What Constitutes a Self-Taught Artist?

by William Henderson

While all artists are self-taught to a degree, self-taught artists are those who don’t go to art school or receive formal training. While they tend to create outside the stereotypical ideas of what makes art "art," they can get support from museums and foundations that support self-taught artists. Self-taught artists can work in any medium, though many tend to be painters.

Art 101

Collectors tend to divide the work that self-taught artists create into two categories -- outsider art and vernacular art, according to George Jacobs, owner of the George Jacobs Self-Taught Art Gallery. Outsider art refers to work made by an artist who works outside the mainstream art community. Vernacular art refers to work by an artist who is influenced by a specific culture. For example, a group of 27 self-taught African American artists living in the south put together an exhibition of more than 60 paintings, drawings, sculptures and assemblages that explore African-American identity and culture. Folk artists, who often focus on recording the world around them or who make handicrafts or ornamental art using techniques passed down through generations of their families, are a subset of vernacular artists. The commonality among artists labeled outsider and vernacular is that they learn as they go and create what they want.

Real-World Experience

Self-taught artists believe that formal education just gets in the way of their process. At 18, New Jersey-based artist Victor Grasso found some success while painting murals for Atlantic City casinos and opted against going to art school. He told Patrick Ross, a writer and curator of the online The Artist’s Road, which explores the challenges and rewards of being a self-taught artist, that just because he didn’t earn a degree doesn’t mean he hasn’t studied how the artists who came before him did it. Creating without earning a degree hasn’t negatively affected his career or the careers of other artists who believe as he does.

Representation and Assistance

Even without the safety net of a degree or the connections you likely make in art school, self-taught artists can find support, help and representation from organizations and patrons. The Philadelphia-based Foundation for Self-Taught Artists curates and exhibits collections by self-taught artists and also spends part of its considerable resources educating people about self-taught artists. Alpha Arts Guild in North Georgia includes in its membership self-taught artists. Membership in a guild is one way self-taught artists can network with each other and also get their art in front of collectors and art lovers.


Self-taught artists can find venues for selling their work in museums that focus on self-taught artists, online and by opening up their workspaces. Making names for themselves and working for profit often matters less to self-taught artists than to other working artists. “[Self-taught] artists create not because of their desire for fame or fortune but because they need to express their deepest feelings and visions,” says Denise Ulick, who, along with her husband, Michael, owns and operates Church Street Art Gallery in Lenox, Massachusetts, a gallery that hosts exhibitions made up solely of outsider art.

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