WHEN “THEM” BECOMES “US,” AND “US” BECOMES “THEM”
NEW YORK — With its carnival-like vibe — it’s certainly the world’s most welcoming, festive art fair — and its exhibitors’ booths often packed to bursting with colorful paintings, drawings, sculptures, and other hard-to-classify confections, the annual Outsider Art Fair, which is now up and running, through Sunday, March 22, at the Metropolitan Pavilion in downtown Manhattan, offers an alluring cacophony of visual delights.
This high-profile event celebrates the collective, unbridled — and unpredictable — imagination of self-taught art-makers who tend to produce their distinctive creations on the margins of so-called mainstream society and culture. Its latest iteration takes place at a moment of unfathomable, multifaceted crisis in the United States and around the world, as useless, aimless, destructive wars launched or supported by Uncle Sam rage on, economies dangerously wobble and weaken, and the corruption, criminality, mendacity, and greedy profiteering of power elites everywhere go unchecked.
Against such a historical backdrop, and within the colorful, exciting setting of the giant, burst piñata that is the Outsider Art Fair, there is one big, bold, new artwork on view that dares to stand back from the fiesta to take the measure of the current moment of uncertainty and anxiety, even as it does so with humor, sass, and charm. It’s a work of art that refers to American political history without functioning polemically or in a propagandistic manner. It’s at once sophisticated and clever, and superbly well crafted.