Norman Girardot, Professor Emeritus, Lehigh University, will explore the mysteries of human art-making, including tribal art, children’s art, art of the insane, prison art, self-taught art, visionary art, and so on….or just about everything outside of what elite Western tradition presumptuously called fine or schooled art by excluding everything else.  In the contemporary sense, to be an ‘outsider’ or in this case, an ‘outsider artist’, loosely means someone who in some fashion is marginal to mainstream culture.   There can, of course, be a light and dark side to being an outsider in that real innovative forward-looking creativity, or a dark regressive demonology, can both flow from a culturally unmoored imagination.

This series will explore some of these issues in a general and semi-traditional historical and academic way (lectures, films, discussion), but will focus primarily  on a concrete case of outsider art as exemplified by Bethlehem’s own late great outsider “found object” artist, Mr. Imagination (aka Gregory Warmack, 1948-2012).

Fee for this series is $45. Proceeds benefit the Charter Arts Teachers’ Creativity Fund.

To reserve your spot, please call 610-868-2971 Ext. 3185.