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Scott’s Closet is an online presentation documenting artworks from my personal collection created by American self-taught artists. Many of the works have lived with me for almost 30 years, and as such has become part of my daily existence and vantage.

I have always collected– As a boy, I kept lockboxes full of rocks found in local creek-beds that I imagined to be dinosaur bones, crystals, and arrowheads. I then shifted my attention to old silver coins given to me by my Dad from his time working at a liquor store before I was born. In high school, I had short stints hoarding cheap religious clocks with dancing lights and holograms purchased from bodegas and piñata stores and stolen large-scale fashion ads from Express, where I worked after school.

But it was during my first year of art school at the University of Texas that the world shifted when I stumbled into a free lecture on Texas prison art. Slides of drawings by Frank Jones, Henry Ray Clark, and many others danced across a white wall while the artists’ stories and histories were discussed by a small group of art history students. These artists completely rattled me, and their visionary works felt shockingly different from anything I’d ever seen. A year later, in 1993, I ventured to the Webb Gallery in Waxahachie, TX at the suggestion of a teacher. Bruce and Julie Webb, for whatever reason, instantly took me and altered the course of my life with their loving and expansive introduction to the worlds of self-taught and Outsider art. With their help, and by trading my time working for art, a young and hyper-enthusiastic art school kid was able to acquire his first few artworks to live with.

In this same spirit, most of the works in Scott’s Closet are available for direct purchase on the gallery’s website for significantly lower prices than I would normally ask in hopes of paying it forward to a new generation of collectors. These paintings, drawings, and sculptures have engaged me daily, and each work has offered new discoveries year after year. While it is hard to conceptualize parting with many of these pieces, it will inherently lead me to populate a new home with exciting new artists and voices.


This show is dedicated to my wife and best friend, Tess Reichlen, who has allowed me to hang and rehang, and then rehang again, hundreds of artworks throughout the course of our relationship. It will never stop, so I’m thankful you’re patient. 


– Scott Ogden