The American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM) is an art museum located in the Federal Hill neighborhood at 800 Key Highway in Baltimore, Maryland and that specializes in the preservation and display of visionary art. The city agreed to give the museum a piece of land on the south shore of the Inner Harbor under the condition that its organizers would clean up residual pollution from a copper paint factory and a whiskey warehouse that formerly occupied the site. It has been designated by Congress as America's national museum for self-taught art.
AVAM’s 1.1 acre “Wonderland” campus contains 67,000 square feet of exhibit space and a permanent collection of approximately 4,000 pieces. The collection includes works by visionary artists Ho Baron, Nek Chand, Ted Gordon, Clyde Jones, Leo Sewell, Vollis Simpson and Ben Wilson as well as over 40 pieces from the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre of London. Some of this work is displayed in a gallery on the first floor of the Main Building, throughout the James Rouse Visionary Center, and outdoors when new temporary themed exhibitions are being installed.
The museum has no staff curators, preferring to use guest curators for its shows. Rather than focusing shows on specific artists or styles, it sponsors themed exhibitions with titles such as Wind in Your Hair and High on Life. The museum’s founder, Rebecca Alban Hoffberger, takes pride in the fact that AVAM is "pretty un-museumy".
Read more about American Visionary Art Museum: History, Mission, Reception, Community Involvement, Exhibitions
Famous quotes containing the words american, visionary, art and/or museum:
“There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“Public morning diversions were the last dissipating habit she obtained; but when that was accomplished, her time was squandered away, the power of reflection was lost, [and] her ideas were all centered in dress, drums, routs, operas, masquerades, and every kind of public diversion. Visionary schemes of pleasure were continually present to her imagination, and her brain was whirled about by such a dizziness that she might properly be said to labor under the distemper called the vertigo.”
—Sarah Fielding (1710–1768)
“There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“A fallen tree does not rise again.”
—Hawaiian saying no. 2412, ‘lelo No’Eau, collected, translated, and annotated by Mary Kawena Pukui, Bishop Museum Press, Hawaii (1983)