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  1. Guatemalan Art & Crafts

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    Guatemalan Art & Crafts: Ceramic, woodcarving, textiles, paintings, sculpture, religious art, nativity, angels, crosses, and more.

  3. Estelle Tambak

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    Estelle Tambak was a prolific painter, educator and social activist from New York. She died on April 2, 2002, at the age of 88.

  4. Anonymous & Misc. American Art

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    Anonymous & Misc. American Art: Folk and Outsider Art by American Artists: Landscape, genre, figure, narrative, still life, and more.

  5. Milton Bond

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    Reverse painting on glass is a technique practiced by only a very few masters today. In the forefront stands Milton Bond. His self-taught technique not only evokes the spirit and essence of Americana, but has also earned him international acclaim.

    Bond was born in 1918 in Bridgeport, Connecticut and now resides and works in Stratford, Connecticut. Bond comes from a long line of New England oystermen and sailors. He was the owner and master of one of the last commercial vessels on the Long Island Sound. His love and deep understanding of the sea is reflected in many of his works.

    Bond is a self-taught artist who has been reverse painting on glass for over twenty years. He began drawing at age five and showed tremendous talent at such a young age that his work was exhibited at a State Teacher’s Convention in 1923. His works have been shown in important museum exhibits in the U.S., Europe, and South America. He has also won many prizes and awards for his paintings.

  6. Anonymous & Misc. Polish Art

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    Anonymous & Misc. Polish Art: Folk, Outsider, and Naive Art from Poland. Traditional glass paintings & religious art. Magdalena, Nikifor, Katarzyna Gawlowa, Ludwig Wiecek, and more.

  7. Marianny Wisnios

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    Marianny Wisnios did not begin making art until late in her life, but she was very prolific from the onset. Between 1972 and 1993, she was exhibited throughout Poland in many museum shows. She died in the mid-1990s.

    Wisnios’ work reflects her deep religious convictions, displaying sensitivity and emotion. Her figures are usually large, taking up most of the paper on which they are drawn. Because she was poor, she generally used found materials, and most of her work is on brown paper. That fact, however, did not in any way limit her inspiration. Her work is bold, direct and compelling.

    Alexander Jackowski, a respected author of folk/naïve art books, features Wisnios in his book, Folk Painting in Poland.

  8. Ludwig Wiecek

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    Ludwig Wiecek (deceased) was an outsider artist who lived in Poland his whole life. Born deaf and mute, Wiecek spent all of his adult years in an assisted living facility. Wiecek was a prolific painter and carefully depicted what he saw and imagined: His subject-matter ranges from religious images to everyday scenes.

  9. Katarzyna Gawlowa

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    Katarzyna Gawlowa (1896 – 2002) was born in 1896 in the small village of Zielonki, close to Krakow, Poland. As a child she worked long and hard on her father’s farm—working the fields, looking after the cows, and making trips to town to sell milk and vegetables. When she was inside of their humble thatched home, she would paint walls, filling every space with birds, flowers, saints and angels. When her parents died, she moved to a neighboring house and continued her passion, painting holy figures to wander the walls. This practice continued for years and fed Gawlowa’s spirit.

    In the early 1970’s, a young artist from Krakow and Jacek Lodzinski, a collector, encouraged the now almost 80 year-old Gawlowa to do portable paintings. Though she was timid at first, she immediately loved the sensation of seeing her paintings framed. Before long, people visited her from Krakow, Warsaw, and countries whose language she did not understand. She was amazed that all of theses people wanted that to see her work.

    Though much of Gawlowa’s work is religious in nature, she painted objects from her own environment and events from her childhood—wedding feasts, pilgrimages, and folk bands. Her religious work most often features the Virgin Mary decorated with flowers, birds and butterflies. Gawlowa was not wealthy, and her supplies were limited. So much of her work is on hard cardboard and plywood. Because she was taught not to waste, she wasted no space on her paintings, filling in many figures and often adding poems and lyrics in any free space. Other specific characteristics of her art include flat, white faces that are normally the starting points of her compositions. Her colors are generally bright, pure and direct, creating a two-dimensional feeling.

    On December 28, 1977 Krakow’s Ethnographic Museum held an exhibition of her paintings, and art lovers were able to experience first hand an authentic talent that had grown out of contemporary Polish Folk Art. Gawlowa died in the 1980s, leaving behind a wealth of work that has dispersed across the world. She is surely one of Poland’s treasures.