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Why James Brett Wants to Retire the Term “Outsider Art”

The founder of London’s Gallery of Everything has spent decades championing makers who worked far from academies and institutions, from painter Sam Doyle to Czech visionary Anna Zemánková. Research comes first, he says, and the market follows.

One of the biggest shifts in the art world over the past two decades has been the gradual embrace of alternative perspectives, whether geographic, demographic or stylistic. What was long presented as the official, if restrictive, course of art history has expanded, and there has been a broader reconsideration of the very definition of art. That shift arguably reached a tipping point at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013 with Massimiliano Gioni’s “The Encyclopedic Palace,” where work by contemporary artists appeared alongside historical artifacts, found objects and works by self-taught, visionary and otherwise non-academic makers.

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But he was not alone in his quest to reevaluate and expand the canon. That and other reassessments have opened the door to practices that developed outside academic or institutional systems and that engage, sometimes with mysticism, spirituality and archetypal forms of the human subconscious. What might first have looked like a curatorial trend has proved far more persistent. Across museums, biennials and the market, the renewed interest in so-called outsider art reads as part of a broader search for forms of expression perceived as more direct, intuitive and psychologically or spiritually grounded—an impulse all the more urgent in an age of mounting disconnection.

A key player in this space has been London’s Gallery of Everything, which describes itself as a “commercial gallery dedicated to artists and makers beyond the cultural mainstream.” Founder James Brett has long argued that such artists should not be quarantined in a separate “outsider” category but shown, collected and historicized alongside the broader canon.

“I always found the terminology not very helpful because the terminology creates exclusion, and that exclusion was primarily in museums,” Brett told Observer ahead of Frieze Week. “The concept of outsider art was helpful in defining a category but unhelpful for including people, because it immediately implied they were outside. In the end, I decided not to use that terminology at all because I think it is restrictive.”

Brett cited Sam Doyle, to whom the gallery is devoting an extensive survey, following the artist’s presentation at the Outsider Art Fair in New York earlier this year. Running through November, “What I Paint Is History” is the first U.K. solo exhibition of the South Carolina artist, bringing together more than 20 paintings and sculptures, many shown publicly for the first time.

Born into the Gullah community of St. Helena Island, South Carolina, Doyle was self-taught and used house paint on roofing tin, sheet metal and found wood to chronicle the island’s Black community, combining portraits of neighbors and local figures with histories of slavery, emancipation, religion, sport and Black American culture. “When he was at school, he wanted to be an artist, but he did not have enough money to be one, so he became a hundred different things,” Brett explained. Outside his home, Doyle created the St. Helena Outdoor Art Gallery, covering its frontage with bold, graphic paintings of famous basketball players, musicians, Christ, Black emancipation and Martin Luther King Jr. Brett described Doyle’s art as born of genuine creative and emotional urgency. “He memorialized the unusual people and the people who formed that society. He felt he was writing the history of the island.”

A natural storyteller, Doyle turned his art into a witness to the broader history of Black emancipation and cultural life. He gained national attention after his inclusion in the landmark 1982 exhibition “Black Folk Art in America: 1930–1980” and later entered the orbit of Jean-Michel........

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