Dwight mackintosh outsider artist henry
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Dwight Mackintosh
1906–1999, American
Tags: Drawing
Dwight Mackintosh hailed from Hayward, California. At the age of sixteen, he was diagnosed with mental retardation and institutionalized in Sonoma State Hospital. In 1947 he was transferred to De Witt State Hospital in Auburn and finally to Stockton State Hospital in 1972, spending a total of fifty-six years in hospitals. In classes at the Alan Short Center at Stockton State Hospital, he demonstrated an interest in and aptitude for drawing, and after his release in 1978 (as part of a mass release of patients), he registered for art classes at the Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, California, which provides adult artists with disabilities with a professional studio environment for five days a week. Mackintosh devoted himself to drawing with great concentration.
Mackintosh’s early drawings, made with black felt-tip pen, feature male figures, buildings, and calligraphic, largely indecipherable script. As he continued workin
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Outsider Art. The Musgrave Kinley Collection from the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, until 2 June 2002. www.whitworth.man.ac.uk. Rating: ★★★★
What is the last piece of art that you looked at? The chances are that it was in a gallery, produced by an art school graduate, and that it was worth a small fortune in the lucrative art market. Even if it was a radical or conceptual piece—a cow sliced in half, a pile of bricks—it was probably deeply rooted in a cosy art establishment.
But there is another kind of art being made that is “exhibited” in psychiatric hospitals and orphanages, on prison walls, and in bus shelters and public lavatories. The artists are usually socially excluded, untrained, and often severely mentally ill. They are “outsiders”—not part of the sophisticated art world—expressing their inner lives through art, with no intention of becoming professionals.
The Whitworth Art Gallery is showing one of the