Spotlight on Outsider Art: 27 Self-Taught Artists You Should Know About (Part 3)
We asked nine experts in the field to talk about their favorite self-taught artists.
By Art in America Guide to Museums, Galleries, and Artists
January 17, 2020

With the 28th edition of the New York Outsider Art Fair in town, we asked nine experts in the field to talk about their favorite self-taught artists.

TOM DI MARIA

Director, Creative Growth Art Center, Oakland, California

Latefa Noorzai has been working with Creative Growth now for three or four years. Originally from Kabul, she’s a refugee from the war in Afghanistan. She had never made art before coming to us, and she creates images of women she remembers from her previous life, as well as fantastic self-portraits.

Last fall we presented an exhibition that showed work by Creative Growth artists with disabilities alongside work being made by Aboriginal artists—some with disabilities and some without—at the Mangkaja Arts Resource Agency in Western Australia. This year we brought paintings by two Mangkaja artists, Sonia Kurarra and Tommy May, to the Outsider Art Fair. The piece by May below is a depiction of, and hope for, rain—which is very timely given what’s going on in Australia right now.

Another artist whose work I fell in love with when I saw it in Paris is the French artist Caroline Demangel, who began making art during a hospitalization in 2008. Her drawings are beautifully stylized and very compelling.