Quirky Museums and Outsider Art

Museums Are Treasure Hunts

Museums can be like treasure hunts. World-famous museums are filled with so many famous treasures, it can be overwhelming to find the particular ones that speak to you, personally. In contrast, many quirky little museums just pop up when you're traveling through places, and they invite you in. You enter because you're curious, expecting nothing in particular.

I love visiting museums. I can get lost in them for days at a time. I'm particularly fond of art museums, natural history, anthropology, and the planetarium. I've been kicked out the Met (my favorite) often at closing (once hiding for the fun of it). But ot's a special treat to visit smaller museums housing personal collections in former resident mansions, like New York's Frick or Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner. Based upon the idiosyncratic tastes of their owners (not museum or investment committees), these collections are both more focused and eclectic than those of larger museums. The setting and architecture of the Gardner, especially, adds intimacy and delight to her diverse personal collection of masterworks (now amplified with additional works and building space). The relative informality of strolling as a guest through the Gardner also makes it an easy target for art theft: an unsolved big one occurring in 1990 remains unsolved and offers millions in reward for information leading to its recovery.

courtyard of Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Not everyone likes museums. I know some folk who dislike the confines of museums, regard them as mausoleums, and would rather see even historically treasured art in less formal settings. But it takes a lot of space and great design to fashion an informal, approachable setting for a large amount of treasure. Only a fraction of the Vatican's huge art collection is displayed, while thousands of valuable works are stored away. Frankly, I'd rather get to see what I can, even if some museum settings are less inviting than others.

Quirky Museums and Outsider Art

 I enjoy the surprises of discovering odd little specialty museums that you stumble upon during road trips. No one outside the local area may even know about them. Often their collections reflect curiosities of their geo-cultural location, like maritime museums pm Canada's Pacific coastt, and a museum of local cacti in Arizona, railroads in Pennsylvania, or alien UFO sightings in New Mexico. Most places with any history at all have some version of a museum. Creating and leaving an intentional visible record seems a human thing to do. And seeing quirky museums and outsider art is a fun thing to do

Moody Museum in Dover, Ohio

Mooney's workshop with arrowhead s designed by wife

Frieda with her mounted button collection

A good example is a family-maintained museum in Dover, Ohio (Amish country) dedicated to the work of knife-maker and carver, Mooney Warther (b.1885) (his workshop shown above) and to the button-collection designs of his wife, Frieda. Mooney's knives are still produced and beautifully functional. His train replicas are incredible with their intricately carved ebony, ivory, and walnut wood housing thousands of exactly designed moving parts (watch them in motion at https://www.youtube.m/watch?v=KYYFNff5e20).  

I especially like museums that pop up unexpectedly in places you don't expect them. They can be filled with all sorts of curiosities. A column I posted on dolls and uncanny art, was inspired by a visit to a Pollock's Toy Museum in London, England. It's really more of a dusty curiosity shop than a museum. But quirky museums can be grand, too, like the Museum of Naif Art in Nice, France. In contrast to the Frick or Gardner, these two very different "museums" are linked by their focus on objects and art created outside the conventionally recognized borders that historically have defined "fine art".

This distinction of art that is not fine art has itself become a category that many people enjoy. Terms like folk art, outsider art, deviant art, and graffiti refer to to art that's always existed outside and apart from established art academies and museums. They refer to art typically done by people without formal training or payment. Some, like Henry Darger (whose story I'll mention later), even keep their art secret. So why do they do it? For love, dedication, belief, obsession, desire, reverence, wish-fulfillment, and on. Why did the cave-painters paint? Surely not so that tourists millenia hence could visit their caves.

Pollock's Toy Museum in London, England

I've mentioned this place in my "Uncanny Doll" post. I happened upon it during my last visit to London in early BC (before Covid). Somewhere in the whirlwind of days spent visiting that town's justly revered art museums, I swooped into a small, dusty, dimly lit brick dwelling in Bloomsbury called a toy museum. Downstairs was a crowded shop of toys; upstairs (for a fee) was the toy museum.

Pollock's Toy Museum

Toys accompany you as you trudge up a narrow set of stairs. You see dolls and puppets in different states of composure and decomposition, toy soldiers, a teddy bear (from1905 touted to be the world's oldest with tufts of fur long gone, and a disarray of doll houses. In fact, being in this museum felt a bit like being inside an old dollhouse: crooked walls, uneven ceilings, creaking stairs. There were very few mechanical toys, a disappointment for me. Still, the floors and displays were packed. (Please forgive my poor photos: the best I could do under the lighting and glass-reflective conditions.)

One room was full of antique dolls,, some in strollers, some having tiny tea, some sitting on the floor, others still housed in worn boxes. Displays continued with painted cloth dolls, some of which I rather liked for their naive but weathered, faces. The sense of overcrowding made me wish for some sort of birth-control for dolls. A bit sad to see the dust collecting inside. But where's an old doll to live these days?

The assortment of toys provided a mini social history of sorts. Colonial-time dolls, dolls with black and asian faces, dolls with OXO tins beside them, those in Falkland War and other uniforms, many tin toy soldiers, in miniature fox hunts, and so on. I suppose part of the charm of this place for me was accepting the disorder, the jumble of different objects placed together in somebody's version of history.

wooden and paper dolls with movable limbs (note backward hands of doll on right)

 Even if not always endearing or cuddly, there was an awkward directness about some of these cloth dolls that appealed to me. Here's how inspiration can strike. Even a poor photo of vintage Kewpie dolls taken at Pollock's was enough to get me going on a quirky painting, Kewpie Family at Home .

vintage Kewpie dolls, Pollock Toy Museum

Kewpie Family at Home, painting by Janet Strayer

A beautiful mansion in a a beautiful setting beside the French, Riviera presents our next view of outsider art

Musée International d'Art Naïf in Nice, France

exterior of the museum and sculptures by Frederic Lanovky ( also seen outside, left)

Anatole Jakovsky left the pubic a beautifully situated house and international art collection including sculpture, fiber-art, paintings and works on paper, all of which celebrate creative works done outside established artistic channels. You can find work by Rousseau (probably the most famous "naive" artist who made it big time), but far more works are by artists who never set foot inside a museum. Much anonymous work is displayed, as well as work signed by artists living in psychiatric institutions and other less frequented sources for art.

portait of A, Jakovsky by Jacqueline Benoit and "Elijah, the Angel" , anonymous

Street Art

Even transient populations create transitory museums that commemorate their culture. This occurs in the form of wall and sidewalk graffiti and street-vendor art that travels from corner to corner. Where best to find such art changes locations. I heard that a mecca for graffiti was Bushwick, Brooklyn. But you can probably walk into most urban alleyways and find some derelict graffiti. It's become such an attraction (especially after Banksy) that cities have discovered the value of street art and decided to "legalize" it in the form of encouraging outsider artists to paint murals on given public spaces ... the gentrification of what was once rebel art. Street artists move around, and can pop up everywhere. Their artwork is often a highlight of my travels (see post on Mexico).

derelict graffiti

An Unusual Case History in Outsider Art

Henry Darger become famous after his death. I first came across his drawings decades ago at the American Museum of Folk Art in New York. The reclusive Darger in his lifetime worked as a janitor in Chicago and produced thousands of pages of artwork and narrative text, all done secretly in solitude. His work was discovered accidentally in 1973 by the tenant who'd moved into his room after Darger's relocation to an old-age home (where he died six months later). The photo below presents the crammed room where he lived and created fantasy worlds in art.

Darger's home, photo by Keizo Kitajima and Yukiko Koide Presents, Tokyo.1999

Darger had little formal education or art training. He used tracings from children's coloring books, comic strips, and ads as the basis for his massive series of pencil-drawn, water-color depictions of a personal world filled with diverse children and hand-written stories focused on their need for protection. Darger’s final and most studied work is called: The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. Whole dissertations have been written about humble Henry Darger.

It was fascinating to see the scope of his work, his evolving, self-taught artistic skill over time and dedication (or obsession), the insistence and coherence of his fantastical narrative themes. Although Darger's works garner a small fortune now and are in collections of the MOMA, Art Institute of Chicago, and the Smithsonian, I somehow doubt this outsider would feel pleased by our attention Reclusive and wounded in his personal history, I think his enormous and complex creativity sought to assuage old wounds, be heroic in his own story, remediate the world in his mins, and to find solace.

artwork by Henry Darger

Do Art Your Way as Artist or as Art-Appreciator

Do art means both making it and looking at or appreciating it. Nowadays, some of the traditional divisions between insider-outsider and fine-folk may be blurring. The commercial world can make fortunes from both. But the lesson for artists and participant audience is that any art is valuable when is driven by or appreciated by internal imperatives. Artwork doesn't have to be positive or negative, pretty, conventional, or horrifically original. It just has to convey something that does something or means something valued by the artist and art-appreciator.

With millions of internet postings, there's an overwhelming amount of material to look at, from deviant to traditional. It takes an attitude of openness and some patient discernment to search and find what most engages your own feelings and experiences, what excites you or invites you to look further and to experience more fully all that creative life offers. It isn't about number of 'like' clicks or commercial value. It's about you, what you care about, how you are and want to be.

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