American Visionary Art Muesuem

The American Visionary Art Muesuem is one of the few mueseums in the world dedicated to art by the self-taught. Its founder is Rebecca Alban Hoffberger, a former midwife and psychiatric nurse (she was also the first American to apprentice mime under Marcel Marceau in Paris, aged 16) who wanted to "trumpet the wonders of raw human creativity." Some of the exhibits, and the stories of the artists who created them, are quite tear-inducing; the permenant collection includes the only work by an anonymous asylum mental patient in Britain who never showed much interest in anything until he found a fallen tree from which he carved a life-sized likeness of himself. The chest of the figure is sunken as the artist had tuberculosis. He died not too long afterwards. In contrast a few of the artists appear as obsessive eccentrics; the ex-world record hitchhiker's robot family, the painted concrete mountain as an homage to God, and the like.

I can't find images of the things I liked the most on line, so you will have to visit yourself, but I did find the educational goals on the website which are great. It is worth a trip.