Review by Choice Review
Wehnert presents 11 Texas outsider artists and their art, looking at them through the lens of art brut and focusing on their creative work as the product of social and cultural isolation. Wehnert frames the discussion with an introduction on the origins of art brut and its successors, casting his organizing interpretive theme of isolation in terms of the artists' disenfranchisement, alienation, self-taught abilities, and absence of connection to the art world. The illustrated artist biographies and commentaries on individual works that follow, however, tend to undercut isolation as a defining characteristic. True, the artists represented may have operated outside the structures of mainstream art institutions but, as Wehnert makes clear, they were nonetheless in creative conversation with the worlds they inhabited. In his well-wrought essays on the artists, Wehnert reveals complicity with a larger art world in the reception of the art in question around formulaic discovery narratives, a connoisseurship of dysfunction, the problem of canon formation in the outsider arts, and ultimately the construction of the myth of "deep isolation." A book for readers, collectors, and curators with knowledge of the genre. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty, general readers.--Bernard L. Herman, University of North Carolina
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
