Cavin-Morris Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of works by artists not working in the mainstream of art in conjunction with, and to anticipate, the 19th Outsider Art Fair. In this exhibition we pay homage to those great artists we have had the privilege to be associated with and to exhibit over the last 25 years.

Though not all the artists have yet received the critical and museum attention they so richly deserve, the importance of their work continues to grow and many continue to receive greater renown. For example, most recently Kevin Sampson has been invited to build an environment at the 2011 Venice Biennale, and the bulk of the work of Gregory Van Maanen now has a home at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, WI. Others are constantly included in group shows and new books on the field.

We have grown older and sometimes wiser with these artists; many of then opened worlds for us that we are still exploring. Bessie Harvey, whose work we first introduced to the field in 1984, became the first Cavin-Morris artist to be included in a Whitney Biennial (1994). But more importantly her work, and the insights and lessons it taught us about southern African American aesthetics and spirituality laid the groundwork by which we could recognize the greatness and importance of later artists like Kevin Sampson, Leonard Daley, Vincent and Lloyd Atherton (from Jamaica) and others. To be involved in this field is a path of its own, a journey that finds amazing links between cultures and the universality of the links between the heart, the mind and the hand.

We made a decision early on that we would not focus on secondary market representation of the old masters because what intrigued us and excited us about the field was in finding new and unique artists from all over the world. We did not want to limit our search to the United States. While we felt there was indeed an indigenous footprint on art created outside of the United States, what was fascinating to us were the universalities between diverse cultures from Hector Hyppolite’s excursions into the Haitian spirit world to Emery Blagdon’s Healing Machines.

Unfortunately, there isn’t room for all these creators in this tribute to our 25th year but we have chosen pieces by a select group of artists who we feel represent our outlook and fascinations. They include Ghanaian movie posters, Mort Golub, Keith Goodhart, Chris Hipkiss, Joseph Hofer, Pushpa Kumari, Franck Lundangi, Melvin Edward Nelson, George Peterson, Anthony Joseph Salvatore, Kevin Sampson, Christine Sefolosha, Sandra Sheehy, Jon Serl, Gregory Van Maanen, Jozef Vojtanek, Shannon Weber, Timothy Wehrle, and Anna Zemánková.