Outsider Art Comes Home | June 14 – July 23
The International Outsider Exhibition of Modern Art (IOEMA) Collection began with a modest website, innercityartist.com, created by John and Susie Yimin in the late 1990s to showcase inner-city artists they had met and whose work they collected.
The website accepted online contributions from street artists, basement outsiders and curated which work and artists were shown on the site. By 2000, innercityartist.com topped Google for outsider art searches.
An early decision, critical to the collection, was to request an original work of art rather than a fee for accepted entries.
Over the next 20 years, art from around the world arrived on the Yimin’s front porch in Pittsburgh in various forms, from post-it note scribbles to nine-foot-wide canvasses .
This exhibit is the first time selections from The IOEMA Collection have been shown.
Featured artists include Mikey Welsh, Michael Coffee, Khara Oxier, Maciej Hoffman (Poland), William Thomas Thompson, Stephan Judges (France), Mayo Fujino (Japan), Plastorm, Steve Murison (Scotland), Ian Pyper (UK), Ayin Es, Billy Bob Beamer, Michel Keck, Mary Zeman, Dushan (Czech Republic), Gabriel Shaffer, Lory Smith, and more.
The Ioema Collection