GALLERY HISTORY
The Fleisher/Ollman Gallery opened in Philadelphia in 1952 as the Janet Fleisher Gallery. Over the course of the next four decades, the Gallery established a reputation as one of the world’s premiere sources of self-taught art, defining the field and helping to develop major public and private collections of this once-marginalized group of artists. We were among the first to mount major exhibitions for Henry Darger, Sister Gertrude Morgan, Bill Traylor, and Martin Ramirez, and we published early catalogues for James Castle, William Edmondson, and Joseph Yoakum. Since 1997, when John Ollman became sole owner, the Gallery’s emphasis has shifted toward the exhibition of contemporary artists in order to reflect the influence of the self-taught. This revised curatorial mission—recently amended to remove from discourse entirely the “self-taught” label as a distinct entity—has become particularly relevant as many contemporary artists eschew the academic in favor of intuitive practice. In addition to our modern and contemporary interests (among them Joseph Cornell, H.C. Westermann, Ed Ruscha, and Alfred Jensen), we continue to showcase the most significant American vernacular artists of the 20th century, including the exclusive representation of Felipe Jesus Consalvos and the Philadelphia Wireman. Recently, due to our annual group shows of young Philadelphia talent, cutting-edge young artists like Anthony Campuzano have joined this pantheon alongside American modernists like Castle and Consalvos
In keeping with the Gallery’s diverse program, past exhibitions have explored the profound influence of artists like Joseph Yoakum and Martin Ramirez on the Chicago Imagists Jim Nutt, H.C. Westermann, and Ray Yoshida. “Fabulous Histories: Indigenous Anomalies in American Art,” the Gallery-curated exhibition for Harvard University’s Carpenter Center, outlined the shared formal and conceptual concerns of nine artists: Jim Nutt, Martin Ramirez, P.M. Wentworth, Christina Ramberg, James Castle, Luis Romero, Jess, Felipe Jesus Consalvos, and Anthony Campuzano. We presented an extrapolation of this landmark exhibition for Art 36 Basel.
Fleisher/Ollman has participated in a variety of art fairs, including Art 36 Basel; Art Chicago annually from 1988 to 2003; the Köln Art Fair in 1997; the Intuit Fair since 2003; TAAS-New York since 2004; and the 2004 ScopeLondon and 2004 and 2005 ScopeMiami fairs. The Gallery has contributed toward building comprehensive self-taught collections at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the High Museum, Atlanta, GA; the National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC; and the Milwaukee Museum of Art. We have also been involved in the acquisition of works by the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; the American Folk Art Museum, NY; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; and the Art Institute of Chicago, among many others.