Visionary Art in Baltimore
What is art? A dictionary definition may suggest it’s a method or result of arranging elements in a deliberate manner that will be appealing to the senses or emotions. This includes such works as film and literature, music, sculpture, and paintings. A whole philosophical branch is devoted to it: aesthetics. Over the centuries, people have striven for an explanation of what art is and what it does, and many forms and schools of art have been formerly taught. There’s also a branch of art, though, that falls outside of these various schools known as folk art, where the artist is largely unschooled, but gathers his or her training from a community tradition, handed down from generation to generation. But there’s an even more personal art form, outside of traditional custom or training, known as Visionary art, and it’s this type of art that’s celebrated at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland.
Visionary art is art that’s made by self-taught individuals, without formal training, and whose work comes out of an inner personal vision; in this sense, a pure exploration of the creative act itself. The Visionary Art Museum has dedicated itself to those artists who don’t listen to any other tradition but the one inside their own brain. Perhaps one of the more interesting things about visionary art, considering that it’s so personal and individual-centered, is that the most common theme of the art is that of the Garden of Eden and similar visions of utopia.
If you’re making a trip to Baltimore and plan to stay overnight , you should take a trip to this unusual art museum, which contains over four thousand pieces in the collection, rotating the best works in their Permanent Collection Gallery. Fifty works will be on exhibit at any one time in the permanent collection. It includes work by visionary artists such as Ho Baren, Vollis Simpson, Ben Wilson, as well as forty works from the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre of London .
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March 30th, 2010 at 10:50 am
I’m with Visit Baltimore and we did a video with Rebecca Hoffberger, founder and director of the American Visionary Art Museum. In the video she tells us about some of the artists that have their work in the museum, and she also shows us some of the art. Check it out at http://www.visitmybaltimore.com/members/show/2/70833