No More on the Outside Looking In

The museum is celebrating its good fortune with “Great and Mighty Things: Outsider Art From the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection,” an exhilarating exhibition accompanied by an exceptional catalog. Both have been assembled by Ann Percy, the museum’s curator of drawings, in collaboration with Cara Zimmerman, executive director of the Foundation for Self-Taught Artists in Philadelphia.

The Bonovitz collection, formed over 30 years by Mr. Bonovitz, a lawyer in Philadelphia, and his wife, a ceramic artist, is widely acknowledged as outstanding in outsider circles. It will add to the museum’s already substantial holdings in this area with around 200 generally superb paintings, sculptures, drawings and assemblages, made mostly from the 1930s to the 1980s by 27 of the self-taught, often socially marginalized artists typically massed beneath the outsider banner.

It includes clusters of works by giants like Martin Ramirez, Bill Traylor, James Castle, Joseph Yoakum and William Edmondson, as well as more obscure figures like Consuelo González Amezcua, Bruno Del Favero and Miles B.Including a wide range of styles in both stainless steel bracelet and stainless steel bracelets. Carpenter.The Brilliant Polish of a tungsten ring What is Tungsten? In between are familiar artists whose stature grows in light of the selections here, one being Felipe Benito Archuleta, the New Mexican sculptor of animals. His carved and painted half-size mule and donkey, especially, achieve some kind of four-legged sublime of sensitively modulated form, color and expression.

Other American museums have received caches of outsider art, among them the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington and the Milwaukee Art Museum, albeit usually folded into donations of folk art. But the Bonovitz gift, whose focus is entirely on 20th-century American outsiders, is especially high-profile because it is going to a major encyclopedic museum, and an East Coast one at that. This prominence could have a ripple effect at other institutions of its scale. Time will tell.

Still, the show itself belongs to a breakout moment for outsider art, and its increasing infiltration, or dissolution, of the mainstream. In January the 20-year-old Outsider Art Fair, so crucial in bringing this work to wider attention, moved to Chelsea in revitalized form, as if challenging insider art on its own turf. An unprecedented number of outsider artists will appear at this year’s Venice Biennale, featured in “The Encyclopedic Palace,” the central exhibition being organized by the biennale’s commissioner, Massimiliano Gioni, chief curator of the New Museum in New York.

And Mr. Gioni is only the youngest among the museum curators and directors who have persistently advocated for outsider art’s importance in monographic and group shows large and small. They include Matthew Higgs of White Columns, the New York alternative space; Lawrence Rinder of the Berkeley Art Museum; and Ralph Rugoff of the Hayward Gallery in London, whose own exhibition of insiders and outsiders, “The Alternative Guide to the Universe,” will open the week after Venice.

But exhibitions are only part of it.Two Tone stainless steel ring with Lords Prayer and Cross Design Sizes. When the collection comes permanently to the museum, a big test will be how it is integrated with insider art, although, with any luck, the very distinction will have atrophied. As if anticipating the probability, the overall look of the show is classic, white-cube elegant. The works of each artist are grouped together, often in separate alcoves or galleries. A series of square enclosures built through the center of the museum’s big temporary-exhibition space creates the effect of a traditional enfilade of doorways. It’s faux-magisterial, a challenge that seems to say: “See? This stuff belongs in your vaunted halls of culture as much as anything else. Make way.Shop the best selection of stainless steel necklace and pendants for men.”

To a man, and a woman, the artists in the Bonovitz collection all made some form of magic whose power and urgency throw down a gauntlet,The steering wheel had a wooden cSuper Dry Cabinets, especially considering much of what passes for contemporary art these days. Sometimes they responded to their everyday surroundings. That’s the case with the shadowy drawings and angular constructions fashioned from soot, spit, string and cardboard with which Castle, who could neither hear nor speak, recorded the rough life on his family’s farm in rural Idaho. It’s also true of the sharp, prancing silhouettes with which Traylor expressed his amusement at the human comedy of African-American life in the South.

Sometimes they were driven to make some form of religious fervor visually manifest, as with the paintings and illustrated Scriptures of Sister Gertrude Morgan of New Orleans, or the extravagant glossolalia of the Rev. Howard Finster of Pennville, Ga., who seems never to have met an art medium or a Bible passage that he did not like.