Content area
Full Text
"THE past isn't dead. It's not even past." So wrote William Faulkner about his native Mississippi, and living proof of the great novelist's prescience is on display at an exhibition, "Passionate Visions of the American South", which is leaving the New Orleans Museum of Art for a national tour that takes it to the University of California at Berkeley from March 2nd to July 10th and then on to Portland, San Diego, Washington, DC, and Raleigh.
On the tour are about 220 paintings and sculptures produced by southern artists since 1940. They celebrate what collectors used to call Primitive Art and now call Outsider or Vagabond Art, and they are the work of artists whose social standing, education and training leaves them outside the mainstream of the art world.
OutsiderArt owes much of its strength to its honesty and naivety. Self-taught artists are unencumbered by prior notions...