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artists & participants
Alikhan Abdollahi,
Horst Ademeit,
Hilma af Klint,
Kwame Akoto,
Albert ,
Noviadi Angkasapura,
Yasmin Arshad,
Peter Charlie Attie Besharo,
Abu Bakarr Mansaray,
Mary Barnes,
Morton Bartlett,
George Beckstead,
Forrest Bess,
Benjamin Binder,
Ion Birladeanu,
Aaron Birnbaum,
Emery Blagdon,
Pearl Blauvelt,
William Alvin Blayney,
Julius Bockelt,
Erich Bödeker,
Hawkins Bolden,
Giovanni Bosco,
Uwe Breckner,
Freddie Brice,
Herman Bridgers,
Anibal Brizuela,
John Bunion Murray,
David Burton,
Calvin and Ruby Black,
Raimundo Camilo,
Tom Carapic,
William Carlton Rice,
James Castle,
Gaston Chaissac,
Nek Chand Saini,
Samuel Charles Jaw,
Brian Chin,
Mamadou Cisse,
Clarence & Grace Woolsey,
Derrick Alexis Coard,
Clark Coe,
Clive Collender,
Alan Constable,
Aloise Corbaz,
Lee Cordova Spooner,
Alfred Corinne Marie,
Joseph Crepin,
Francesco Cusumano,
Richard Dadd,
Henry Darger,
Charles A. A. Dellschau,
Louis DeMarco,
Fernand Desmoulin,
James Dixon,
Alevtina Dmitriyevna Pyzhova,
Hiroyuki Doi,
Jim Dornan,
Sam Doyle,
Svetlana Dressen,
Tarik Echols,
William Edmondson,
Walter Ellison,
Minnie Evans,
Denis Ezhikov,
Guo Fengyi,
Chase Ferguson,
Giovanni Fichera,
Howard Finster,
Auguste Forestier,
Manoel Francisco Dias,
Benjamin Franklin Perkins,
Verba Frazier,
Giovanni Galli,
Willem van Genk,
Hans-Jörg Georgi,
Pietro Ghizzardi,
Madge Gill,
Consuelo Chelo Gonzalez Amezcua,
Richard Greaves,
Daniel Green,
Glendenning Hamilton,
Peter Hand,
William Hawkins,
Hosea Hayden,
Margarethe Held,
Manfred Henke,
Morris Hirshfield,
Josef Hofer,
Stan Hopewell,
Georgiana Houghton,
Jesse Howard,
William Howard,
Peter Hughes,
Hector Hyppolite,
Enrico Imoda,
Vladimir Isaev,
Karl Hans Janke,
Alfred Jensen,
Felipe Jesus Consalvos,
Willie Jinks,
Anderson Johnson,
Patrick Joyce,
Karl Junker,
Prince Antonin Juritzky,
Peter Kapeller,
Roland Kappel,
Josef Karl Rädler,
Paul Karl Schimmack,
Bodys Isek Kingelez,
Davood Koochaki,
Zdenek Kosek,
Norbert H. Kox,
Julia Krause-Harder,
Hans Krüsi,
Viktor Kulikov,
Toshiro Kuwabara,
Paul Laffoley,
Dominique Lagru,
Shields Landon Jones,
Augustin Lesage,
Larry Lewis,
Georges Liautaud,
Albert Lubaki,
Leonid Lugovykh,
Pascal-Desir Maisonneuve,
Anthony Mannix,
Miroslav Marsalek,
Julian Martin,
Chris Mason,
Kunizo Matsumoto,
Justin McCarthy,
Malcolm McKesson,
Aleksandr Medvedev-Petrov,
John Miles,
Dan Miller,
Reuben Aaron Miller,
Vitaly Molka,
Francois Monchatre,
Sister Gertrude Morgan,
William Mortensen,
Michel Nedjar,
Vitaly Neiman,
Melvin Edward Nelson,
Masahiko Ooe,
Dietrich Orth,
Francis Palanc,
Michael Patterson-Carver,
Peter Paul Drgac,
Alexander Pavlovitch Lobanov,
Jean Perdrizet,
Alcides Pereira dos Santos,
Pavel Petrovitch Leonov,
Samuel David Phillips,
Elijah Pierce,
Francesco Ponte,
Walter Potter,
Erin Punzel,
Martin Ramirez,
Robert Rapson,
emile Ratier,
William Rice Rode,
Andre Robillard,
Prophet Royal Robertson,
Yuichi Saito,
Takeshi Sakamoto,
Nicolo Scarlatella,
Hans Schärer,
Friedrich Schröder Sonnenstern,
Judith Scott,
William Scott,
Sava Sekulic,
Tomoyuki Shinki,
George Simmons,
Ekaterina Skvortsova,
Janet Sobel,
James Son Thomas,
Austin Osman Spare,
Marian Spore Bush,
Eric Stewart,
Harald Stoffers,
Marcel Storr,
Ionel Talpazan,
Katsuhiro Terao,
George Thaxton Miller,
William Thomas Thompson,
Martin Thompson,
Vasily Tichonovich Romanenkov,
Miroslav Tichy,
Mary Tillman Smith,
Bill Traylor,
Lyudmila Trunova,
William Tyler,
Adelhyd van Bender,
John VanZile,
Joaquim Vincens Gironella,
August Walla,
Alfred Wallis,
Melvin Way,
Fred Webster,
Myrtice West,
George Widener,
Benton Wilkens,
Ted Willcox,
Louis William Wain,
Terry Williams,
Scottie Wilson,
Josef Wittlich,
Adolf Wölfli,
Jim Work,
William Wurfflein,
Joseph Yoakum,
Hideaki Yoshikawa,
Francesco Zafarana,
Anna Zemankova,
Bogdan Zietek,
Carlo Zinelli,
Aloys Zötl
press release only in german
From June 2017, Mona will play host to The Museum of Everything, a British non-profit organisation dedicated to the exhibition, advancement and integration of private and non-academic artists.
This is the first time The Museum of Everything will visit Australia. The exhibition will feature over 1,500 works from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, arranged over a series of themed spaces in an informal journey through human making. Included in the show are drawings, sculptures and paintings, as well as ceramics, collage, photography, assemblage, plus found objects and installations.
We have asked The Museum of Everything to come and occupy Mona. But that — like everything, always, everywhere — is up for debate. Is it an occupation, or a collaboration?
The Museum of Everything is a travelling institution, which opened in London in 2009. Its purpose is to advocate for the visibility of art that falls outside the confines of the art world proper; the work of ordinary people, working far (literally or otherwise) from the cultural metropolis.
That word, ‘ordinary’, is an interesting one. Because oftentimes, the art that we are talking about — let’s call it the art of everyone — happens to be made by people who can only truthfully be described as extraordinary.
These artists don’t have degrees, but they might have visions or compulsions; they are transcendent scientists, self-taught architects, and citizen inventors; sometimes, they are dedicated followers of personal belief systems, or producing art from inside a hospital or prison. Some create their own visual folklore to sit alongside (or challenge) established histories of culture and place. ‘Our museum stretches, I hope, the possibility of who has the right to be considered an artist,’ says founder James Brett. But of course, not everybody is an artist. The collection is comprised of the passionate fringe, the outliers who concentrate the human propensity to make and create. They are simultaneously different, because that kind of intensity and ability is not available to us all (and especially not in the absence of the usual art-world rewards, such as money and cultural cachet), and yet they are also somehow the same, more familiar to us than the big art-world names will ever be.
This extra/ordinary tension complicates the category ‘art’, in its deepest sense. Is art typical, universal, even biological — or is it exceptional? Can we place elite art, that which is clearly tied to the desire for social status, next to apparently private forms of creative expression, and call them by the same name?
To answer these questions, as well as the important social-justice ones that accompany them, you must first widen your concept of art. It stops being about insider/outsider, us and them, and becomes instead a big, wobbly, cumbersome carryall; and once ‘everything’ is included, nothing is, and so the whole problem of terminology and definitions just dissolves, until you’re left with nothing but an action. The will to make thrives everywhere, even in the most unlikely places. That’s what our friends at The Museum of Everything are trying to show. And we want to help them, in the form of this exhibition. The occupation is an invitation.
What you will find, when you come, is a jolly fine collection, cor blimey, of drawings, paintings, sculptures, photography, environments and assemblies. There will be wondrous samples of the Art Brut / Outsider Art canon (oh, the irony) as well as the ‘newly discovered’ (as our British imperial overlords would have it), alongside work from studios for artists with disabilities. We’re excited. This stuff matters, in a social-justice sense and in an art-lovers sense (we’ve been missing out!). But also, we empathise — being from Tassie and all — with the whole outsider/insider thing. Specifically, the problem: what happens when the outsider becomes the institution; the exception, the rule? Is it even a problem?
Both our museums—that of Everything, and of Old and New Art — want to learn, in the most human of ways: by doing. ‘The hand is the cutting edge of the mind,’ says Joseph Bronowski. Art, in the end, is a behaviour, something we can’t help but do — or at least, it should be. The best way to test its mettle is to clear away the extra stuff, the art-world beatifications, the labels and classifications, to see what’s left. You might just find it’s everything.