Final Project (M.A.)--John F. Kennedy University, 2005. / "August 29, 2005"--T.p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 93-97).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Delaware, 2009. / Principal faculty advisor: Bernard L. Herman, Dept. of Art History. Includes bibliographical references.

It was both by luck and by accident that Dirk Charley van der Mescht's creations were discovered as a topic for research ... a recluse who lived out in what seemed to be the middle of nowhere. It was said of this man that he was a strange person who produced even stranger works. On investigation it was discovered that he was an Outsider sculptor by the name of D. C. van der Mescht. He and his family live at a small railway siding, known as Zuney, eighteen kilometres west of Alexandria. Isolated, uneducated and untutored, he had created an environment of sculptures for no apparent reason at all. The only explanation he appeared to be able to offer is that: he just does it. Intro. p. 1.

No description available.

This paper demonstrates the overall success of bringing non-traditional audiences to a New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) exhibition, "Passionate Visions of the American South: Self-Taught Artists from 1940 to the Present." It also highlights the success of some of its public programs. However, the process of attracting these audiences to the museum falls short in its attempts at developing long-term relationships with NOMA. The first chapter provides historical background on NOMA and offers an overview of the "Passionate Visions" project. Chapter Two describes, in relative detail, the project's community outreach component and implementation of its public programs. It closes with an analysis of short range and long term impacts. The final chapter further analyzes the project experience, inclusive of the management style of the project director, issues surrounding conflict of interest and ethics, and the degree of NOMA's commitment, or lack thereof, to long-term non-traditional audience inclusiveness.

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts (History of Art) by coursework and research report March 2017 / In the 1960s and 1970s, farm worker Nukain Mabuza created a painted hillside rock garden on a farm between Barberton and Kaapmuiden, Mpumalanga, South Africa. He transformed his dwellings, and rearranged and painted the surrounding rocks according to a unified scheme of geometric and animal motifs with a carefully selected colour palette. This altered environment went far further aesthetically, and lasted far longer in time, than the signs and scars that might typically result from a farm worker’s dwelling upon the land. His work arguably bears some of the hallmarks of an inhabited ‘total work of art’. I challenge the dominant ‘outsider art’ explanatory framework adopted by JFC Clarke and re-evaluate the fragmentary archive of Mabuza’s life and work. Working from the likelihood that no single context will offer sufficient grounds for situating Nukain Mabuza’s particular creative practice, I assess the relevance of cultural, historical and religious contexts, which might have shaped Nukain Mabuza’s personal vision and contributed to the form of his expressive environment. Nukain Mabuza’s altered landscape has suffered considerable damage – there is no longer any trace of the two dwellings and the stile, and the paintings on the rocks have all but disappeared. My project seeks to contribute to the scholarship on Nukain Mabuza’s work by extending, analysing, interpreting and situating his inhabited painted environment within the worldview of southern African Bantu-speakers, as a unique personal creative expression, and as an expression of the artist’s modernity. / MT2018

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Wollongong, 2008. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references: leaf 267-300.

<p>Although interest in the work of untrained artists has surged recently, appearing everywhere from the Venice Biennale to The New Yorker, the art world’s fascination with American autodidacts began nearly a century ago. My dissertation examines how and why American artists without formal training first crashed the gates of major museums and galleries between 1927 and 1940 through case studies on the most celebrated figures of the period: John Kane (1860–1934), Horace Pippin (1888–1946), and Anna Mary Robertson "Grandma" Moses (1860–1961). All three painters were exhibited as “modern primitives,” a category that emerged in the wake of the French naïve Henri Rousseau (1844–1910) but which took on a distinct character in the United States where it became a space for negotiating renewed debates about authenticity in American art as well as pervasive social anxieties over how immigration, race, and industrialization were changing the country. In addition to establishing how the “modern primitive" fit into the pluralistic landscape of American modernism, my dissertation reaches into the present, exploring how the interwar breakthroughs of Kane, Pippin, and Moses prefigured the ubiquity of self-taught artists—often referred to as “outsider” artists—in American museums today.</p> / Dissertation

This D.Phil constitutes an investigation led by studio practice and supported by archival and desk-based research into knowledge production through the building of complex cosmologies; specifically those created de novo in visual art practice and 'outsider science' oeuvres. It considers how these cosmologies relate to mainstream science, definitions of outsider art, and other complex cultural systems such as alchemy. Through a more detailed analysis of the work of the British artist John Latham and American outsider cosmologist James Carter, the thesis undertakes this investigation through discussions on the development of these systems and a consideration of the epistemologies these cosmologies reveal. The studio practice elements drive this investigation forward by interrogating themes including the relationship between culture and complex systems, alchemical epistemology, and the struggle to relate to unintuitive science.

« Quel est le point commun entre un fou, un poète, un artiste, un curé, une personne handicapée mentale et un facteur? L'Art Brut bien sûr». L’Art Brut (les anglophones préfèrent la notion d' Outsider Art) et sa déclinaison actuelle, l'Art Singulier apparaissent comme un sujet qui dépasse largement le cadre artistique et l'invention de Jean Dubuffet en 1945, pour s'étendre au domaine de la psychologie et de la sociologie, en « touchant » la société toute entière. Ce phénomène social et artistique, dans sa diversité, ses manifestations et ses paradoxes, interroge tout autant la sociologie, que l'histoire de l'art. Le regain d'intérêt actuel pour cette forme d'expression singulière, liée à une morale et à une certaine vision del'existence, nous interroge sur des questions essentielles de la vie sociale. A partir d'une enquête et d'entretiens avec des artistes contemporains, nous avons voulu interroger la filiation, artistique et sociologique, entre les pionniers del'Art Brut et les créateurs, qui se réclament aujourd'hui de l'Art Singulier; comprendre le sens de la multiplication des expositions et des manifestations qui sont consacrées à une forme artistique qui semble aujourd'hui cristalliser unecontestation de l'art contemporain officiel et un engagement social spécifique des artistes, dans leur mode de vie et leur rapport au travail. A travers l'étude des thèmes et de l'esthétique particulière à cet« art populaire contemporain», nous avons aussi voulu comprendre quelle vision du monde voulaient nous faire partager ces artistes atypiques et en quoi leurs œuvres étaient révélatrices d'une morale, mais aussi constitutives d'un courant et d'un style. / "What do a lunatic, a poet, an artist, a priest, a mentally retarded person and a postman have in common? "Outsider Art, of course" Outsider art (as it is referred to by English speakers) and its current approach Known as Singular Art (Art Singulier) appear like a subject that goes way beyond the artistic scope and the invention by Jean Dubuffet in 1945, to extend to the field of psychology and sociology, thus encompassing "society at large». This artistic and social phenomenon, through its diversity, its various expressions and paradoxes, raises questions in sociology as well as in the history of Art. The current renewed interest for that furur of uncommon artistic expression, linked to ethics and a certain vision of existence, makes us ponder over the essential issues of social life. Through a survey and several interviews with contemporary artists, we have sociological relation between the pioneers of " Art Brut " and today's artists who claim to belong to " Art Singulier"; we have also tried to understand the meaning of the many exhibitions as well as multifarious .events dedicated to a forum of Art which seems, today, to embody a certain anti-official contemporary trend as well as a specific social commitment from the artists, in their way of life as well as in the relation they have with their own work. By studying the themes and aesthetics of that "contemporary popular art" we have endeavoured to understand what vision of world those atypical artists wanted to share with us and to what extent their works revealed an ethnics and also actually built up an artistic movement and a style.