Fleisher/Ollman Gallery celebrates a milestone anniversary with a change of location.

Over the past 50 years, the words primitive, visionary, naive, outsider, folk and, most recently, self-taught have all been applied to a huge and diverse group of artists that works largely outside the trends of contemporary art. While none of these descriptions are exactly right, something intangible does link these artists, as well as many who are not, strictly speaking, "self-taught." It might be an iconographic directness, emotional intensity or explicit workmanship. Now, after 50 years of identifying, defining and promoting this work, the Fleisher/Ollman Gallery is celebrating its birthday by moving into a beautiful new space in the art deco Sun Oil building, just around the corner from its old home on 17th Street.

The large, light-filled spaces of the newly renovated gallery are filled with artwork from the past 50 years, plus some that reflects, as owner/director John Ollman says, "where we are today and where we want to be in the future." There's a selection of ethnographic objects, some African pieces and a wonderful carved and painted Northwestern Native American mask that was once, incidentally, in the collection of Andy Warhol. I was pleased to see pieces by old favorites like Henry Darger and Martin Ramirez. The gallery also contains a wonderful selection of pieces by Jose Bédia, Phil Frost, Acharya Vyakul and local artists such as Bruce Pollock, Anda Dubinskis, Mark Mahosky, Philadelphia Wireman and Marcy Hermansader. Work by Chicago artists is also represented, including Jim Nutt, Christina Ramberg, Karl Wirsum, Don Colley (who lived in Philadelphia until just a few years ago) and Ray Yoshida, along with one of H.C. Westermann's magnificent death ships.

Ollman confesses that he didn't set out to run a gallery. He began working at Janet Fleisher Gallery in 1970 while teaching sculpture and nonwestern art history part-time at Philadelphia College of Art (now University of the Arts). By that time the gallery had been open for 17 years, and Janet Fleisher had established its reputation by showing surrealists like Wilfredo Lam. During Ollman's first years, he and Fleisher exhibited work by American self-taught artists, as well as ethnographic material from different cultures -- especially pre-Columbian and Native American. Then, beginning in 1974, they installed enormous salon-style exhibitions of work by folk and self-taught artists, co-curated by the legendary folk art collector Herbert Hemphill. By the late 1970s they began paring down the number of works in each show and linking them by themes. All of this led to the format that the gallery has used ever since -- "one-person shows for the 20th-century self-taught artists we really believe in, and the contemporary artists with connections to the themes and ideas in their work."

In some ways, the development of the Fleisher/Ollman Gallery has paralleled public awareness of self-taught artists. Until about the mid-1960s, work by 20th-century self-taught artists was outside the interests of virtually all collectors of contemporary fine art and folk art, whose interests were closely linked with antiques and Americana. Ollman says he sold only two pieces out of a 1970 show of Sister Gertrude Morgan's work, but since that time interest in self-taught artists has risen steadily. Many of these are now blue-chip artists whose reputations were made, in part, by Ollman's critical appraisal and promotional efforts. Then throughout the '80s and '90s, work by self-taught artists became increasingly attractive to collectors and the prices of the art continued to rise -- sometimes dramatically. The market for work by self-taught artists since that time has developed into a multitiered structure based on the demand for the work, its availability and its quality.

Though thrilled with this growing interest, John Ollman and many other experts on self-taught art are concerned about the adoration it inspires. Ollman is interested in advancing a critical dialogue about the work of these artists, suggesting, "Let's apply the same standards to these artists that we do to educated artists." He supports this by writing articles and essays, publishing catalogs and assisting curators with research. Similarly, collector and theorist Michael Hall (an active artist himself) has long been an advocate for self-taught artists, arguing strenuously that the complex influences of literature, theology, popular culture and mainstream art can be found and studied in their work, the same as any other artist's. It is pretty clear that the fundamentals of connoisseurship -- not just quaint biographical and sociological analysis -- can and should be applied to this type of work.

When asked about his future plans for the gallery, Ollman says he's excited about linking work by artists from different times and places with common themes and ideas, including historic figures like George Orr and H.C. Westermann who had a place in the development of "outsider" art, and contemporary artists from other cultures like Acharya Vyakul and Frederic Bruly Bouabré. Personally, I can't wait to see more work by all of these artists, along with the others already represented by the gallery. It's some of the best around, no matter what you call it, and it looks great in this wonderful new space.