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american masters
December 3, 1999 - September 2000

Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art will present American Masters, a study collection exhibition of art by 11 major outsider artists, featuring art and artifacts ranging from a finial from Los Angeles’ Watts Towers to the typewriter used to create Henry Darger’s 15,000-page fantasia. The exhibit opens on December 3, 1999, and will run through September 2000, at Intuit, 756 N. Milwaukee Avenue, Chicago. The exhibit is free and open to the public from noon to 5 p.m., Wednesday through Saturday.

The American Masters exhibit is part of Intuit’s ongoing mission to introduce the public to the wonder and excitement of intuitive and outsider art. Included in the exhibit are well-known names like Howard Finster and Sister Gertrude Morgan, artists who use the Christian religion as a vehicle for their spiritual and sometimes apocalyptic visions. There are also practitioners who work with fantastic architectonic forms, such as A.G. Rizzoli, who constructed them on paper, and Simon Rodia, who actually built them.

Then there are those who are really beyond classification. Individuals like Bill Traylor, who drew imaginary figures of people and animals with such mythic power, that they seem to possess a life of their own, despite their childlike rendering. Or Henry Darger, who created an illustrated literary saga of epic proportions depicting an alternative world populated by heroic children, demonic sadists, and benevolent, fairy-winged dragons. Or Martin Ramirez, whose labyrinths and tunnels and compartments set the stage for a lyrically obsessed tableaux of his own mysterious making. The exhibit also features work by William Hawkins, Joseph Yoakum, Drossos P. Skyllas, and Eugene von Bruenchenhein.

Whatever their similarities or differences, all of the artists in the exhibit—be they intuitives, visionaries, or the mentally different—had one thing in common: the unyielding need to probe their own psyches for subject matter and use their unique inner resources to produce works of astounding originality and beauty.