Houston Art Car Parade, TX
"Hippysaurus" by The Waters Family, winner of the Mayor's Cup
April 12–15, 2018 The 2018 Houston Art Car Parade took place April 12–15. The Parade featured more than 250 cars, bikes, skaters and motorised creatures. This year, the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art awarded $15,500 in prize money. For images of all art cars in this year's parade and information about the 31st Annual Houston Art Car Parade, flip through the annual programme here. www.thehoustonartcarparade.com
"It's Only Rock & Roll But I Like It" by Heights High School led by Rebecca Bass
Jessica Park at Bennington Museum, MA
until May 28, 2018 Jessica Park (b. 1958), a native of Williamstown MA, Park is an internationally acclaimed artist on the autism spectrum, best known for her depictions of architecture. "Enthusiasms: Personal Paintings by Jessica Park" features a lesser-known aspect of Park’s work, reflecting her personal interests in popular culture, astronomical phenomenon, and prismatic lights and colour, often configured in tightly controlled grid-like structures. Park’s work can be found in the Regional Artists’ Gallery while paintings by Gayleen Aiken are on view in the John T. Harrison, Jr. Orientation Hall, juxtaposed with photographs by Duane Michals. Bennington Museum
75 Main Street, Bennington, VT 05201
benningtonmuseum.org
American Folk Art Museum, NY
until May 27, 2018 "Vestiges & Verse: Notes from the Newfangled Epic" unites more than 250 works by 21 seminal and recently discovered self-taught artists, who are introduced for the first time through the examination of the idiosyncratic structures of their lifelong, intricate narratives. Rare manuscripts, series of drawings, illustrated notebooks with coded texts, expanding cartography, journals, and multi-part collages provide an art historical and pluridisciplinary perspective on the mechanisms behind visual storytelling. American Folk Art Museum
2 Lincoln Square, New York, NY 10023
folkartmuseum.org
Museum im Lagerhaus, St. Gallen
until July 8, 2018 The C.G. Jung Collection is being presented to the public for the first time. "In the Land of Imagination" shows artworks by Jung’s patients from 1916 to 1955. A parallel exhibition, "collection meets artist: inspired by Saï Kijima", compares the collection with the artist’s own work. Museum im Lagerhaus
Davidstrasse 44, 9000 St. Gallen, Switzerland
www.museumimlagerhaus.ch
until October 7, 2018 Museum Gugging presents "existence.! humans in the jean-claude volot collection". Volot's collection juxtaposes well-known artists of art brut alongside lesser-known artists, including Karel Appel, Gaston Chaissac, Hans Bellmer and Louise Giamari. The collection is on view in Austria for the first time. museum gugging
Am Campus 2, A-3400 Maria Gugging, Austria
www.gugging.at
Raw Vision 97 Article Preview:
Charles Dellschau 1830–1923
An extract from Outsider Art in Texas: Lone Stars describes an early US outsider artist who privately documented his ambitious designs for flying machines By Jay Wehnert The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. . . . Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone—that is the secret of invention: be alone; that is when ideas are born.—Nikola Tesla, New York Times, April 8, 1934 The life and art of Charles A. A. Dellschau is shrouded in mystery and wonder. Dellschau’s life illustrates how diverse forces of isolation can converge within an individual,
sometimes contributing to a uniquely personal creativity and art. Charles Dellschau’s fascinating life of isolation and imagination would come to mark him as one of America’s earliest and greatest self-taught visionary artists. Charles August Albert Dellschau was born on June 5, 1830, in Berlin, in what was then Prussia. He was born into a historical period of political revolution and economic upheaval in his homeland, marked by violence and hardship. Many of his generation sought opportunities and stability by coming to the United States. Charles uprooted himself from home and family and apparently emigrated alone to Texas in 1849, arriving through the Port of Galveston.
Book 8, nos. 4347, April 7 and 9, 1919, ink, watercolour, pencil and collage on paper, 35 x 17 x 2 ins. / 88.9 x 43.2 x 5.1 cm, Collection J. Kevin O’Rourke, courtesy of Stephen Romano Gallery, New York
Charles Dellschau’s life in his adopted American homeland was marked by adventure, fragile domesticity and recurrent personal tragedy. While during his early years in the United States he may have sought his good fortune in the California Gold Rush, his return to Texas held just the opposite. There, he was to be preceded in death by his two wives and their natural children. He ultimately settled in Houston with the family of his surviving step-daughter where his life’s final decades culminated in his visionary masterwork. Charles Dellschau’s life illustrates the wide range of forces, both grand and personal, that can come to bear, resulting in displacement and isolation. The global economic and political world that he was born into in Europe provided the broad
circumstances of his lone flight from his family and culture of origin. He arrived in the United States alone. Subsequently, so much personal family loss in the span of two decades would serve as a further backdrop for Dellschau’s ultimate retreat and reclusion from domestic life and his immersion into a solitary and private life of fantasy and creativity.
Plate 4400 Aero Nix, 1919, watercolour and mixed media, 17 x 17 ins. / 43.2 x 43.2 cm, Stephen Romano Gallery, New York
Living with Elizabeth in Houston, Dellschau was later described by family members as increasingly aloof from everyday family life, spending more and more time alone in his private room in the family house. It would not be until some 40 years after his death at the age of 93 that the world would discover the wonder and intrigue of his furtive and cloistered labors. In 1967, following a fire at the house, the attic and its contents were cleared out on the order of the Fire Department. Left on the sidewalk that day was what Charles Dellschau had been producing in his reclusive room during the culminating two decades of his life. However, his labors were only beginning to be brought into the full light of day. Fred Washington, a Houston junk and antiques dealer with a picker’s
sharp eye, acquired the discarded pile of fire debris. What had caught Washington’s eye was a cache of twelve large notebooks, each hand-bound with shoelaces and thick with text and colourfully detailed mechanical drawings of dirigible-like machines.
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