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September Issue 2007
Fresh Air, Fresh Art at TRAM Fair in Travelers Rest, SC
By Judith Ziemer
Just as nature begins to paint its routinely anticipated, but always fresh display of color and drama outside, "outsider" artists from all over the southeast will be bringing their own fresh, colorful and surprising displays to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains for the 2nd annual TRAM Fair on Oct. 6, 2007. In Travelers Rest, SC, they'll join local artists - painters, sculptors, fiber artists, and musicians - from 10am-6pm at Gateway Park, 115 Henderson Drive, (behind Sundrift Adventures), for a celebration unlike any other festival in South Carolina.
It's a family (and pet) friendly festival with live music, food, children's activities, poetry, storytelling and some of the most unique handmade art on the planet created by folk and outsider artists.
While the Fair is staged under the sky, the term "outsider" artist has nothing to do with being outdoors. Instead, it differentiates these artists, most of whom have taught themselves to make art, from those with formal art education working within the canon and hierarchy of the institutional art world of galleries, museums, and art schools.
Outsider art goes by many labels: naïve, folk, intuitive, innocent, and visionary. Its creators are equally varied: street people; eccentrics; housewives; day laborers; mystics; psychotics; men and women of every color and class.
The art is honest and direct. There is no common esthetic, but, typically, the work seems to spring directly from the soul of its creators compelled by some irrepressible urge to manifest their inner world, the common American experience, a religious ecstasy, sexual fantasies, or visions of the hereafter. Last thought of, if at all, are market demands. Many may not even regard what they make as "art," let alone part of an art tradition or movement.
Despite their obliviousness to the conventions of art, the art establishment is not oblivious to the power and charm of outsider art. More than 50 museums vie for the best folk and outsider art America has to offer according to Ginger Young, whose gallery features folk and self-taught artists of the South. In 2002, New York opened the American Folk Art Museum and has feted outsider and folk art at an annual fair for fifteen years. Baltimore boasts the American Visionary Art Museum and Atlanta's Folk Fest draws more than 10,000 collectors, dealers, and artists every August.
Traveler's Rest Art Mission joined this august group last year in providing an audience for outsider and folk art at the only outsider art fair in South Carolina. More than 35 artists, committed to the spirit of outsider art, exhibited including some of Greenville's finest, many of whom will return this year.
Artists showing at the 2007 fair include: Dianne Anastos; Julie Masaoka, a shrine artist; Texas painter, James Anderson who favors religious themes; Barbara Green, a jeweler from Marietta, and Leslie Hart, whose articles of desire are up-cycled and revamped from materials found at 2nd hand stores and yard sales.
Bobbie Holt from Conway, SC, paints with vibrant colors and an energetic style. Karen Lucci, bead artist and painter of contemporary bible paintings returns along with Ramona Hotel, an artist with roots in Kentucky and a home in North Carolina who makes witty and wearable bottle cap art. Deb Bridges will bring her ethereal raku pottery. Featured artist, Susan Sorrell, whose beaded and embroidered 3-D fabric painting will be the poster for TRAM Fair 2007, bills herself as a genuine Southern fried folk artist.
These and many more artists will make TRAM
Fair 2007 an extraordinary art experience not to be found
in conventional venues. For directions, call Travelers Rest Art
Mission at 864/834-2388 or log on to (www.trartsmission.org) for
further information.
Carolina Arts is published monthly by Shoestring Publishing
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Copyright© 2007 by PSMG, Inc., which published Charleston
Arts from July 1987 - Dec. 1994 and South Carolina Arts
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