Unlike many self-taught artists who only gained fame following their deaths, David Butler experienced success during his lifetime, holding several museum and gallery exhibitions at various locations including the Delaware Art Museum and Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Living to the ripe old age of 99, Butler was one of the original recognized stars of Southern African-American yard art. His home in Patterson, Louisiana is where he created an amazing tin zoological environment both inside and outside his home. He did this over several decades, and began his work as an artist at middle age, after his employment at a sawmill left him injured. The 1982 exhibition “Black Folk Art in America, 1930-1980” held at Washington, DC’s Corcoran Gallery, is where Butler’s art first rose to prominence. Unfortunately, one year later in 1983 illness would strike Butler, resulting in his having to move in with his family, away from the zoological environment he had created.

Butler liked to call the “creatures” he created “critters.” He drew inspiration both from mythological sources, and the Bible, as his mother was a missionary. Butler’s family’s religious beliefs impacted his artistic vision to an extent; he also created kinetic sculptures which included windmills, weathervanes, and spinning “whirligigs.”

An interesting fact is that Butler’s artistic ability developed somewhat due to the fact that he desired color in his yard during winter months, when the “real” flowers he had planted in spring would disappear. Some of the results of his imagination include cowboys, alligators, sea monsters, even flying elephants. Some of his works of art include “Two Headed Dragon Wagon,” “Peacock,” “Train,” “Man in the Moon,” and “Two Wisemen on a Camel.” His work can be found today at Gilley’s Gallery in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

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Dial, who passed away at 87 years old on January 2016 was a self-taught African American artist who came to prominence in the United States in the late 1980s.

Thornton Dial was born in 1928 to a teenage mother, Mattie bell on a former cotton plantation in Emelle, Alabama. He began farm work when we was five years old and attended school rarely.

From childhood on, Dial built “things” using whatever he could salvage, recycling even his own work to reuse materials in new creations. Dial referred to what he made only as “things,” though late in life he found out that others call them “art.”

His principal place of employment was the Pullman Company in Bessemer, Alabama working as a machinist, until the company closed its doors in 1981. After the Pullman factory shut down, Dial began to dedicate himself to his art for his own pleasure.

He was ‘discovered’ by Bill Arnett, an Atlanta-based collector of art made by black Southerners. And the rest as they say, is history.

Many of Dials art pieces fetch in the upwards of 12,000 each.

What is Outsider Art?
The term outsider art was coined by art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for raw art or rough art (untrained artists), a label created by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture. More here

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Born in Garden Valley, Idaho in 1899 just nine years after the rural frontier territory was admitted to the Union, James Castle was born deaf, never learning to read, write, or sign but choosing to communicate through his artwork instead. Later determined to be autistic by contemporary medical specialists, Castle spent a significant portion of his life creating art in a desolate chicken house and an icehouse.

James Charles Castle spent his entire life isolated in his family’s home and businesses, other than a six-month period of time spent in the Idaho School for the Deaf and Blind; he was expelled from the school. Sadly, Castle was ridiculed and taunted by others. In fact, relatives would destroy his drawings, often created from items he found including scraps of cardboard and milk containers. It is believed Castle’s parents’ positions as postmasters provided much of the supplies he used to create collages, text and abstract drawings, and color meditations. Perhaps most intriguing of all, Castle would render rustic and pastoral architecture and terrain using soot mixed with saliva, which he would put on the end of a sharpened stick to render works of art much like what results with ink or graphite.

Most of Castle’s artwork was fairly unknown until after his death, although his artistic talents did garner local acclaim at the Boise Gallery of Art in exhibitions in 1963 and 1976, just one year prior to his death. International recognition came later, in fact decades after Castle’s death; in 2011 the first international retrospective of his work was held at the Museo Reina Sofia.

Tom Trusky, who was Director of the Hemingway Western Studies Center and a professor at Boise State University, is credited for bringing Castle’s artwork outside of the confined spaces the artist lived in. Moving to Boise in 1970, Trusky became familiar with Castle’s artwork after hearing of it from acquaintances who knew mostly not of Castle’s amazing talent, but of his reputation as a strange man with inexplicable artistic idiosyncrasies. While an English professor at Boise State, Trusky authored a biography of Castle. Trusky wrote in the biography that James Castle was “obsessed with making art from an early age,” and that he had been “incorrectly declared retarded, even insane.” After much study of Castle’s life, ability, and talent, and analyzation of the artist’s life by members of the medical community, Trusky said he was convinced that Castle was not insane at all, but that he was a classic example of a gifted autistic.

Today, this truly talented outsider artist’s work is exhibited across the U.S. at museums including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of Art in New York, and the American Folk Art Museum.

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Shortly on the heels of her divorce, Miss Helen returned to Nieu Bethesda where she cared for nearly the next two decades for her ailing parents. Following the death of her mother in 1941 and her father in 1945, Miss Helen began to isolate herself from her local community, and became somewhat of a recluse. The neighbors thought her a bit strange, but it was at this time she began to transform her home and garden with creations crafted of ‘glass and light.’ This art took the form of walls coated with crushed glass, murals, and mirrors enhanced from the light of burning candles.

While she avoided people of the community as much as possible, Miss Helen opened her home up during the Christmas season and invited neighbors to enjoy her display of glass and light. Miss Helen employed Koos Malgas in 1964, a “colored” sheepshearer who many in the community suspected she was having an affair with as he remained close to her for the last 12 years of her life. Malgas helped Miss Helen create statues of cement and glass, transforming her former garden to a “sculpture yard” consisting of more than 300 statues depicting animals and other figures.

Sadly, in 1976 Miss Helen committed suicide after her eyesight began to fail. She reportedly swallowed a mixture of crushed glass in olive oil and caustic soda, not being able to bear the thought of losing her eyesight considering that her creations relied on light for the most part. Owls were an important part of Miss Helen’s life; she thought of them as highly insightful and intuitive, filled with wisdom. She and Malgas had begun work on the Owl House prior to her death; Malgas returned to restore the Owl House in 1991 as it had been declared a national monument.

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Finster’s first creative works came in the form of garden parks and museums he built to showcase what he called “the wonderful things o’ God’s Creation, kinda like the Garden of Eden.” Upon moving to Georgia after he ran out of land in Alabama on which to display his inventions, Finster built the Plant Farm Museum, featuring attractions which included the “Bible House,” the “Hubcap Tower,” and the “Folk Art Chapel,” a five story structure which became the largest in the garden.

Finster’s folk art was inspired by visions of a religious nature he experienced from the time he was a boy. One of 14 children, Finster’s first vision was one he saw at age three, following the death of his sister, Abbie Rose. Finster claimed that Abbie appeared on a floating stairway, telling him that throughout his life, his religious experiences and visions would play a vital role. While riding in a wagon at the age of 15, God called him to become a preacher; it was at that point he began preaching at tent revivals across the south, including in Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee.

It was in 1976 Finster decided to dedicate his life to painting and creating folk art, after getting paint on his thumb while rubbing paint as he did what he called a “patch job” on a bicycle. Finster said that when he looked at the white paint on the tip of his thumb, he saw a human face on it and heard a voice telling him to “Paint sacred art.”

Many of Finster’s paintings have bible versus written on them, and are known around the world. In the mid-80’s, Finster’s work became so well-known that he was commissioned to paint album covers for Georgia-based rock bank R.E.M., and the Talking Heads. Of the Talking Heads cover, Finster said that he though the cover included 26 religious verses. He felt good about it, considering a million albums were sold within weeks of its release. Finster said of the album’s success that since a million were sold, that’s 26 million verses he got out into the world.

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After a series of drug dealing convictions he was found guilty of an assault, his third strike in the Texas Three Strikes Law, which sentenced him to 25 years in Huntsville State Prison. While in prison he was introduced to the prison arts program which provided a creative outlet. He developed a characteristic drawing style involving detailed patterning and line work. He drew with green, black and red ball point pens on any scrap of paper he could find — envelopes to prison menus. He described his gladiators and cosmic visions with razor-sharp outlines, covering every millimeter of the surface with the color inks.

After being discovered in a prison art show by William Steen, Clark found an enthusiastic reception in the wider world. After winning a prize in the “Texas Department of Corrections Art Show,” he was exhibited in “Living Folk” at Hirschl & Adler Folk Gallery in New York in 1990; “Passionate Visions of the American South,” New Orleans Museum of Art, 1993, and “Spirited Journeys: Self-Taught Texas Artists of the Twentieth Century,” 1997.

Clark said his work comes to him naturally: “I sit down and, watch a football game or watch my soap operas every day. While I’m watching, this my hand be real busy. Every once in a while, I glance down, I don’t know where it come from, but it’s beautiful precise control.”

And he went on to express: “If anybody knows anything about my art, they know about my planets,” he explained once. “I know they are out there because I’ve been there. Every night when I go to bed, I travel in my spaceship going to all the places I put on these papers.”

Clark went to prison more than once, but after his final release he made Houston his home. Ironically, Clark died on July 29, 2006, the victim of a robbery and murder in his home.

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Henry Darger has become one of the most influential ‘outsider’ artists of the 20th century. Sadly, he died without ever knowing how popular his work would become. Darger wrote what many describe as an epic tale centered around freeing children from slavery, his drawings and watercolor paintings visually depicting The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.

Coined in 1972 by art critic Roger Cardinal, the term ‘outsider art’ is used to describe ‘raw’ or ‘rough’ art, even creative works developed by those in insane asylums, or who otherwise had little contact with the art world.

Born in Chicago in 1892, Darger’s mother gave birth to a daughter when Darger was just four years old; his mother died during childbirth, and he never knew his sister. When Henry was just 8 years old, his father, Henry Joseph Darger Sr., was placed at St. Augustine’s Catholic Mission home because he was impoverished and crippled. He died just five years later, essentially leaving Henry Jr. an orphan at the age of 13. Soon after, Henry was placed in an asylum in Lincoln, Illinois, and asylum designed for ‘feeble-minded’ children.

At the asylum he was subject to harsh punishments and forced labor and ultimately escaped a year before the asylum was investigated for abuse. Henry spent only three years in the asylum before escaping and going to work as a custodian in a Catholic hospital in 1908; this would be his job for the next 50 years, although his secret passion was writing and illustrating his manuscript. His manuscript, purported by some to be the “longest book ever written,” was more than 15,000 pages.

Living a hermit’s life, Darger produced hundreds of water-color illustrations of the world he had written about in his manuscript, a world some believed to exist only in Darger’s dreams. Darger’s images were often violent, even brutal, displaying the torture and murder of the children in his stories. They can also be very colorful, playful, sincere and innocent. Darger surely drew upon his life experiences in the asylum. His unique style has given rise to the term “Dargerism”.

This Video takes a Look Inside His Apartment

In creating his works of art, he relied largely on cheap paper and tools, some of his work including cardboard collages. Darger was known to draw on both sides of the cheap paper. John Jerit of Memphis owns American Paper Optics; as an art collector, he primarily collects works created by self-taught and outsider artists. Having a collection of Darger’s works, he said in a news article recently that he simply flips the pieces each year for display purposes.

Darger was considered a smart aleck as a teen, perhaps because he had to be an adult himself at such an early age. Dressing shabbily and collecting what some call a ‘bewildering’ array of trash taken from Chicago streets, this artist’s life can only be described as lonely and sad.

The American Folk Art Museum calls Darger “one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century”. His headstone is inscribed with “Protector of Children” and “Artist.” Some of his works are displayed today at the American Folk Art Museum and Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, New Orleans Museum of Art, and others.

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