THE AMERICAN VISIONARY ART MUSEUM
by Skylaire Alfvegren
Hoffberger signs on guest curators for each exhibit, who may lack experience but have a sharp eye for the subject at hand. "Like everything else, it really has been an intuitive thing." she says. "Even if we had the money, I wouldn't hire an in-house curator because I really feel it's important to have fresh connections and insight."
AVAM's third and most ambitious show, "The End is Near!," celebrated fire, one of the mightiest powers for cleansing and transformation. Grand both in scope and subject, over 250 works explored the limitless fascination many visionary artists have with the end of the world and the approaching millennial overhaul.
"Whenever I describe "The End is Near!" it is the end of the world, not the end of the millennium, that first comes to mind. I'm not worried about the millennium, but the zeros are frightening to a lot people. I think it's similar to turning thirty or forty; it's just a product of the fact that we have ten fingers instead of eight." explains Manley. Heavy on images of everlasting hell-fire, The End is Near! is significantly darker than previous exhibitions. For every Angelic rendering of the creator or his heavenly paradise, one finds a dozen apocalyptic visions drawn from the book of Revelations.
"When I did a lot of folk field research in the south, with people on the low end of the social scale, they'd work hard all week and then sit for hours in church on Sunday to be told they were going to hell," Manley recalls. "I finally realized that the prospect of damnation is more comforting than thinking you'll be ejected from the universe when you die. That someone's going to go to a lot of trouble to torment you for eternity is very satisfying."
"The End is Near!" will close April 12. Six weeks later AVAM will open the final show of their 'alchemical agenda,' by plunging into the waters of human emotion with "Error and Eros: Love Profane and Divine." Billed as a "close-up look at love, the most powerful emotion" it will open in conjunction with the first annual Baltimore Folk and Visionary Art Show. "We want to represent great love, but we also want to deal with the fact that you're statistically more likely to be killed by someone that once said 'I Love You' than some random person." says Hoffberger. Curators Maggie and John Maizels publish Raw Vision, the International Journal of Intuitive and Visionary Art. David Bowie and his wife Iman, major collectors in the field, have agreed to serve as honorary co-chairs.
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