PARIS.- The Museum of Everything is the world’s only travelling museum for undiscovered, unintentional and untrained artists of the 19th, 20th and 21st Centuries, with over 350,000 visitors since its creation in 2009.
The Museum of Everything works with leading international artists, curtors and thinkers, receives substantial media attention and has created a successful series of books, films and its own award-winning retail brand.
In October 2012, The Museum of Everything presents Exhibition #1.1 in Paris at Chalet Society, the radical new art project helmed by Marc-Olivier Wahler, former Director and Chief Curator of Palais de Tokyo.
For this inaugural French exposition, The Museum of Everything curated an ex Catholic school in St Germain with five hundred artworks by contemporary and historic self-taught, visionary and non-traditional artists and reveals their private drawings, signs and carvings, handmade books, discovered bodies of work and environmental installations.
Highlights include the only surviving series of sequential works by Chicago janitor Henry Darger, the towering mediumistic spirit scrolls of Chinese factory worker Guo Fengyi, the faith mission art of New Orleans lay-preacher Sister Gertude Morgan and the paranoid tramways and ideograms of Dutch self-appointed naïve Willem van Genk.
This journey through the alternative history of art embraces creators who function without art education, theory or society. For them, as for The Museum of Everything, the act of creation and the impulse to make are more important than schools, galleries or institutions.
To illustrate this belief, Exhibition #1.1 incorporates essays by leading artists, curators, writers and thinkers, including David Byrne, Ed Ruscha, Marlene Dumas, Carsten Höller, Maurizio Cattelan, Nick Cave, Annette Messager, John Baldessari, Paula Rego and Christian Boltanski.
For these artists there are no studios, no press junkets, no art fairs, no magazine spreads. Instead there are treasure troves of untrained work, discovered under rocks, in basements and attics, its creators often unaware their art would ever see the light of day.
SELECTED ARTISTS
• Emery Blagdon (1906-1986)
Nebraskan farmer who filled his homestead with healing machines constructed from recycled wire, wood and waste to cure visitors of all ills.
• Henry Darger (1892-1973)
American hermit and janitor whose panoramic illustrations of a children’s fairytale fictionalised his own disturbed and troubled childhood.
• Charles Dellschau (1830-1923)
Local butcher and aeronautical enthusiast whose thirteen books of impossible flying machines were created after a chance UFO sighting.
• Madge Gill (1884-1961)
Hackney resident and mediumistic artist whose drawings and tapestries found under her bed revealed her powerful spirit guide, Myrninerest.
• Morris Hirschfield (1872-1946)
East Coast slipper manufacturer who turned to painting in his seventies’ and was subsequently honoured with a one-man show at MoMA.
• Alexandre Lobanov (1924-2003)
Deaf and mute Russian outcast whose secret drawings and photographs depict him as a powerful marksman, hunter and hero of the revolution.
• Martin Ramirez (1895-1963)
Renowned Mexican institutionalised artist whose iconic drawings and collages reflect the conflict of the modern world on daily life and travel.
• Bill Traylor (1854-1947)
Freed slave and shoe worker whose sidewalk drawings depicted animals, people and scenes from the world he saw unfolding in the streets around him.
• George Widener (b 1962)
Southern artist with exceptional memory and mathematical skills, whose inner world is revealed in beguiling diagrams on discarded paper napkins.
