The Artlink Archive Project: Inside the 'Outsider' Issue

In 1992–93 Artlink published Naïve & Outsider Art centring on themes linked by their shared invisibility in mainstream discussions. While the title obviously references art historian Roger Cardinal’s 1972 book Outsider Art, (after Jean Dubuffet’s ‘Art Brut’ or ‘raw art’), this outlying status was described by Artlink’s founding editor Stephanie Britton in 2022 as ‘…the context changes, but at the time the concept [of various practices lying beyond the mainstream] functioned as a catch up on things that had been under the radar for decades already... [we were] collating a wide range of ideas', a group of practices that existed but were hardly recognised in published texts. Looking back across Artlink’s history, Naïve & Outsider Art offers much to think through about the magazine’s own platform, intentions and the trajectories of those practices foregrounded thirty years ago under what are now troubling rubrics.

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