Tucked away among the artworks at New York dealer Andrew Edlin’s booth at the Outsider Art Fair in New York right now is a small plaque honoring Sanford Smith, who founded the fair in 1993 and ran it until Edlin bought it in 2013. This is the first edition of the fair since Smith’s passing, in 2024, and as was laid out in his New York Times obituary, he was enormously influential in turning art fairs—once sleepy industry affairs—into must-attend events.
“I’m feeling a little wistful,” Edlin said. “He always came and told me how proud he was of me!”
Visitors at the Outsider Art Fair. Photo: Olya Photography.
On view through Sunday, the 33rd edition of the beloved fair hosts 66 exhibitors from nine countries. Some 18 of them are first-time exhibitors, including BravinLee Projects (from New York), Akio Nagasawa Gallery (Tokyo), Plataforma Art Base (Mexico City), and Modesti Perdriolle Gallery (Brussels).
A roster of insiders were prowling the aisles during the VIP preview on Thursday, like actors Steve Buscemi and Susan Sarandon; musician David Byrne, the Independent Art Fair’s director, Elizabeth Dee; curator super-duo Massimiliano Gioni and Cecilia Alemani; Mary-Kay Lombino, the deputy director of the Loeb Art Center at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.; dealer Gracie Mansion; Valérie Rousseau, curatorial chair for exhibitions at the American Folk Art Museum; and critics Barbara Pollack and Barry Schwabsky.
Several attendees I talked to said that the offerings are especially strong this year. Here are 11 artists whose work you shouldn’t miss.
Montrel Beverly
Sage Studio, Austin
Montrel Beverly, The Last Supper (2024). Courtesy Sage Studio, Austin.
Remixes of classic artworks in quotidian materials can be great, or they can fall flat, but I’m very into the detailed renditions of Leonardo’s Last Supper (ca. 1495–98) and other masterpieces that Montrel Beverly made out of pipe cleaners. In his 2024 rendition of the last meeting of the Prince of Peace and his apostles, which measures a couple of feet across, Judas carries a knife behind his back—and, the gallery’s Lucy Gross pointed out to me, even the sandals, hanging down below the table, are thoroughly rendered. It’s a steal at $1,800.
I also love how the gallery, tired of shipping frames, drew ornate ones directly onto the wall. Totally precious. And don’t miss Beverly’s even smaller versions of other paintings, like Jan Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (ca. 1665).
“When I tell people I’m a pipe-cleaner artist,” Beverly said, “they say, ‘That’s odd but cool.’ I want to be Time magazine’s pipe-cleaner artist of the year.”
Hervé Bohnert
Ristch-Fisch Gallery, Strasbourg
Hervé Bohnert, Untitled. Courtesy Ritsch-Frisch, Strasbourg.
Pastry chef by day, artist by night, Alsace native Hervé Bohnert carves found wood furniture and other decorative objects into truly odd artworks. He’s transformed a towering, heavily ornamental Henri II–style cabinet in Ritsch-Fisch’s booth into an array of scenes on the theme of death by simply carving some of the existing heads and bodies into skulls and skeletons. In one scene on a door, the living bow down to Death, while on another, a woman dances with Death. Death celebrates its victory over the living in the detail at the top.
It is surely the largest memento mori I have ever clapped eyes on, and it’s got an accordingly ambitious price tag of €45,000 (just shy of $47,000).
Ted Diamond
Dutton, New York
Ted Diamond, after Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (1970-1986). Courtesy Dutton, New York.
Artist Ted Diamond was tragically found in Boston Common, after committing suicide, in 1986. He had been obsessed with death. Fortunately, his one heir rushed to the psychiatric hospital, where he had long been in treatment for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, to retrieve his notebooks, which are full of watercolor and gouache works, and preserved them for three decades. Diamond studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, but never earned a degree, and his only professional contact with the art world had been when he walked into Boston art dealer Stuart Denenberg’s gallery one day in 1966. Denenberg was so impressed that he bought two of his self-portraits.
Sonia Dutton is showing many of his works for the first time—he’s only been shown once before, in California, in 2018—and they include self-portraits, portraits of his friends from the hospital, and, as here, in after Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (1970–86), abstracted treatments of human figures that are compelling far beyond their small size; this work measures just 16½ inches across. They’re marked at $2,000 to $4,000.
Justin Duerr
VanDerPlas Gallery, New York
Justin Duerr, Monolithic Cosmocrater (2024). Courtesy VanDerPlas Gallery, New York.
Justin Duerr is a man of many talents. You may have seen him in the Sundance Award-winning 2011 documentary Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles, which treats a form of Outsider art; he was a researcher on the project. Or maybe you read his 2018 book Herbert Crowley: The Temple of Silence, about that artist. He’s also been a Philadelphia squatter, a fisherman on the Bering Sea, and more.
But we’re here today to behold his ambitious pen-and-ink drawing Monolithic Cosmocrater (2024), which has so many of the things you might go to Outsider art for: obsessive, meticulous renderings of geometric shapes in vivid colors, mysterious imagery of pained faces floating in space, and cramped lettering explaining the vision behind the work: “The monolithic cosmocrater—the inescapable attraction of the point of origin with the maw of termination.” Well, obviously!
Robert Forman
BravinLee Programs, New York
Robert Forman, City Edge (2024). Courtesy BravinLee Programs, New York.
Fiber art is very much in the spotlight right now (and has been for a few years). But Hoboken, N.J.–based Robert Forman has been at it since 1969, when he was in high school and incorporated some of his mother’s embroidery thread into collages he was working on. He did study painting at New York’s Cooper Union, but Jack Whitten encouraged him to pursue his favored, unique technique, in which he paints with thread, thickly laying down various colors to create images.
At Whitten’s suggestion, he later traveled to Mexico on a Fulbright scholarship and met the Huichol people, who work in a similar manner. His densely detailed cityscapes and nature scenes truly impress. And sure, Karin Bravin said, he went to art school, but he devised the thread painting technique himself, and its obsessive quality expresses a kind of “Outsiderism.” Several works are on view, priced at $18,000 to $25,000.
Pinkie Maclure
Marion Harris, New York
Pinkie Maclure, The River (2017). Courtesy Marion Harris.
It’s true, I can’t get enough of Scottish artist Pinkie Maclure’s stained glass works—I picked them out as highlights of the 2017 edition of the fair. Fascinated with traditional stained glass programs in church windows, she uses the medium to tell stories about subjects as numerous as addiction and humankind’s destruction of nature. She’s also a singer-songwriter with 10 albums to her credit.
Her diminutive The River (2017) and Landfill Tantrum (2020) are bewitching at just $9,000 and $6,500, respectively. The River reveals a cross-section of the water’s surface, above and below, and shows several figures, one triumphantly emerging from the water, another preparing to plunge in, and, mysteriously, a snake emerging from a purse. Layers of glass, and even tiny glass beads, lend the scene delightful depth.
Bill Miller
dieFirma, New York
Bill Miller, Golden Hour (2022). Courtesy dieFirma, New York.
Linoleum might seem kitschy or even tacky today, but the gorgeous samples that Bill Miller collages together after salvaging them from dumpsters and demolition sites demonstrate that this material, which you might associated with midcentury diners and kitchens, was created to furnish affordably pretty interiors.
The son of an auto worker and the grandson of a coal miner, both of whom died on the job, Pittsburgh-based Miller is very concerned with big industry and how it affects communities, especially after it goes away. All his works on view are hugely visually satisfying, with linoleum samples made to look like embroidery here, faux marble there, and many other textures and materials, but the birch trees in Golden Hour (2022) truly pop. Small works go for as little as $3,200, big ones for as much as $35,000.
Martín Ramírez
Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia
Martín Ramírez, Untitled (Feathered Train) (c. 1953). Photo: Visko Hatfield, courtesy Fleisher/Ollman, Philadelphia.
This powerhouse gallery for Outsider Art typically gets pride of place in a booth right inside the entry, and with good reason—that way, you always enter the fair on a high note. And it’s not every day that you see a fair booth present the estate of a collector, but Fleisher/Ollman this year offers that of Audrey Heckler, a visionary supporter of the Outsider field, including an incredible roster of works by Ramírez, Bill Traylor (his painting of a pig knocked me out too), and other giants. But this massive Ramírez work, Feathered Train, stood out even among the classics, and has a locomotive emerging from a tunnel, surrounded by feather-like abstract shapes, as if a mountainous landscape were turning into a bird. Already spoken for, it was priced at about $300,000.
Della Wells and Anne-Marie Grgich with Sandy Jo Combes
Portrait Society Gallery of Contemporary Art, Milwaukee
Della Wells and Anne-Marie Grgich with Sandy Jo Combes, Remember Sister, We Sisters Are Married To Truth and Freedom, Not Married to Fear And Lies (2025). Courtesy Portrait Society Gallery of Contemporary Art, Milwaukee.
Collagist Della Wells successfully branched out into fabric art a while back, gallery owner Debra Brahmer told me, and she’s found much success. Based on the large piece Remember Sister, We Sisters Are Married to Truth and Freedom, Not Married to Fear and Lies (2025), it’s not hard to see why.
Created with fellow-artist Anne-Marie Grgich with help from seamstress Sandy Jo Combes, this iconographically rich work dominates the booth, showing larger-than-life-size figures of a Black woman horrified at being married to a rooster-human hybrid (dapper though he may be) that symbolizes right-wing political forces, all against the backdrop of the U.S. flag. All around them are the faces of civil rights champions like Angela Davis, Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman—figures who Brahmer predicts won’t even be taught in schools if our new president and his minions have their way.
Brahmer declined to discuss prices but did say the work went to the collection of John Horseman, president of the board of the St. Louis Art Museum, and his wife, Susan.
Arstanda Billy White
Shrine, New York
Arstanda Billy White, Van Gogh (2024). Courtesy Shrine.
Popular figures from Vincent van Gogh to Fat Albert, Elvis Presley, Tupac Shakur, and Master P come in for tributes from Arstanda Billy White, who paints these idols and sculpts them in ceramic. Hit by a car when quite young, he sustained injuries to his brain and to an arm, so we can count ourselves lucky he’s able to make these charming works. It all takes place at the NIAD Art Center in Richmond, Calif. (where Marlon Mullen and others also have studios). Gallery owner Scott Ogden pointed out some Basquiat-like pictorial energy in the artist’s touchingly titled gestural self-portrait That’s Me, Being Scared and Afraid (2024), and I love his Van Gogh (2024), showing the Dutchman, complete with blood flowing from the ear.
“I’m the guy who is going to draw a picture of Van Gogh,” the artist says in a, quoted in a wall label. “In the painting he’s yellow because that’s how Van Gogh wanted it, but I put him in black. I’m going to draw the whole thing, and then I’m gonna draw my dad, the Golden Glove Champion.”
White’s ceramics go for between $1,500 and $5,000, and the paintings for between $4,000 and $14,500.
Esteban Whiteside
FolkArtWork Collective, Des Moines
Esteban Whiteside, Wheel of Misfortune: Healthcare Week (2024). Courtesy FolkArtWork Collective, Des Moines.
I don’t go to the Outsider Art Fair for ripped-from-the-headlines political art, so I was humbled to find Esteban Whiteside’s commentary on the handsomest alleged murderer, Luigi Mangione, in a small, painted sculpture that takes the form of a television. Its screen bears the words “Deny, defend, depose,” the words inscribed on the bullet casings connected to the killing of United HealthCare CEO Brian Thompson in 2024, which allude to the tactics insurance companies supposedly use to avoid paying claims.
Wheel of Misfortune: Healthcare Week (2024) is accompanied by other artworks that tartly indict American capitalism. One shows a bag of money changing hands and bears the words “A bag a day keeps the gun laws away”; another, referring to prison labor, shows an eagle carrying two men in prison stripes and the words “Land of the Free Labor.” They’re priced at $2,000 to $2,500.
The Outsider Art Fair is on view at the Metropolitan Pavilion, 125 West 18th Street, New York, through Sunday, March 2.
