(1907-1986) spent years filling a barn on his rural Nebraska property with delicate hanging mobiles, sculptures, and paintings. Using wire, found objects, sheet metal, and elemental compounds sourced from a local pharmacy, Blagdon believed his creations generated electromagnetic energy with immense healing properties, referring to his overarching project as a “healing machine.”

(1914-2005) was permanently blinded at the age of seven, following a series of accidents. In his later years, Bolden dedicated himself to maintaining a vegetable garden in the backyard of his family home. At the urging of a relative, Bolden also began creating scarecrows to protect his garden and its highly-valued produce. This pursuit became his passion in life, and he carefully constructed hundreds of scarecrow assemblages entirely by touch, using found materials sourced from his alleyway and from around his neighborhood.

On the eve of the Great Depression, Thornton Dial (1928 - 2016) was born into a sharecropping family in rural Alabama. During his life, Dial directly experienced the trauma and tumultuous times of the Jim Crow laws and the civil rights movement. As an artist, and  inspired by individuals like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dial created art to address and confront the blatant issues of racial oppression in the United States. His works are a powerful commentary on the world he lived in, and his visual style ranges from narrative storytelling to more allegorical works that use abstraction to poetically express his political and personal beliefs.

(1892-1987) was a self-taught Black artist born to rural farmers in North Carolina. As an adult, she worked as a gatekeeper at a public garden, which may explain the striking floral motifs displayed in many of her works. Evans claimed that she primarily found inspiration from dreams, and her fervent belief in God also played a central role in her artistic practice. In her own words, “This art that I have put out has come from the nations, I suppose, that might have been destroyed before the flood.… No one knows anything about them, but God has given it to me to bring back into the world.” She primarily used wax crayons and pencils to create her art, and Evans’s drawings tap into surrealism unconsciously. Her drawings feel free of the pitfalls of self-consciousness and self-doubt, as they were made just for her own enjoyment and use. “Something told me to draw or die,” Evans once stated, “It was shown to me what I should do.”

(1882-1961) was a self-taught British artist and self-professed psychic medium and healer. She fervently believed that a spirit guide named “Myrninerest” guided her hand and authored her drawings, which feature recurring pale-faced figures and apparitions, swirling geometric patterns, architecture, and cryptic writing. Gill’s work is included in the collections of Centre Pompidou, Paris, Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne, and Whitworth Museum, Manchester. Exhibitions include Parallel Visions at LACMA, Los Angeles (1992), Outsiders at Hayward Gallery, London (1979), Floral Fantasies at the Wilhelm Hack Museum (2019), and Brutal Beauty at Barbican, London (2021). Gill’s largest known work was recently on display in Foreigners Everywhere at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024), curated by Adriano Pedrosa.

(b. 1966)

(b. 1951, Te Aroha, NZ)

(b. 1950, Grand-Halleux, Belgium)