Special Collections Research Center

This research guide will concern visual artists whose artistic skills are practiced without formal instruction in the fine arts. Many of these artists are considered “visionary,” meaning that they view their art as being inspired by supernatural or religious experiences, visions, or dreams, and in many cases see themselves as emissaries of God, spreading the Gospel or other religious messages via their artistic expression.

For the purposes of this pathfinder, Appalachia includes Northeast Mississippi, North Alabama, and North Georgia, as many well-known outsider arts hail from these states, which are sometimes interpreted as culturally separate from the mountain South. However, the artists of the Deep South are the most well known and most collected among contemporary American outsider artists. The northern regions of Georgia and Alabama, which lie in the margin between the Deep South and Appalachia, are in particular associated with a prolific output of outsider art so research into this topic necessarily includes those regions.

This guide strives to take into account artists working in all visual media, including painting, sculpture, “yard art,” or art landscapes of found objects, and a variety of other forms but does not include traditional skilled arts such as basketry, woodcarving, instrument-making, pottery or any of those folk arts associated strongly with Appalachia which require specific learning. However, one may refer to works on these traditional arts for the sake of comparing them to works of true outsider art.

Outsider art is an umbrella term, and under it may fall the subcategories of prison art, “tramp art” by itinerant travelers, art by mental patients and the mentally ill, and decorative arts, in which an artist may modify a ready-made object with his or her personal creative touch. Sources of information about outsider art are somewhat of a grab bag, as outsider art takes varied and many forms, and I have elected to include sources that discuss them all. As most scholarship regarding outsider art has occurred within the last twenty-five years, and as the collecting of outsider art only came into vogue in the latter part of the 20th century, the sources included in this pathfinder are quite current and may not be as extensive as those which pertain to more established fields of art.

Few, if any, sources were found regarding artists specifically from the states of Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, South Carolina, and Tennessee.