True visionaries need no explanation. This seems to be the main message behind “All Things Round: Galaxies, Eyeballs & Karma,” the 17th annual themed exhibition at the American Visionary Museum in Baltimore. It’s a show that’s chockablock with jaw-dropping oddities created by artists from all over the world, using all manner of unlikely materials. It’s visually dense, but light on continuity and context. Visitors should expect to be wowed and bewildered in equal measure.
In their relentless pursuit of singular weirdness, AVM director and founder Rebecca Hoffberger and co-curator Mary Ellen Vehlow have cast a wide net, pulling in artists with wildly different backgrounds and working methods. “All Things Round” includes pieces made from vacuum tubes, toothpicks, embroidered sock thread, melted plastic, paper plates, bottle caps and plastic foam cups. Objects here range in age from about 1200 years to less than 6 months old and are hung floor-to-ceiling and cheek-to-jowl against brightly colored walls. Never mind the white cube environment of most art museums: The Visionary Museum cultivates a distinctive fun-house-meets-cabinet-of-curiosities aesthetic.
(Photo by Exploratorium's Tinkering Studio) - ’Rolling Through the Bay,’ by Scott Weaver, 1974-2008, toothpicks. Collection of the artist.
(Photo by Dan Meyers) - ’Flustered Rustics,’ by J.J. Cromer, 2007, mixed media. Permanent Collection of the American Visionary Art Museum, Gift of J.J. and Mary Cromer.
One wall in the show’s first room features pencil drawings created circa World War I by seminal Swiss outsider artist (and institutionalized psychotic) Adolf Woelfli. These mesmerizing pieces are full of unconventional musical notations, masklike faces and spirals, all rendered with obsessive-compulsive care.
Another wall is crowded with abstract sculptural reliefs by Candy Cummings, a Maryland-based art school dropout who inherited the contents of her father’s electronic service company a decade ago. Since then, she’s been using those transistors, capacitors and circuit boards to assemble dozens of inexplicable retro-futuristic-looking contraptions.
Around the corner from these are tiny, roughly 2.5-by-3-inch embroidered images by Ray Materson, a self-taught artist who began stitching richly detailed miniatures out of sock thread to pass the time while serving a 15-year prison sentence. His subjects range far from his prison environment — daydreams of Katie Couric, the Mars Exploration Rover and a castle on the Crimean Peninsula.
These three artists live in completely disparate universes, and it’s hard to imagine any one theme that would tie them together. Instead, Hoffberger and Vehlow spin “All Things Round” into a series of tangential subtopics: from manifestations of the Divine Feminine, to pieces based on the Mayan calendar and circular conceptions of time, to works that reuse or recycle castoff consumer goods.
Hoffberger’s oft-stated objective is to keep the museum as “un-museum-y” as possible. In pursuing this goal, she has eschewed curatorial orthodoxies and transformed the institution itself into the main artwork on view. All of the pieces included in a show here seem to become interchangeable supporting players. The Visionary Museum is the real star.
This transformation becomes problematic when applied to art from other cultures. The section of the show about cyclical time, for example, features aboriginal funerary memorials from Australia and Huichol Indian yarn paintings from Mexico. Can such artifacts by anonymous artists, representing rich, long-standing cultural practices, really be equated with, say, whimsical paintings of outer space created by an amateur astronomer living in Maryland? Does a giant, wall-filling mandala made entirely from cut paper plates by Wendy Brackman this year help the viewer appreciate the bronze Bala Krishna statue displayed nearby?
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