The American Folk Art Museum has launched "Self-Made: A Century of Inventing Artists," an exhibition exploring the work of self-taught creators who operated outside traditional institutional frameworks. Featuring a diverse array of drawings, paintings, and sculptures by figures such as Henry Darger, Bill Traylor, and Sister Gertrude Morgan, the show examines how these artists used their practice to construct identities and narratives in environments that often offered little formal recognition.
This exhibition is significant for its critical engagement with the term "self-taught," acknowledging it as a socially and institutionally constructed category rather than a fixed definition. By highlighting artists who created out of necessity and instinct—often within domestic spaces or sites of confinement—the museum challenges traditional notions of artistic authorship and provides a more nuanced, expansive view of American art history that resists easy categorization.