by Jana Astanov
Featured image: AFFSOONGAR Sayeh (Shadow), oil, pastel on cardboard, 2025.
The Outsider Art Fair returns moving outside the academic, the institutional, and the market-driven logic of contemporary art. The fair gathers practices that emerge from necessity rather than positioning. These are works shaped by inner worlds, psychic urgency, devotion, and survival.
Outsider art resists easy categorization. It often exists beyond formal training, yet carries its own systems of knowledge. What appears raw is often precise. What seems naive is, at times, cosmological.
Intuitive Architectures
At Van der Plas Gallery, the work of Anne Grgich unfolds through layered portraiture that centers human expression. A Seattle-based, self-taught artist, Grgich works across drawing, painting, collage, and textile, often building her compositions over found texts and images that remain visible beneath the surface. Her work creates a sense of accumulated time, where faces and figures emerge from fragments of language and memory. Repetition functions as a stabilizing rhythm, allowing each piece to develop as a kind of interior mapping, constructed patiently and with a quiet, ritual-like attention.
Della Wells, presented by Portrait Society Gallery of Contemporary Art, constructs a deeply personal mythology rooted in memory and storytelling. Beginning her artistic practice at the age of forty-two, Wells draws from narratives shaped in childhood, where imagination became both refuge and method. Her works unfold within Mamboland, an imagined realm where Black women hold authority, resilience, and spiritual continuity. Through collage, drawing, and collaborative textile, she builds layered compositions that carry ancestral presence while quietly embedding symbols of the civil rights struggle. The figures that populate her work do not simply endure. They reframe history, asserting dignity and authorship over their own image.
A recent textile collaboration between Wells and Anne Grgich, titled Them! Us!, shown at Portrait Society Gallery, extends this vision into a shared material language. The work reimagines the American flag as a layered assemblage of fabric, stitching, and found objects, where personal and collective identities intersect. Rather than a fixed symbol of nationhood, it becomes a site of memory and negotiation. In this piece, “them” and “us” collapse into one another, suggesting that belonging is neither stable nor singular, but continuously constructed. The collaboration bridges Wells’ narrative world-building with Grgich’s intuitive patterning, resulting in a work that feels both intimate and political, grounded in lived experience yet open to collective interpretation.
Them! Us! by Della Wells and Anne Grgich
In contrast, Anne Brown at Art Sales and Research brings a quieter, more distilled visual language, where simplicity becomes a container for emotional depth. Working with organic and found materials, she transforms elements such as bones, driftwood, and natural remnants into sculptural assemblages that carry a raw, totemic presence rooted in the tension between beauty and strangeness.
Elza Kayal Gallery presents expressive, often surreal paintings by Hungarian artist Klára R. Lakatos. Her works bring human and animal forms together within personal mythologies shaped by Romani heritage, exploring vulnerability, interdependence, and opposing forces, with a Chagall-like lineage of floating figures and dreamlike scenes.
Eileen Weitzman, also shown with Elza Kayal Gallery, creates soft sculptures and thickly textured paintings that combine bold color and pattern with strong figurative and abstract forms. Her works assert a vivid presence, balancing humor with subtle social commentary while remaining visually direct and engaging.
Spirit and Survival
At Pulp Holyoke Gallery, Affsoongar creates layered works in oil and pastel rooted in Iranian cultural memory, where figuration dissolves into shadow and gesture. Her compositions center on the naked female body within raw natural settings, where vulnerability and strength coexist, evoking a reimagined Eve without the fig leaf. Through this bold, seductive figure, she reclaims a vision of womanhood rooted in empowerment and resistance, beyond imposed cultural and religious constraints.
June Gutman, shown with Kishka Gallery, is a Montreal-based, self-taught artist whose prolific practice centers on what she calls “The Terror,” a psychological state oscillating between nightmare and altered perception, rendered through works that are both unsettling and darkly humorous.
Angela Rogers, shown with Fountain House Gallery, creates figurative sculptures by wrapping sticks with yarn and layering materials such as fabric, wire, and beads, forming tactile, expressive bodies that feel both fragile and resilient, as if channeling her own spirit guides.
Solange Singer, shown with Fountain House Gallery, draws on Haitian cultural memory, with vibrancy and devotion to the feminine spirit.
At Pure Vision Arts, Simone Johnson presents bold colored pencil drawings of New York “bodega cats,” depicted as hedonistic queens lounging among technicolor shelves of everyday goods.
Aleksandra Duprez, shown with Pulp Holyoke Gallery, creates works where silhouetted human forms merge with symbolic elements, evoking a spiritual force within the unconscious.
Beyond Outsider
The term “outsider” itself remains unstable. It suggests a boundary, yet the works presented here dissolve it. What is revealed instead is a spectrum of artistic production that refuses hierarchy.
There is something grounding in encountering art that is not trying to belong. It does not perform for validation. It does not anticipate critique. It simply exists, often with an intensity that feels rare.
In this sense, the Outsider Art Fair is not outside at all. It may be closer to the origin point, where art is still a necessity, a language, and a way of staying in relation to the world.
About the author:
Jana Astanov is a Polish-born interdisciplinary artist and writer based in the United States, originally from the Masurian Lake District. Her practice spans performance, photography, and installation, with a focus on ritual, embodiment, and symbolic systems. She is the author of six poetry collections: Antidivine, Northern Grimoire, Sublunar, The Pillow Book of Burg, Birds of Equinox.and Avant-Garden. She is the co-founder and editor of CREATRIX Magazine. Follow her on IG @Jana_Astanov
