Since I just got back from Baltimore, I have to plug my favorite little museum ever, the American Visionary Art Museum. This little folk-art museum features artists who are self-taught and have outsider perspectives; oftentimes the artists are institutionalized or suffer other various societal obstacles (the first time I visited, the ratio of artists to psychiatric disorders seemed to be 80% schizophrenia, 20% PTSD). Every time I go there, they have fantastic collections and new perspectives – I can get fatigued with museums, even contemporary galleries, but I am always impressed with what they have at AVAM.
The art can range from the very rudimentary (rough crayon drawings on butcher paper) to the elaborate (huge triptychs made entirely of matchsticks). They can range from silly (giant poodles and quilts proudly displaying bad puns) to depressing and downright sad. My favorite piece in their permanent collection is this beautifully eloquent sculpture of an emaciated figure, carved from a single boll of applewood. The artist was a nameless British tuberculosis patient who had never previously sculpted anything in his life. He had been inspired by a fallen applewood tree on the institution premises, and created his first and only work shortly before his death.
Right now they have a great exhibit called “The Marriage of Art, Science and Philosophy,” featuring a number of installations with moving parts, lights and sound – what can I say, I am a sucker for multidimensional art. But the most astonishing feature is an artist whose chosen medium is pencils – and by that I do not mean he does pencil drawings. The artist actually sculpts the graphite part of the pencil into various objects, using nothing more than a razor blade. There is a pencil topped with a very tiny and flawlessly sculpted bust of Elvis, a series in which he sculpts the entire alphabet on top of twenty-six pencils, and a pair of pencils connected at the tops through a tiny graphite chain of links. Even though he apparently did not use a magnifying glass to sculpt them (!), you have to use a magnifying glass to appreciate the sheer mind-boggling amount of refinement it takes to do these. These sculptures can take him years to make, and if any mistakes are made in the process they go to the “Cemetary,” which we viewed (I honestly couldn’t spot most of these errorswithout the magnifying glass). No, his bio didn’t list any specified mental disorder, like some of the other artists, but I’m surprised he wasn’t featured in the room labeled “Obsessive Compulsive.”
If you are in the area, go see these – and other marvelous works of folk art – at the AVAM, just off the Inner Harbor!
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Funny, I was just speaking about how much I love the applewood piece.
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