James Hampton (1909–1964) was an American outsider artist. He worked as a janitor, and in his spare time, in secrecy, he built a large assemblage of religious art, made from scavenged materials: cardboard, plastic, glue, pins, tape, old furniture, jelly jars, aluminum and gold foil, shards of mirror, desk blotters held together with tacks, and…
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Augustin Lesage (1876 – 1954) was a French coal miner who later became an artist, following the direction of a voice he heard. As an artist, he was untrained and is thus considered an outsider artist or as part of the art brut movement (another term for outsider art). The French artist Jean Dubuffet coined…
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Louis Wain (1860 – 1939) was an English artist best known for his drawings of anthropomorphised cats. In his later life, Wain developed schizophrenia, which psychiatrists speculated at the time was brought on by toxoplasmosis, a parasitic infection that can be contracted from cats. He was first committed to a mental hospital in 1924. He…
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