Fleisher/Ollman Gallery Philadelphia, PA
The Fleisher/Ollman Gallery opened in Philadelphia in 1952 as the Janet Fleisher Gallery. Over the course of the next four decades, the gallery established a reputation as one of the world's premiere sources for self-taught art, defining the field and helping to develop major public and private collections of this once-marginalized group of artists. Fleisher/Ollman was among the first to mount major exhibitions of work by Henry Darger, Sister Gertrude Morgan, Bill Traylor, and Martin Ramirez, and published early catalogues on James Castle, William Edmondson, and Joseph Yoakum. Since 1997, when John Ollman became the gallery's sole owner, emphasis has shifted toward the exhibition of contemporary artists who reflect the influence of the self-taught, including Anthony Campuzano, The Dufala Brothers, Jennifer Levonian, Isaac Lin, Tristin Lowe, Jayson Musson, Paul Swenbeck, and the late BBill Walton. This revised curatorial mission—recently amended to remove from discourse entirely the "self-taught†label as a distinct entity—has become particularly relevant as many contemporary artists eschew the academic in favor of intuitive practice. In addition to its modern and contemporary interests (among them Joseph Cornell, H.C. Westermann, Ed Ruscha, and Alfred Jensen), the gallery continues to showcase the most significant American vernacular artists of the 20th Century, including the exclusive representation of the late Cuban-American collage artist Felipe Jesus Consalvos and the unknown sculptor now referred to as the Philadelphia Wireman.
In keeping with the Fleisher/Ollman's diverse program, past exhibitions have explored the profound influence of artists like Joseph Yoakum and Martin Ramirez on the Chicago Imagists Jim Nutt, H.C. Westermann, and Ray Yoshida. Fabulous Histories: Indigenous Anomalies in American Art, organized by Fleisher/Ollman for Harvard University's Carpenter Center, outlined the shared formal and conceptual concerns of nine artists: Jim Nutt, Martin Ramirez, P.M. Wentworth, Christina Ramberg, James Castle, Luis Romero, Jess, Felipe Jesus Consalvos, and Anthony Campuzano. An extrapolation of this landmark exhibition was also presented at Art 36 Basel. More recently, Fleisher/Ollman presented 60/60, an exhibition which brought together the work of sixty artists—ethnographic, self-taught, and contemporary—spanning the gallery's sixty years, and Castle In Context, which placed James Castle's soot and spit drawings and constructions alongside the work of such artists as Jasper Johns, Grant Wood, Terry Winters, and Forrest Bess.
Fleisher/Ollman has participated in a variety of art fairs, including Art Basel, Art Chicago, Köln Art Fair, Intuit Fair, The American Antiques Show (New York), ScopeLondon, ScopeMiami, and The Armory Modern.
The Gallery has contributed toward building comprehensive self-taught collections at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the High Museum, Atlanta, GA; the National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC; and the Milwaukee Museum of Art. We have also been involved in the acquisition of works by the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; the American Folk Art Museum, NY; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.
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