Dear "Here Comes Everybody" (Jimmy Joyce)--
just came across a bit re the American Muesum of Visionary Art--in Baltimore! and since so many on list live and work there--wondered if anyone has been to it--?
(i came across it via some art brut/Dubuffet sites)--
there is an excellent collection of American "Folk Art" in the museum here in Milwaukee-
i have been working also on a new genre of art i call Fauxk Art--
a recent example i found in a dumpster is pumpkin face--made of a crude wood painted a cheap pumpkinish orange--cut in shape of pumpkin, but crudely--with nails stitched on for eyes and nose, some rope for mouth, some little crude decorations--and in the rope for mouth, a strip of tin in a crude grin--
it "looks like" folk art--seom hand made quasi kitsch object--
yet--turn it over--MADE IN CHINA!
also other day saw a rather large and garish poster for "Wisconsin's Most Famous Outsider Artist"--
giving web site, galleries, images--
the folk art and haitian art in museum here are truly inspiring--
one piece by Rev. Blackmon, whom have known for years selling his paintings on street corners--he also is a preacher and psychic hand reader--his paintings are wonderful--all fromBible themes with verses painted out around sides and tops and bottoms of paintings--
on the one hand, in the street--and on the other, in the museum--
also saw, battered and grimy--one of those infamous dogs playing poker paintings--resting against a dumpster in an alley--among some empty beer bottles and old torn flapping card board boxes leaking stale rain and rust from some busted tools--
from Dubuffet:
"Art doesnt' go to sleep in the bed made for it; it would sooner run away than say its own anme; what it likes to be is incognito. It's best moments are when it forgets what its own name is."
i.e. perhaps those colors leaking from box--with the rian water and rust painting sides of box--and satiing areas of alley street--glittering beneath a rather tired street lamp--
and above, paint peeling off from magnificent cracking wooden door long unused--
beneath eaves where large bird perches with some bread in mouth--a crow--with collaged nest--
if anyone can, please do share an intrepid report re the visionary museum!
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