The Year in Self-Taught Artists: 2024 Expanded the Canon

“Projects: Marlon Mullen” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York

Marlon Mullen’s exhibition reups MoMA’s historical commitment to art practices emerging outside of the mainstream, recalling projects as early as the ones under the leadership of its founding director, Alfred H. Barr, such as “American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America, 1750–1900in 1932. The Mullen show gathers paintings inspired by the covers of art publications like Art in America and Artforum—copies of which were donated to NIAD Art, the progressive studio for disabled artists where Mullen has been working for the last forty years. These works join the longstanding tradition of making art about art, raising questions about the impact of artistic training, the circulation of images, and peer systems across time and place.

“Janet Sobel: All-Over” at The Menil, Houston

Focusing on the abstract canvases created in the 1940s by Ukrainian-born, American-based Janet Sobel (1893–1968), this bracing exhibition reunited the artist’s major paintings for the first time in over sixty years. Curator Natalie Dupêcher dug into Sobel’s short-lived but meteoric career, which began in 1943 when leading New York dealers, collectors, and artist peers embraced her work. The attention culminated in her first solo show at New York’s Puma Gallery in 1944, and another one at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery in 1946. Sobel pioneered what became known as “all-over” abstraction. Listen to Dupêcher’s presentation at this year’s Anne Hill Blanchard Uncommon Artists Lecture. [https://vimeo.com/919657061?share=copy]

“Magali Herrera: A Spark of Light in this World” at Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne, Switzerland

While the art world continues to expand its horizons, specialized museums continue to zealously research, publish, preserve, and explore the next uncovered territories. The Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne is a stellar example. It opened to the public in 1976, with the treasured Art Brut collection amassed by Jean Dubuffet. This year, its retrospective of the works of Uruguayan artist Magali Herrera exemplified this museum’s unique approach: investigating and revealing artistic figures who have remained under the radar for far too long. Aligned with Dubuffet’s care for documentation, this presentation includes items from the artist’s personal archives and an active correspondence between Herrera and Dubuffet (from 1967 to 1974), who was fascinated by her writing style. Herrera’s drawings translate an internal cosmogony into lines and dots that are finely executed with Chinese brushes over slow but intensive, nonstop creative sessions. Her images, of solitary landscapes, comprise miniscule dots, and evincing these immersive creative sessions.

Creative Growth: at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Outsider Art Fair

Enthralling works by Judith Scott, Alice Wong, Monica Valentine, and Dan Miller were featured in Expanding the Canon: 50 Years of Creative Growth at this year’s New York Outsider Art Fair—the most vibrant, international platform for the self-taught art community. The organization—which supports artists with developmental disabilities—was also celebrated at SFMOMA in an impressive show that highlighted the philosophy of its founders Florence Ludins-Katz and Elias Katz: “that each person has the right to the richest and fullest development of which (he) is capable. Only then can society reach its fullest potential… Creativity is a vital living force within each individual.” The project led to a milestone acquisition by SFMOMA.

The Artists Who Served as Spirit Guides

Three artists who cultivated ties with the spirit world and the otherworldly grounded and guided our scattered paths through 2024. Melvin Way passed away in January, and New York lost its urban shaman, whose intricate, energy-induced and formula-ridden drawings were stashed in his pockets like protective devices. Working under the auspices of her spirit guide Myrninerest, Madge Gill blew our minds at this year’s Venice Biennale with the hallucinatory Crucifixion of the Soul (1934), a ten-meter-long ink-on-calico piece, filled with checkerboard architectural spaces across which the pale faces of discarnate women emerged. Lastly, in the insightful exhibition “Animism, Shamanism, and Art Brut” at Cavin-Morris Gallery in New York, we were mesmerized by the polychrome wood shaman’s mask created ca. 1880 by an unrecorded/unidentified artist from the new Norton Sound in Alaska.

Arte Popular Hit the Global Stage

2024 was a remarkable year for arte popular from Brazil. The term, roughly equivalent to “folk art” or “self-taught art,” similarly refers to works produced apart from art school conventions.

When the Modernist movement emerged in Brazil in the 1920s, artists and writers from the cultural elite began to incorporate Indigenous and Black influences into their work. The cultural production of marginalized groups became valued as a source for shaping national identity, and a model for finding liberation from European traditions. Last year’s São Paulo Biennale featured exquisite examples by Bispo do Rosario and Aurora Cursino dos Santos. This year’s Venice Biennale, curated by MASP’s Adriano Pedrosa, featured works by Rubem Valentim and artists from the Yanomami Indigenous Territory.

Meanwhile, bold gallerists brought arte popular works to art fairs in 2024. Art Basel Miami saw works by Hélio Melo courtesy Almeida & Dale, José Adário courtesy Galatea, Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato courtesy David Zwirner, and José Antonio da Silva courtesy Galeria Estação (we are impatiently waiting Estação’s 2025 retrospective at the Musée de Grenoble). At Independent 20th Century, standouts include works by Heitor dos Prazeres at Galatea’s booth as well as Maria Lira at Gomide & Co. At Frieze Masters, Galatea’s booth was dedicated to Chico da Silva.

The Pompidou Published an Art Brut Edition of Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne

This rich issue of the Cahiers, edited by scholar Barbara Safarova and Centre Pompidou’s Chief Curator of the Contemporary Collections, Sophie Duplaix, provides a preliminary reflection on filmmaker Bruno Decharme’s exceptional donation to the Centre Pompidou in 2021 of 921 works by 242 of the most canonical Art Brut artists—a gift of unimaginable scope given the rarity of the works, one that adds fresh and unexpected layers to the museum’s collection. This publication traces the evolution of Art Brut through the eyes of the collector; the works of mediumistic female artists; Art Brut’s geographical developments; the intersections of Art Brut and folk art; “brut” writings; and the art of Auguste Forestier, whose sculptures were created while confined at the Saint-Alban psychiatric hospital and would spark Jean Dubuffet’s seminal Art Brut collection.

Four Women Lent Landmark to Support of Self-Taught Artists

Four women stood out this year for their support of self-taught artists. Critic Roberta Smith announced her retirement from The New York Times in March; over her remarkable career, she persistently introduced self-taught artists—Bill Traylor, James Castle, John Dunkley, Morris Hirshfield, Bispo do Rosario, Frank Jones, James ‘Son Ford’ Thomas—to new audiences, expanding with enduring impact the frontiers of art. Collector Audrey B. Heckler, who passed away in the Spring, left behind a trailblazing collection composed of the best examples in the field, many of which will be exhibited in 2026 at AFAM. The book Moderno Contemporanêo Popular Brasileiro (2024) celebrated Brazilian gallerist and collector Vilma Eid, who championed arte popular over the last forty years. Art dealer and art historian Jane Kallir announced the opening, in November, of The Kallir Research Institute’s new headquarters, dedicated to expanding the scholarship of artists championed by Otto Kallir at Galerie St. Etienne. Aside from pursuing her grandfather’s legacy with Grandma Moses, she championed Henry Darger, the artists of Gugging, Ilija Bosilj-Basicevic, Josef Karl Rädler, Morris Hirshfield and John Kane.

“Mary Sully: Native Modern,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Mary Sully—born Susan Mabel Deloria on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota—was a reclusive Yankton Dakota self-taught artist who created highly distinctive work informed by her Native American and settler ancestry from the 1920s through the 1940s. The enchanting and revelatory “Mary Sully: Native Modern”gathers 25 drawings, primarily graphite and colored pencil triptychs that she referred to as “personality prints,” each evoking different Euro-American celebrities of her time. Sully’s grandson described her as “a solo artist in every sense of the word,” and accordingly, her works having remained unseen by almost anyone beyond her family during her lifetime. As Holland Cotter observed in the New York Times, she was “personally caught between cultures, ethnicities, social classes, gender expectations, hostage to a still crushing colonial history.”

“The Way I See It: Selections from the KAWS Collection” at the Drawing Center, New York

While KAWS’s multifaceted creative endeavors are embedded in a vast community of peers, artists, collectors, gallerists, and museum professionals, his collecting activities (which he started 30 years ago) have been a far more private affair—until now. This exhibition is presented as a corrective lens for his ideal art history book, showing his major support of self-taught artists and interest ina vast range of artistic trajectories. It features unforgettable works by artists from H.C. Westermann, Robert Crumb, Adolf Wölfli, Joe Coleman, Susan Te Kahurangi King, and Peter Saul to Jane Dickson, Helen Rae, Anton van Dalen, Martin Ramírez, Yuichiro Ukai, and graffiti pioneers like FUTURA 2000, Lee Quiñones, and DAZE. KAWS’s support raises questions about the traditional importance of artistic training.

In the catalogue, the artist explains his proclivity: “there are thousand ways to exist as an artist. I kind of hate categories and labels. A lot of people tend to get focused on hierarchy—what is ‘art world,’ what is ‘commercial world,’ what is ‘outsider’ or ‘self-taught.’ I never look at things like this.”