In late February, I boarded a plane from Portland, Oregon, to New York City with a mission to write about the work of artists from North Pole Studio at the NYC Outsider Art Fair. Now in its 33rd edition, this fair brought together sixty-six exhibitors from nine different countries and features work by artists who pursue their craft outside the traditions and training of the art world. North Pole’s Executive Director Carissa Burkett commissioned me to follow the staff and several artists of this Portland-based nonprofit to NYC on this beat. Truth be told, I felt surprised that I was not simply asked to write about the studio’s contributions to the fair before they were shipped to NYC (surely a more cost effective approach!). But upon walking into the Metropolitan Pavilion in Chelsea where the fair was underway from February 27–March 2, I instantly understood the importance of being there in person.
The fair was, in a word, exhilarating. And North Pole’s booth, though unassuming at first glance, experienced landslide success. The studio attracted droves of passersby, sold over half the artists’ works, and even drew personal congratulations from Andrew Edlin, the fair’s owner. For three days, I tracked North Pole’s progress at the fair, watching patrons interact with the work and considering why this little studio enjoyed such magnetic pull in a sea of art from across the globe.
North Pole is a progressive art studio with a clear purpose: “to increase opportunities for artists with autism and intellectual / developmental disabilities to thrive as active members of the arts community.” The studio continues to expand in Portland, most recently making moves to a new location in Portland’s Pearl District nestled among other established art galleries. This year’s Outsider Art Fair was not North Pole’s first; the organization had booths at the fair in 2022 and 2023.
Before I left, Burkett advised me to brace for the notorious sensory overwhelm of the fair. With her admonishment, I arrived at the Metropolitan Pavilion ready to fly safely under the radar with my noise-cancelling headphones and N95 mask. I purposefully decided to avoid looking for North Pole on the fair roster and averted my eyes from the names listed above each booth. I was already familiar with many of the studio artists and felt confident that their work would find me from the walls.
Perhaps this was a mistake. The space was overrun with eager patrons on Friday afternoon, who often obscured my view. I meandered the labyrinthine rows of booths for a long while, feet slowly tiring.
Suddenly, I glimpsed a familiar face. It was Austin Brague, a North Pole artist known for his meticulous drawings of urban cities in the United States. Finally, I found North Pole! The studio’s booth was staffed at that moment by Krista Gregory, North Pole’s Exhibitions Associate, who would soon be joined by Phoebe Mol, North Pole’s Director of Community Learning & Engagement.
Minutes after my arrival, one of Brague’s works sold. I frantically photographed this piece entitled Empire State and Chrysler Buildings (2024), as patrons can take pieces they purchase before the fair ends, and listened in as Brauge chatted with the eager buyer. I learned this 14 x 17 inch drawing took Brauge an estimated 78 hours to create with micron pen and pastel, and that he had based it on a source image from the internet. His every stroke emanated care and clarity of intention. His personal atmospheric touches, like the dreamy gradient of sky, infused the work with liveliness apropos of its urban context. After all, New York City is sometimes considered a character in its own right in popular media analysis. Brague’s work showed how the city-as-character might come into view—as a totality leveled through textured minutia, an accumulation of various traits that give life to the whole.
As I hovered around North Pole’s booth, I recognized another familiar face. Davis Wohlford, North Pole’s founding artist, made his way to the table with proud family members in tow.
Wohlford possesses a knack for rendering differences among sameness by highlighting the uniqueness of individuals in affinity groups. His six works at the fair, 12 x 12 inch paintings, carried titles that spoke to the nature of their subjects: Elephants, Lions, Tigers, Bears, Foxes, and Deer (all 2024).
Wohlford’s Bears, for instance, portrayed many brown, grey, and black bears in different modes of expression, some play-fighting, protecting their cubs, or doing nothing in particular. Wohlford painted these creatures using figurative splotches of solid color, accented with a few minimalist elements that provide a tacit understanding of their form and action—pink marks for paws and whiskers, light blue dots for eyes, and dark blue dots for pupils. I wished I could ask him about every bear (all thirty-eight of them that I counted) in this composition, for his masterful use of negative space supercharged both their individuality and collective dynamic.
Though I am left to build my own yarns about Bears, I do not mind. Perhaps this is the ideal way to experience Wohlford’s work, by allowing it to stoke the embers of one’s own capacity for imagination and story.
During the rest of my time at North Pole’s booth on Friday, I took in abstract works by Annie Rose Macer and Adam Richards. Macer is a Guatemalan-born artist who harbors a talent for alchemizing color and shape into patterns with animistic qualities. I have seen North Pole respectfully refer to her as “the pattern queen” on social media. Richards, on the other hand, thrives in his commitment to mark-making, creating high-contrast compositions that naturally volley with Macer’s bright forms. Gregory chose to exhibit these artists’ works in close proximity, because, while striking in their own rights, they also sing together.
I made many returns to one of Macer’s hand-cut paper collages at the booth. For this, she diligently mapped out rows and columns of rectangular mini-collages onto a burnt orange background. Some of these looked like faces, mouths with teeth, slithering tongues, or perhaps stairways, electric currents, portals into other worlds—all sliced into colorful bits of paper. The light from above caught the work just so, and the golden paper cuttings in this collage shimmered. Macer titled this work Sunshine (2024). I wondered how she knew right where every piece belonged, where every cut should be made and color contrasted to wield this quiet force—like the spell of natural light, making the world strange and new, again and again.
Nearby, Richards’ work exuded a different kind of animism, one riddled with signs and symbols, teasing at legibility just out of reach. Two of his similarly-sized works formed a dyad with one another. The topmost contained the makings of faces—at least, to my imagination—eyes and mouths leaping out from the fray of dark blue and black marks. Was this a portrait? Below it, I observed another work composed of letters, numbers, and other symbols. I searched for Adam Richards’ name among these marks, but I could only find its spectre, not its entire sequence. I wished for a print copy of these works so that I might circle the faces and words that popped out at me, like a crossword puzzle or a game of I spy. Richards beckoned this kind of engagement.
I left the fair for the day, concerned that my lingering might deter patrons, and returned the following Saturday evening to find Gregory at a shockingly barren booth. Gregory was admittedly exhausted from the excitement of this success. We visited for a while, speaking about her visits with Christopher Anders, another of North Pole’s exhibiting artists.
Unlike many North Pole artists, Anders works from his home, with Gregory paying him regular visits to engage him as part of North Pole’s Exhibiting Artist program. Anders’ traumatic history and mental health struggles inform his practice and has stated that art-making provides him with “momentary relief.”
Anders’ drawings at the fair ran the gamut from naturalist landscapes, which he recalled from his memories as a truck driver, to psychedelic fantasies that referenced the likes of King Kong and Pink Floyd. Of particular interest to passersby were his pencil drawings on legal-sized envelopes. The envelopes were stamped with the address of Grant County Jail in Washington and dated back to 2007, when he was incarcerated for ninety days as punishment for selling weed at Ozzyfest. Anders used some of these envelopes to share raw and satirical reflections on his incarceration. He even invited inmates and guards alike to sign one envelope as if it were a show poster from a musical tour. Beauty, humor, and criticality poured forth from his work in equal measure, claiming agency for his complex lived experience.
Upon my final visit to the fair on Sunday morning, North Pole’s booth had been entirely rearranged. Certain art had sold, and new art went on display in its place.
With this re-configuration, I zeroed in on two of Doug Wing’s 6 x 6 inch remaining pieces—Untitled (3D Camera) and Camera Collage (both 2024). Each work featured a photo of an old-fashioned camera with a lens that yearned toward something just out of view. This diptych mimicked the geometry of old cameras with their stout, square facades. Wing accented the works with hues of red, bright blue, and gold paint in dancing strokes. His use of unusual angles and bold chromatics prompted me to consider the fabricated nature of media at large, the way media ideates upon itself, reaching backwards and forwards in time to create an alternate version of reality that comments on our own.
My time at the fair culminated in the revelation of James Enos’ mixed-media bound book, Walt Disney Pictures Present: The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe (2023–2024). Enos composed this book of 12 x 18 inch sheets of paper. Certain pages were stark, containing only the typewritten text of this tale, while others folded out accordion-style to reveal swaths of elaborate illustrations, which harkened to contemporary manga and anime. Enos drew these illustrations—fantastical humanoid figures and animals—with marker and ballpoint pen. They radiated facial expressions of surprise, anger, delight, anxiety, and other enigmatic states. I watched in awe as Gregory and Mol unfurled some of the accordion pages for a curious patron, stretching Enos’ illustrations to the length of the booth. Clearly, his powers of storytelling beget this level of expansiveness. Gregory noted that this book, if it did not sell at the fair, was promised to Booklyn, an organization that deals in artist books.
Shortly after, I gave Gregory and Mol my last goodbyes and left the fair, preparing to fly home that evening. I returned to Portland with lingering questions bumping around in my thoughts:
I am an autistic person, and, though I managed to navigate the fair’s space with relative ease, I imagined other contributing artists and people with Disabilities might struggle in this crowded and stimulating environment. My thoughts also drifted to the history of the sideshow and the disparaging exhibition of Disabled people that occurred historically. I shuddered to think, but were there parallels here? I considered the sheer class privilege that allowed so many access to the fair (I did not have to pay to get in given my assignment, but the general public did). And, finally, my curiosity wandered to the man I saw outside on the cold street painting plein-air near the Metropolitan Pavilion. Who was this fair truly for?
At the same time, I knew that acknowledging problematics in this way risked accomplishing little other than performative wokeness—and critiquing the fair was not my assignment anyway. In spite of all my questions and quibbles, my experience with North Pole at the fair inspired me. I witnessed North Pole artists exhibiting artwork that interrogated the nature of similarity and divergence, and it was relatively affordable to buyers without extravagant wealth (ranging from $240-$2,400). Best of all, I had witnessed fairgoers celebrating North Pole artists with their interest and expressing this in material terms.
From my strange positionality as both a working artist and an arts writer, I constantly wonder how this magic web of attraction, affinity, and desire threads between specific makers and those who invest in art. Why do artists make what they make the way they make it? Why do individual patrons like the artwork they like? I offer no answers here, nor do I ever expect to. But throughout my time at the fair, I was reminded that art plays an interstitial role in connecting humans with one another across tenuous lines of difference. By and large, North Pole’s magnetic showing of work at the Outsider Art Fair cut to the core of this truth.
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