The 29th edition of the Outsider Art Fair will include a hybrid of online and in-person components, featuring 7 curated exhibitions across 5 gallery locations around Manhattan.
Western Exhibitions is excited to be showing work online by Courttney Cooper, Andrew Hostick, Michael Pellew, and Cathrine Whited. All of work in OAF OVR can be seen in person (in Chicago) in our current show, The Western Exhibitions Drawing Biennial. Jenny Crowe’s work will be included in one of the in-person components in New York, in the exhibition Figure Out: Abstraction in Self-Taught Art at Andrew Edlin Gallery, 212 Bowery
Click here to access the OAF website, and click here to access our OAF 2021 viewing room.
Download a preview here.
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We’ll be showing a new (to us) map by Courttney Cooper, a vernacular artist from Cincinnati, Ohio. Cooper is known for drawing large-scale cityscapes of his hometown that respond to changes in the city’s architecture and environment. Gluing together pieces of found paper from his job at a grocery store, Cooper’s obsessive drawings, rendered with ballpoint pens, map out neighborhoods in his hometown in remarkable detail. Buildings, streets, and conversations are all recorded from memory. Cooper’s practice is a perpetual celebration of Oktoberfest Zinzinnati, USA, a commemorative and nostalgic place that exists parallel to or as a transparent layer upon Cincinnati, Ohio.
Andrew Hostick’s subjects are the advertisements and reproductions found in various art magazines including Art in America and Artforum. In each drawing Hostick inscribes and scores the mat board with heavy-handed marks, slowly building up a velvety sheen of coloured pencil. The resulting works constitute a beautiful collapse of both primitive and contemporary sensibilities, commenting directly on a sort of voyeuristic access to an Art World largely inaccessible to the artist as an outsider practitioner. From a review in Disparate Minds: “Much like Marlon Mullen and Helen Rae, the essential nature of Hostick’s process is to reinterpret carefully selected found imagery through entirely different visual priorities. Deviating from the original, Hostick’s resolved commitment to a specific palette across all of the works is a choice that feels utilitarian. These drawings don’t employ abstraction in order to alter the source, but instead deconstruct and interpret. It becomes clear that Hostick’s translations are a means to an end, and the intention of his drawings is entirely different than those of his references.”
Michael Pellew is a Brooklyn-based artist who is known for his humorous rumination on pop culture and celebrity mash-ups. His inspiration comes from speed-metal, Taylor Swift, Chicago Deep House and reality TV stars. Michael’s seemingly simple and succinct drawings use playful line quality and imaginative cultural observations to develop an alternate universe where pop culture is thrown into a blender, giving the viewer random moments that are exuberant, painfully honest, witty and at times, grim. Also from Disparate Minds: “As an artist he remains remarkably consistent, with an unmistakable comedic voice and sense of levity. Popular culture is central to Pellew’s body of work, reflecting his earnest affinity for and commitment to the subject matter, often referencing or elaborating on specific historical moments (the filming of a Michael Jackson Pepsi commercial, for instance). Pellew’s hovering speech balloons and matter-of-fact portraits are produced quickly in graphite, colored pencil, and marker, an immediate distillation of the act of repetitively drawing uniform figures over many years. ”
Cincinnati-based Cathrine Whited will be making her debut at the Outsider Art Fair in our booth with a series of deadpan drawings about food. Whited writes lists as the first step in her art-making process. She then draws each item on the list, rendered in her unique way of framing and labeling the item before cataloging the list’s drawings together as a unit. For instance, with a list entitled, “What’s in my fridge?” every possible item that is in the fridge is labeled. She starts a drawing with a ruler, making guidelines in pencil, to then render the imagery and text. Colored pencil is then applied for the right amount of color before moving to the next item on the list. Her renderings are a vehicle for viewers to isolate, experience, and analyze our collective everyday interaction with the objects and culture that surrounds us.
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In New York: Figure Out: Abstraction in Self-Taught Art at Andrew Edlin Gallery
Jenny Crowe has loved to fill journals for as long as she or anyone who knows her can remember. Her fragments of text combine poetry and the mundane in a struggle to find a whole within her experiences. Crowe’s words are layered to the point that they visually flatten themselves into powerful and immovable forms. Her process is methodical, as she works from left to right and top to bottom, filling the page’s void of empty space until the viewer is trapped somewhere between the impulse to decode text and the desire to enjoy a purely visual experience.