Content area
Full Text
The Colorful Apocalypse: Journeys in Outsider Art. By Greg Bottoms. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. xvi + 184, prologue, acknowledgments. $20.00 cloth.)
Outsider and visionary art is work at the margins, and scholars have been studying this product of the marginalized since the 1940s. While early studies focused on work being produced in asylums and prisons, outsider art is today widely accepted, with many venues open to the artists and their work: the American Museum of Visionary Art in Baltimore showcases the works of outsider artists; the University of Oregon offers a course in folk and visionary art. The genre has become popular even as medication becomes a common cure for visions.
The Colorful Apocalypse: Journeys in Outsider Art, by Greg Bottoms, explores the lives of three visionary artists. (The cover art of the Virgin Mary, with a skull, flames and churches, is a collaborative work by William Thomas Thompson and Norbert Kox, two of the artists interviewed.) The book is divided into an introduction, three notebooks, and an epilogue, or "acknowledgments." In each of the three notebooks, Bottoms explores the effect that a life-altering vision has had upon the life and work of one artist. The first notebook, "Visions from Paradise," focuses on Howard Finster and his legacy at Paradise Gardens. Finster, who died in 2001 before Bottoms began this book, is the...