Highlights from the 2025 Outsider Art Fair

The best and worst of the Outsider Art Fair, which opened to the public Thursday night, seems to come down to clutter. There’s the material excess routinely spilling out of the booths, which sometimes feels captivating, like exposing the machinery of a live mind; and other times gratingly self-conscious, like those nouveau-old antique boutiques. This is a markedly subdued edition, at least compared to last year, but the issue stands. Since its start in 1993, the fair has become known for noise, but in this context, chaos can be equated with an outstanding imagination. It’s a consequence, I think, of the confusion over what constitutes authenticity in a market-first industry.

Can it be simple? An individual either without access to, or regard for, social convention, whose artistic expression is indivisible from those circumstances—an artwork that inspires a sense of discovery. There are 66 exhibitors set up in Manhattan’s Metropolitan Pavilion through Sunday, and more than enough meet the criteria.

Creativity Explored, a studio in San Francisco, and Progressive Artist Studio Collective (PASC), presenting with New York’s Shelter Gallery, both spotlight work by developmentally disabled artists. Keep an eye out for Nicole Appel’s pop art parodies at PASC, and Antonio Benjamin’s funky nudes, which took more than a hundred helpers to complete. Cell Solace’s booth (D17), a collective dedicated to object and design crafted by imprisoned people in the United States between 1940s and 1970s is another standout. The craftsmanship of the purses and wall hangings, all totally made of folded woven cigarette cartons and paper, are admirable. Each work, the collective’s founder, Antonio Inniss, explained was intended as a gift, like the bag his own father received from a friend jailed at Rikers Island in New York.

Read on for more highlights from the 2025 Outsider Art Fair.

Della Wells at Portrait Society Gallery of Contemporary Art

The folklore of Milwaukee collagist Della Wells is woven into “Remember Sisters, We Are Married to Truth and Freedom, Not Married to Fear and Lies,” a 10-foot-long American flag quilt finished just in time for the fair, according to the Portrait Society. Wells worked artist Anne Marie Grgich and seamstress Sandy Jo Combes on the textile, which depicts the wedding of a Black woman and her new groom, a dapper, human-sized rooster. The bride’s gown is a real wedding dress from the artist’s mother, and the groom’s outfit belonged to Grgich’s husband, but the atmosphere is tense. Portraits of Black women activists surround the pair, some of whom gaze defiantly at us, rather than at the altar. Eyes abound, actually, staring out from the stars and stripes as if beseeching its audience to bear witness to this unprecedented union.

I Made Griyawan at Diamond Gallery

In traditional Balinese painting there is no horizon line, only divine order in which human and Buddhist mythology commune. The Batuan variant was born in the 1930s, when artists in the Balinese village began depicting such motifs with Western tools of art production. The Balinese artist I Made Griyawan has propelled the genre farther with The Many Colors of Your Balloon and My Balloon (2008), as well as the other acyclic paintings on display in the booth. A merry crowd of children wave the balloons, each circle a startling pop of primary color against a more conventionally subdued palette. These paintings, in another departure from stylistic convention, are ordered according to sky and sea, but neither aspect feels small or still, due to the repetitive, rippling patterns throughout.

Feheley Fine Arts

Feheley Fine Arts exclusively represents Inuit artists who, like Griyawan, have guided their traditional art form in distinctive directions. Its unfortunate that the great talents here are dead, but it adds weight and purpose to this introduction. The languid figuration and bold symmetry of Annie Pootoogook and Kenojuak Ashevak, who passed in 2016 and 2013, respectively, always impresses. As does the graphic drawing of Ooloosie Saila, who manages to capture the solemn beauty and vague disquiet of icy, dark expanses.

Selections from Collectors at Fleisher/Ollman and Ricco/Maresca

Fleisher/Ollman and Ricco/Maresca, two of the most prestigious galleries to regularly exhibit here the fair, are showing selections from two prominent Outsider collections. Among the works left by Audrey Flack, who died last year after a lifetime of championing the genre in New York, is a lively crayon and pencil drawing by Martín Ramírez of a feathered train track. Ricco/Maresca has brought bits of the prodigious collection of Robert Greenberg, whose tastes ranged from Henry Darger to Chinese Buddhist sculpture and vintage dolls. The must-see piece is a wonderfully lurid colored pencil drawing of red-lipped women by the Swiss artist Aloïse Corbaz.

OAF Curated Space by Mateus Nunes

Mateus Nunes has assembled a coherent, propulsive collection of midcentury Brazilian art for the fair, including some of my favorite painted pieces in the fair, the off-kilter iconography of Mirian Inêz da Silva and anything by Chico da Silva. Vibrant color and the understated but diverse materials animate the viewing experience. The standout sculpture is the gaping crocodilian mask constructed from crushed, reddish plastic. One reaches the end of the display, and like Da Silva’s tail-biting reptiles, circles back to the start; and again.