulated in an identical manner, with just a few distinctive features describing its specific identity. The supreme ease with which each character enters the scene via this agile visual vernacular accounts for the works’ pace and timing. There's an exciting cleverness in the way that the simple archetype of the figure takes on the identity of countless celebrities, analogous to a skilled impressionist mimicking pop culture icons in rapid succession. Pellew seems to be compiling an ongoing, shifting catalog of celebrities; those with apparent relationships or categorizations are sporadically interrupted with unexpected pairings (Princess Diana and Lemmy Kilmister) or fictional personas (Lauryn Hill M.D. from Long Island College Hospital, The Phanton Lord). Viewers with an extensive knowledge of pop culture are highly rewarded by the ability to recognize the abundance and subtlety of his references.

Humor is an important element in many works that don't necessarily make us laugh, but truly funny art like Pellew’s (beyond the occasional clever moment or inside joke), is very uncommon. Crystallizing the elusive and ephemeral quality of comedy into a permanent art object is extremely difficult to achieve. Usually the most overtly funny approach is to employ an explicit punchline that rests on an impressive technical or procedural spectacle; artists that exemplify this approach are those like Wayne White or Eric Yahnker. 

Pellew’s humor, however, is more nuanced, so in the absence of a punchline, his approach relies on absolute fluency rather than overt technical prowess. The quintessential example of this brand of humor is Raymond Pettibon; works that appear effortless afford the artist a more casual voice, equipped to cultivate a more dynamic interaction between the work and viewer. When it's less obvious that there's a joke present, the viewer tunes into a more acute examination of tone and timing in search of the artist's intention.   

Whereas Pettibon uses this approach to insert sardonic or satirical m oments of levity into his generally grim oeuvre, Pellew instead engages this sort of humor with a lighter and even silly sensibility; he creates an abundantly bright and positive space that is captivating. The conceptual foundation of his work becomes about treading the line between earnestly identifying as an artist, or slyly engaging in play-acting the role of an artist. Walton Ford has described using play-acting (as a scientific illustrator) in a similar way as an entry point into comedy. In Pellew’s case, the performance is broader, and in its execution, more engrossing - guiding you through his alternate world, always uncertain if he’s serious, even as he crosses well over into the realm of absurdity.

In the affable universe he realizes, there’s virtuosity in the way moments of comedic surprise cut sharply through. The lingering experience of these pieces isn’t static, but a dreamlike memory of an event unfolding; line-ups of celebrities…everyone had a pepsi…they were all hanging out around a limousine eating McDonalds…and then Marilyn Manson is offering his famous burger and fries. It’s an alternate reality composed of familiar characters and Pellew is leading us along, introducing each of them, all in his voice - but really it's the viewer’s voice. You're left walking away amused and incredibly satisfied. 

Pellew has been working at LAND Gallery’s studio for over ten years and participated in numerous exhibitions in New York, including group shows at Christian Berst Art Brut and the MOMA. His work has been acquired by many reputable collectors, including Spike Lee, Sufjan Stevens, Citi Bank, JCrew and PAPER Magazine.

[progressiveartstudios]

The Effortless Humor of Michael Pellew

One of the fantastic surprises at the Outsider Art Fair this year was our experience with the work of Michael Pellew. Pellew’s work is unassuming, and in the context of the fair particularly, blends in - a style defined by repetition, drawing within a simple system, and the use of unconventional materials (markers). We were more familiar with his series of small original drawings marketed as greeting cards, which typically feature a grouping of four or five figures (available at Opening Ceremony in Manhattan and LA). In a larger scale, the voice only available in snippets in the small scale works unfolds to become an astonishing comedic performance.

The repetition and economy of visual language is necessary to the humor - each figure articulated in an identical manner, with just a few distinctive features describing its specific identity. The supreme ease with which each character enters the scene via this agile visual vernacular accounts for the works’ pace and timing. There's an exciting cleverness in the way that the simple archetype of the figure takes on the identity of countless celebrities, analogous to a skilled impressionist mimicking pop culture icons in rapid succession. Pellew seems to be compiling an ongoing, shifting catalog of celebrities; those with apparent relationships or categorizations are sporadically interrupted with unexpected pairings (Princess Diana and Lemmy Kilmister) or fictional personas (Lauryn Hill M.D. from Long Island College Hospital, The Phanton Lord). Viewers with an extensive knowledge of pop culture are highly rewarded by the ability to recognize the abundance and subtlety of his references.

Humor is an important element in many works that don't necessarily make us laugh, but truly funny art like Pellew’s (beyond the occasional clever moment or inside joke), is very uncommon. Crystallizing the elusive and ephemeral quality of comedy into a permanent art object is extremely difficult to achieve. Usually the most overtly funny approach is to employ an explicit punchline that rests on an impressive technical or procedural spectacle; artists that exemplify this approach are those like Wayne White or Eric Yahnker. 

Pellew’s humor, however, is more nuanced, so in the absence of a punchline, his approach relies on absolute fluency rather than overt technical prowess. The quintessential example of this brand of humor is Raymond Pettibon; works that appear effortless afford the artist a more casual voice, equipped to cultivate a more dynamic interaction between the work and viewer. When it's less obvious that there's a joke present, the viewer tunes into a more acute examination of tone and timing in search of the artist's intention.   

Whereas Pettibon uses this approach to insert sardonic or satirical m oments of levity into his generally grim oeuvre, Pellew instead engages this sort of humor with a lighter and even silly sensibility; he creates an abundantly bright and positive space that is captivating. The conceptual foundation of his work becomes about treading the line between earnestly identifying as an artist, or slyly engaging in play-acting the role of an artist. Walton Ford has described using play-acting (as a scientific illustrator) in a similar way as an entry point into comedy. In Pellew’s case, the performance is broader, and in its execution, more engrossing - guiding you through his alternate world, always uncertain if he’s serious, even as he crosses well over into the realm of absurdity.

In the affable universe he realizes, there’s virtuosity in the way moments of comedic surprise cut sharply through. The lingering experience of these pieces isn’t static, but a dreamlike memory of an event unfolding; line-ups of celebrities…everyone had a pepsi…they were all hanging out around a limousine eating McDonalds…and then Marilyn Manson is offering his famous burger and fries. It’s an alternate reality composed of familiar characters and Pellew is leading us along, introducing each of them, all in his voice - but really it's the viewer’s voice. You're left walking away amused and incredibly satisfied. 

Pellew has been working at LAND Gallery’s studio for over ten years and participated in numerous exhibitions in New York, including group shows at Christian Berst Art Brut and the MOMA. His work has been acquired by many reputable collectors, including Spike Lee, Sufjan Stevens, Citi Bank, JCrew and PAPER Magazine.

[progressiveartstudios]

The Effortless Humor of Michael Pellew

One of the fantastic surprises at the Outsider Art Fair this year was our experience with the work of Michael Pellew. Pellew’s work is unassuming, and in the context of the fair particularly, blends in - a style defined by repetition, drawing within a simple system, and the use of unconventional materials (markers). We were more familiar with his series of small original drawings marketed as greeting cards, which typically feature a grouping of four or five figures (available at Opening Ceremony in Manhattan and LA). In a larger scale, the voice only available in snippets in the small scale works unfolds to become an astonishing comedic performance.

The repetition and economy of visual language is necessary to the humor - each figure articulated in an identical manner, with just a few distinctive features describing its specific identity. The supreme ease with which each character enters the scene via this agile visual vernacular accounts for the works’ pace and timing. There's an exciting cleverness in the way that the simple archetype of the figure takes on the identity of countless celebrities, analogous to a skilled impressionist mimicking pop culture icons in rapid succession. Pellew seems to be compiling an ongoing catalog of celebrities; those with apparent relationships and categorizations are sporadically interrupted with unexpected pairings (Princess Diana and Lemmy Kilmister) or fictional personas (Lauryn Hill M.D. from Long Island College Hospital). Viewers with an extensive knowledge of pop culture are highly rewarded by the ability to recognize the abundance and subtlety of his references.

Humor is an important element in many works that don't necessarily make us laugh, but truly funny art like Pellew’s (beyond the occasional clever moment or inside joke), is very uncommon. Crystallizing the elusive and ephemeral quality of comedy into a permanent art object is extremely difficult to achieve. Usually the most overtly funny approach is to employ an explicit punchline that rests on an impressive technical or procedural spectacle; artists that exemplify this approach are those like Wayne White or Eric Yahnker. 

Pellew’s humor, however, is more nuanced, so in the absence of a punchline, his approach relies on absolute fluency rather than overt technical prowess. The quintessential example of this brand of humor is Raymond Pettibon; works that appear effortless afford the artist a more casual voice, equipped to cultivate a more dynamic interaction between the work and viewer. When it's less obvious that there's a joke present, the viewer tunes into a more acute examination of tone and timing in search of the artist's intention.   

Whereas Pettibon uses this approach to insert sardonic or satirical m oments of levity into his generally grim oeuvre, Pellew instead engages this sort of humor with a lighter and even silly sensibility; he creates an abundantly bright and positive space that is captivating. The conceptual foundation of his work becomes about treading the line between earnestly identifying as an artist, or slyly engaging in play-acting the role of an artist. Walton Ford has described using play-acting (as a scientific illustrator) in a similar way as an entry point into comedy. In Pellew’s case, the performance is broader, and in its execution, more engrossing - guiding you through his alternate world, always uncertain if he’s serious, even as he crosses well over into the realm of absurdity.

In the affable universe he realizes, there’s virtuosity in the way moments of comedic surprise cut sharply through. The lingering experience of these pieces isn’t static, but a dreamlike memory of an event unfolding; line-ups of celebrities…everyone had a pepsi…they were all hanging out around a limousine eating McDonalds…and then Marilyn Manson is offering his famous burger and fries. It’s an alternate reality composed of familiar characters and Pellew is leading us along, introducing each of them, all in his voice - but really it's the viewer’s voice. You're left walking away amused and incredibly satisfied. 

Pellew has been working at LAND Gallery’s studio for over ten years and participated in numerous exhibitions in New York, including group shows at Christian Berst Art Brut and the MOMA. His work has been acquired by many reputable collectors, including Spike Lee, Sufjan Stevens, Citi Bank, JCrew and PAPER Magazine.