Louisville’s first museum & gallery dedicated to Outsider Art.
Located in the historic Portland neighborhood.
F R E E & O P E N T O T H E P U B L I C .
O N V I E W N O W :
QUILTS: Unconventional Kentucky Stitchwork brings together a group of fiber artists spanning multiple generations and geographies of Kentucky, whose practices challenge the conventions of fine art and traditional craft. These artists create from necessity, intuition, and lived experience rather than formal training. Their quilts do not follow patterns — they speak their own languages.
Rooted in Kentucky’s deep textile traditions, these works challenge what a ‘quilt’ can be. Potato chip bags, aluminum cans, and plastic packaging mingle with inherited fabric and found clothing. Hand-stitching collides with stapling, knotting, fraying, and improvised piecing. Some surfaces bulge and sag, others bristle or gleam. The familiar grid dissolves into asymmetry, storytelling, and raw abstraction.
For many of these artists, quilting is not just a hobby, but a way of processing memory, faith, hardship, and humor. Their materials are often salvaged from barns, fields, debris, family closets — carrying the imprint of work and weather. In transforming the discarded into the deliberate, they assert a powerful ethic of resourcefulness and reinvention. These quilts are both intimate and monumental, tender and defiant.
QUILTS honors Kentucky makers who stretch the language of quilting into new territories. Their works invite us to reconsider the boundaries between art and craft, utility and expression, tradition and invention. This exhibition features work by Susan Zepeda, Denise Furnish, 'Sunshine' Joe Mallard, Janet Estes, Tom Pfannerstill, Rebekka Seigel, Penny Sisto, Karen Abney, Terri Burt, and a group of UofL Fiber Arts students.
What is Outsider Art?
What is Outsider Art?
The exact definition of Outsider Art has been a matter of some controversy ever since awareness of the phenomenon began. Broadly, the term can be applied to forms of creative expression that exist outside accepted cultural norms, or the realm of “fine art.” Today, Outsider Art is often used as a short hand for Self-Taught Art, Folk Art, Visionary (or Intuitive) Art, Naive Art, and Art Brut.
The term "Outsider Art" was introduced by French artist Jean Dubuffet in 1972 and was originally intended to act as an exact English equivalent to the French term Art Brut, meaning "raw art". Raw because the work is "uncooked" or "unadulterated" by culture. It is creation in its most direct and uninhibited form. These artists are seen to exist outside established culture and society. The purest of Art Brut creators would not consider themselves artists, nor would they even feel that they were producing art at all.
Following from this, the term Outsider Art has been used increasingly loosely and can often now refer to any artist who is untrained OR with disabilities OR suffering social exclusion, whatever the nature of their work. Because not all artists working in this field are disabled or living on the fringes, this classification can come with a stigma attached. Therefore, Self-taught Art is a popular term in the United States which avoids these stigmas. Many American artists are already pushed to the outer limits of society as a result of prejudice and feel this term offers more dignity.
For more information on different aspects of Outsider Art, please click the link below. (Credit: Raw Vision).
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