Outsider Art: Harnessing Color
Jamestown Arts Center • Jamestown, RI • jamestownartcenter.org • January 27–April 1, 2023
Hasten spring’s arrival with a visit to Outsider Art: Harnessing Color at the Jamestown Arts Center. Co-curated by the art directors of the nonprofit Looking Upwards, Melissa Seitz, Vince Ruvolo, and Casey Weibust, the exhibition brings together “Outsider Art” commissioned and collected by organizations through the Northeast that work with artists with disabilities.
The expansive galleries of the Jamestown Arts Center will be filled with work in all different media: from video to ceramics to canvas to bottlecaps, the exhibition promises to be dimensional and textured, utilizing all resources on hand. While Looking Upwards exhibitions in years prior focused on the technical frameworks of weaving and patterning, this year’s theme, Harnessing Color, was chosen in part as a balm to the depths of winter.
The center of the show will be the “wall of orange.” The six contributing organizations were tasked with either making new work or looking to their collections for works in orange to fill up the space, with the sensation of “walking into the sun,” says Weibust (Out of the Box, Jamestown, RI). She is especially excited about the collaborative installation; the works are pre-selected by the organization yet installed as an improvisational act, determining which works “play nicely” together—creating evocative connections rather than organizational ones.
An ”outsider artist” is one who hasn’t had conventional art education. A controversial term, this third iteration of the biennial event was entitled as such to draw connections with the annual Outsider Art Fair in New York, also in January, and to elicit conversation around its meaning. Seitz (Downtown Designs, Newport, RI) said “the thing I love about outsider art is that it’s often so exciting and surprising.” Outsider art often carries implications of naivete, but/and it can also circumvent the trends that seem to overdetermine contemporary art.
Of the biennial, Ruvolo (Studio 57, Middletown, RI) notes that it helps artists develop ongoing bodies of work, supporting their visibility and professionalization, and has aims to create (inter)national networks for artists with disabilities. Harnessing Color, especially, shows both the “joy of making and the joy of the maker.” This joy is contagious in discussing the plans for the opening and programming, which will include makers workshops and panels with artists and guests. Or, as Weibust pithily puts it: “Why not meet up and do something really fun and special?”
—Elizabeth Maynard