Susanne Mull
Pastel Journal •

At Home in This Place

Describing her studio, Mull says, “It’s a little bit similar to Adolph Menzel’s Balcony Room.” The 1845 German painting readily evokes the artist’s serene, sun-filled space with tall ceilings and French doors opening to a balcony. Mull’s home—a top-heavy 19th-century building with a Mansard roof—keeps her connected to the past. So, too, does the region of Rheinhessen in which she lives. This area was a stomping ground for the German Romantics...
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY
Brut Force •

Take Me to the Moon: Alma Thomas

Alma Thomas was the first African-American woman to be featured in the White House art collection, the first African-American woman to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the first person to graduate from Howard University with a degree in Fine Art. During her life, she never fit into a certain artistic category, and the problem still stands of whether she belongs on the ‘outside’ or ‘inside’ of twentieth century art.
Christian Berst Art Brut / Ampersand Gallery
Brut Force •

Joyful Voyeur: John Kayser's Playfully Intimate Photography

After John Kayser’s death in 2007, stacks of home-developed black and white photographs and cheap drugstore prints surfaced among his personal effects. Kayser’s oeuvre could easily have ended up as pornographic curios in a California garage sale. Yet something differentiates his work from clichéd amateur erotica or mere smut. In part, it is his vision of femininity. It is also the fact that Kayser works with an awareness of his medium. His compositions include inside jokes about the nature of representation or the entanglement of high and low genres.
Brut Force •

Hardboiled: Gil Batle’s Debut in New York

West 20th Street has one of the highest concentrations of art galleries in Manhattan. On a cool, misty November evening, most windows were brightly lit. The only dark spot was the former Bayview Correctional Facility on the corner of 11th Avenue, whose solid brick walls guard its hidden past. That evening, Gil Batle’s debut show, "Hatched in Prison," opened at the Ricco Maresca Gallery across the street from Bayview.
Andrew Edlin Gallery
Brut Force •

Imagined Spaces at the 2017 Outsider Art Fair

It is the last day of the 2017 Outsider Art Fair. With sixty-two exhibitors, this is the event’s biggest iteration so far. As we wander around the Metropolitan Pavilion, pushed along by the crowds, the exhibitors’ booths reveal their treasures: Domenico Zindato’s rhythmic patterns and Hiroyuki Doi’s circles. M’onma‘s nightmarish clown masks and Gil Batle’s carved eggshells. A brochure for the fair invites us to see our visit as a “road trip” across the United States and beyond.
Peabody Essex Mus./ Kathy Tarantola/ Folk Art Mus.
Brut Force •

Securing the Shadow: The Folk Art Museum Chronicles Death in Early America

Artists began to specialize in the miracle of re-animating a corpse and depicting the dead as they once were. In the exhibition, painting after painting shows deceased children smiling serenely, playing with toys and pets, and reunited with their brothers and sisters. The artworks’ subjects are eternally present to their families, suspended in a realm between that of the living and the dead. These attempts to both acknowledge and defy death could lead to difficult emotions.
Maris Hutchinson / EPW Studio
Brut Force •

Collecting a Human Experience at The Keeper

Discarded pieces of gum are placed side-by-side with photographs documenting the structure of snowflakes. You can see Holocaust memorabilia, rock crystals, antique vessels, Alabama quilts, and architectural models of an imaginary European city. What brings these objects together is a meta-exhibition dedicated to the act of collecting itself. The project is so ambitious and vast in scope that it threatens to unravel into disorder.
Brut Force •

Drawing Circles: Hiroyuki Doi Wants You to Know That You Can Make Art

Hiroyuki Doi’s first drawing workshop in the United States is held in the Folk Art Museum’s Collections and Education Center, on a narrow industrial street in Long Island City, Queens. The street is lined with factories -- I sense the hum of machinery and the faint smell of acetone. I find the number and ring a bell. I enter a dimly lit space. Quilts by American folk artists hang on the walls. Doi is sitting at the far end of the room in semi-darkness, with his sunglasses on.
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