Monty Blanchard, New York - MEET THE COLLECTOR Series Part Twenty Eight

I met Monty Blanchard during my first time at the Outsider Art Fair in New York three years ago. It was after this initial meeting that Monty invited me over to his and his partner Leslie Tcheyan's loft in Tribeca for a walk around their incredible collection and I was blown away. Floor to ceiling works and Monty with his vast memory of all the works and who they were by. What a morning that was. Here he shares more about his life, his collection and what his plans are in part twenty-eight of my series …

Monty Blanchard on the Great Wall

1. When did your interest in the field of outsider art begin? When did you become a collector of this art?
The first week of November in 1984… The reason I know this...  In the early 1980s, my late wife Anne and I for “recreation” had been hanging around in the East Village looking at the interesting art on offer there in galleries such as New Math, PPOW, Gracie Mansion, Pat Hearn, Civilian Warfare, and others.  We saw the work of many exciting artists, including, among others, David Wojnarowicz and Jean-Michel Basquiat. If you go back deep in my history, we had also been attracted to outsider art before this, we just didn't know it and couldn’t have identified it as such. I remember we saw a William Hawkins at the Ricco-Johnson Gallery in Soho that we inquired about, but it had been sold. This was way before we knew what outsider art was or who Hawkins or any other outsider artists were.

In the fall of 1984 I was working on a deal in Philadelphia with Sheldon Bonovitz. At one point I went into his conference room and saw it covered with great outsider art and asked him to “tell me more”. He recommended that I catch a later train home and sent me to the Janet Fleisher Gallery (now Fleisher Ollman), where John Ollman, then gallery manager, would tell me more about this art. So I went there and loved it; I put a number of things from the group show on hold. Then John showed me a Howard Finster glass tower that had just come into the Gallery. It was a fabulous piece, maybe Finster’s best glass tower ever! But John wouldn't let me put this piece on hold. At that time my wife and I had a family policy that if a piece cost more than 100 dollars we had to agree on it first and the Finster glass tower was significantly more than 100 dollars. I tried to reach my wife but couldn’t. So I had to make a decision on my own and I bought it!  From all this, I know that during the second week in November 1984 Anne and Lydia, my 14-month old daughter, took the train to Philadelphia in a snow storm to look at all the art I put on hold and ratify the piece I bought. Fortunately for me, she loved it. And my 14-month old daughter saw a William Dawson carved man with a brightly coloured top which she liked, which became her first piece of folk art!

Later that winter or the next spring John came up to visit us in New York and introduced us to Randall Morris and Shari Cavin who at that point happened to live in the building next to us in Tribeca. They were just beginning to sell art from their home , but soon they opened their first gallery three blocks away. We got into the habit of going there, putting the kids down in the middle of the floor with art supplies and began to educate ourselves. Randall and Shari have great “eyes” and fair prices, so they made it easy for us to continue to buy and also they increased our education. Around this time, we also met Phyllis Kind in Soho, Luise Ross, Aarne Anton at American Primitive and others. Also Ricco-Maresca’s first gallery was only three blocks up from Randall and Shari. So it was relatively easy for us to see art and develop our sensibilities. After we “discovered” outsider art, our art buying interests began to shift almost exclusively towards outsider art.

Monty and Phyllis Kind in her nursing home

2. How many pieces do you think are in your collection now?
I was bored the other day, and did a count of the pieces up in the apartment; it was between 1,200-1,300 pieces. There is a bit more work in storage too, maybe around 100-150 pieces. I have given some away over the years and given some to family, but I try to have most of it out. My late wife and I lived on Fifth Avenue with another place in Pennsylvania and these environments used to have a lot of art in them. When Anne died I sold the place in Pennsylvania and put some art and furniture into storage. In 2010 Leslie and I moved into the loft that we still live in now in Tribeca.

3. Can you tell us a bit about your background? And how long you have been the President of the American Folk Art Museum? When did the presidency end?
My background is that I was an English major in college. I went to Business school, graduating in 1979 and went to work on Wall Street in the summer of 1979. My wife was a PhD in economics and she continued as an academic. I was an investment banker from 1979-1998. In the early 2000’s I was an executive with an a small internet company, then a Senior Advisor to a private equity firm for a few years. My jobs were mostly finance and mergers and acquisitions. I really had no professional relationship with art (other than as a collector)!

My association with the American Folk Art Museum goes way back… In 1992 my late wife was an adjunct professor at the Baruch College and on the faculty committee advising the Sydney Miskin Gallery there. The gallery manager came to our apartment one day,  saw our collection and decided to put on an exhibition of some of our collection. So in early 1993, we did a show at Baruch in conjunction with Black History month – It was called ‘Black History, Black Artistry’ and presented a selection of pieces by African American artists from our collection. We didn’t specialize in this though although for a long time other folks thought we did! It was at this point that we were “discovered” by the American Folk Art Museum, even though the dealers, obviously, knew of us before; we’d been collecting eight years or so by then. By 1996 my wife had joined the board of the American Folk Art Museum (the “Museum”) as the chair of Education Committee, and she was also on the Executive Committee and later on the Building Committee. She was very involved. I was a non-board member of the Finance and Investment Committees. After my wife’s death in 2002 I joined the Board in the summer of 2003. Anne and I had gotten Laura Parsons interested in outsider art on a corporate trip in the Bahamas, and encouraged Laura to join the Board of the Museum. By 2006 or so Laura was the President of the Board, and I was a pretty much her “numbers guy”. About that time, the Board recognized that we had a significant financial challenge with the core structure of our operating costs and our debt. Eventually I chaired a Long-Range Planning Committee, which tried to identify potential solutions for this, and eventually I became Board Treasurer. As the nature of our financial challenges became clearer Laura was heroic as President; I promised her that as long as she remained President I would remain involved and do my best to help her and the Museum try to work our way through our problems. By the Spring/Summer 2011, thanks to Laura and her husband Dick Parsons, we had reached an agreement to sell the Museum’s building. The Executive Director resigned in April or May, and we had significant discussions about merging with other museums or about continuing the Museum’s operations in our smaller space in Lincoln Square. There was one group of Trustees pursuing the “merger option”, and another trying to figure out if we could try to “go it alone”.  (I participated in both groups.) One of the Trustees, Joyce Cowin, had previously said she would support Lincoln Square continuing as an independent museum, and in fall 2011 she committed a pledge of $2 million but with certain strings attached: (1) she did not want to be the only person giving money, (2) she wanted someone to be identified as the new leader before she put money forward and (3) she had certain performance criteria that the Museum would have to achieve over its first couple of years of operations.  I called Joyce and offered myself as the new leader and she said I would “do” and she’d support me. So I was elected President in September in 2011. In September 2019 I stepped down and I am now the Chair. Liz Warren is the President now, and Jason Busch is the Museum’s new Director. It is an appropriate time to turn over a new leaf in our leadership, and Liz is most capable to be President. She’s doing a great job.

The front wall in Monty and Che’s apartment

4. What is it that draws your eye away from contemporary art to outsider/folk art? Or do you collect both?
Well a number of things draw my eye to outsider art. With the contemporary art scene when we started collecting… the people I recall on the scene were the photo-realists, and other artists like Julian Schnabel, David Salle and Robert Longo. Rothko and Pollock were the demi-gods of the earlier generation. I didn’t really know of Cy Twombly or Dan Flavin, but most of these artists works were too expensive for us anyway. We really “got” Basquiat though, but couldn’t afford it. The others had a distance and coldness and intellectualism that we didn’t really respond to. We saw the work and went to openings, but we hung around the East Village as opposed to Soho as it was rougher, more intense and had less ironic intellectualism  - you felt you knew something about these artists. The word “authentic” is a dangerous word, but even if the East Village artists were ironic, it felt like their art was driven by them as opposed to someone else wanting them to make it. They felt young and “scrappy” and not part of the established art market scene.  We found the same sort of thing in the early “outsider artists” we saw: artists like Hawkins, Traylor, Yoakum, Simon Sparrow, Minnie Evans, and so on. You could feel their uniqueness and point of view for themselves and not for a market or a hypothetical audience. The other thing is, my wife and I were southerners (from North Carolina and Alabama) and Christian, so it was very easy for us to respond to art by southerners and African Americans and art with Christian imagery. We were natively sympathetic to their language and imagery, and we would go and visit some of these artists and talk to them and have a direct collector/artist relationship with them. But it was more than this. As we got more into this work, we got more engaged and we saw more work and met more dealers who were selling this work. We got to know Phyllis Kind and many others. And then the Outsider Art Fair started up; I think we went every year. It was a great environment to see new artists and meet new dealers. I know we first saw James Castle and ACM at OAF, and many others, I’m sure. If we saw a show of something like prison art and works were 100 dollars each - we could afford things like this. Then later came a time when a Wolfli, say, might  become available, and we could stretch for this, as my career was going well.

A side wall in Monty and Che’s apartment

5. What style of work, if any, is of particular interest to you within this field? (for example is it embroidery, drawing, sculpture, and so on)
We like a mix of everything. The thing that I would say is … one of the things that my wife and I had and that I think Che and I have too, is that we have a fair confidence in our own eye. Because we hung around with Randall, Shari, John Ollman, Luise Ross, Phyllis Kind, Ricco-Maresca and Carl Hammer, among many others, we were frequently exposed to good stuff, and from this we could see and identify the mediocre as well. So if these smart, thoughtful, experienced people on a semi-regular basis educate you, your eye gets better at recognizing the exceptional, or at least the works that will “last” for us. We didn't like everything that they showed us, but over time we developed a confident eye. And Anne and I both said that if we both like something the chances were that it would hold up and we would like it over time.

But let me be clear… we never viewed art as investment. The reason I don’t own a Darger was not that we didn’t “get” Darger; we thought he was pretty spectacular. But the first great one we saw was $16,000 and we couldn’t afford it at the time. Also I thought if we could get a Traylor for $8,000 why would we get a Darger for $16,000! We couldn't really afford over $10,000 at that time anyway, and we didn’t have a lot of space to hang such a big piece either. It was a miss though!  I’d like that decision back.

We were very confident in buying things that not everybody saw the artistic merits of. A friend came by the other day, and said you could go to dealers and with enough money and time you could replicate some other major collections, but he thought you could not replicate our collection; it’s too individual and too idiosyncratic! For better or worse. It suits us. There’s a standard of artistic merit that is worthwhile to us, and a quirkiness that suits us and is different from the sense of a collection put together by someone working with an art consultant. Just before my wife died she was thinking maybe we should “stop this art shit”. I had to reflect about whether I wanted to continue as a collector, and if so, what of? But after a while, I went back into collecting.  Perhaps it’s just my obsession. Over time my interests have expanded and my collection began to include other more primitive stuff and more photography and African currency and other objects that strike us as having the same authenticity. It is certainly much more diverse now than it was in 2002!

When Leslie and I first got together, she didn’t know anything about this art, but now she loves it. She helped create our Tribeca environment and the selection of the art. We are active collecting partners. Her sensibility is different from mine, but she’s very helpful in expanding the collection. At Spring Break recently, I had seen a piece that I thought was interesting, and she encouraged me to get it. Without her perspective and her nudge I most likely would not have purchased it. She will look at things and take them seriously and she often helps me see new things for being worthwhile. I value her opinion. We are a team. It's different when you’re starting out and younger, but she and I are definitely a team looking at and evaluating this art!

The front room of Monty and Che’s apartment

6. Would you say you had a favourite artist or piece of work within your collection? And why?
If you had children would you be able to decide which was your favourite? Ha! There is a shortlist of pieces though - around 4-6 pieces that when I walk around, I always talk about and that I have a deeper personal affinity for. There’s a Bill Traylor running rabbit on the fireplace. An 18th century wildcat with an intense look, that is greenish and a little obscure, a little odd and quite different from everything else. And there’s a Herbert Singleton carved wood panel scene of the Garden of Eden with a white serpent kissing Eve and both her and Adam are African/African American. I like to say that it’s a picture of “what really happened” in Eden.

7. Is there an exhibition in this field of art that you have felt has been particularly important? And why?
The seminal exhibition, in my opinion (and those of many others) is the 1981-82 Corcoran exhibition ‘Black Folk Art in America’. This was just before we got interested in this art, so we didn’t see it, but there was a book, which we soon purchased and loved! It clearly helped shape our sensibility. Also the Herb Hemphill/Julia Weissman book ‘20th Century American Folk Art and Artists’; this book was published just a little earlier (1974) but was still current as we started collecting. In many ways, that book became our “bible” for understanding the breadth and diversity and random sources that could feed an appreciation of folk art. It wasn't just the pieces that were great, but Bert Hemphill, especially, was an amazing collector with amazing eye.  He was always open to discovering new things, frequently completely off the beaten path. Anne and I also knew him as a competing collector. It was rare when we could get to an exhibition before Bert. More than once it happened that we’d be “early” to an exhibition and see a piece we wanted, only to find our that Bert had beat us to it; he generally picked out “the best”! He set the standard for how to open yourself up to folk art, wherever it might show up! We never consciously modeled ourselves on other collectors, but his openness and the diversity of his vision was what we tried to cultivate in our collecting. I’ll give you an example: we have a lacquered tray that Leslie and I found in an antiques shop in Yangon, Myanmar, that was made to commemorate the completion of an oil-drilling project. The artist is unknown, of course, the topic is a little “goofy” and it has no dealer or art market credibility, but it fits right into our collection and holds its own!

Untitled [Eve, the Serpent & Adam] Herbert Singleton. Photo credit: Ariel Jones

8. As you have a large collection now, what sort of pieces are you looking to continue to add to your collection?
It’s tough because these days if I get something I most likely have to take something down to put it up. I bought a bunch of little things at the recent Outsider Art Fair in New York. I bought a small blue and purple ink drawing by an Iranian artist from Cavin Morris Gallery and a ceramic caiman alligator-like sculpture from a Peruvian shamanic artist. At the Independent Art Fair I bought a recent huge great work by Marlon Mullen from Adams and Ollman. He’s someone I’ve grown to respect and like a lot, and I felt he was “good enough” for us to find a place for him in our home, even if we have to take some things down to fit it in. I am willing to stretch for a great large piece like this. Also I might buy works by artists who are new and that I think are great, but whose work may be just a little too expensive for the amateur collector and a little too weird for others. Shinichi Sawada’s work may be an example of this. I think more people will appreciate certain artists over time. If I gulp hard and negotiate hard, I may be able to get something that will add some other dimension to the range of works and sensibilities in my collection.

I got a piece by a young, trained Cuban artist, A.A. Rodriguez, who was shown for the first time at Spring Break as mentioned earlier. It is a framed piece that is an inch and a half deep. It is a model of four different views of the walls of a room in a decrepit apartment in Havana. So the model is very, very finely constructed, and you can look at it and know he is not an outsider. He is 25 years old and just graduating from art school. I’m not buying him so I can re-sell it in 10 years time, but he has a great artistic sensibility and I think he is likely to make even more interesting art in the future. Also at Spring Break I bought a wildly colorful and entertaining rug by Loraine Lynn from a gallery from Toledo, Ohio.

A close up of the work I bought by AA Rodriguez at the Jaeckel Gallery at the 2020 Spring Break Art Fair

9. From visiting your home, it seems like a work of art in itself, and it’s like a mini museum – it’s incredible! What are your plans for your collection in the future?
This question is high on my mind at the moment. Clearly I will give some works to the American Folk Art Museum and some to other museums; some will be sold and some will be given to my daughters. The collection is so diverse that no one place would want it all! And the other thing is a lot of these works gain in power from being associated with the other works that are hanging around here too. It's a combination of how we have hung them and the interplay between this artist’s type of thing and that artist’s type of thing. Figuring this out is my big job over the next couple of years.

10. I remember you saying to me once that you felt that an artist missing from your collection was Henry Darger, and that you missed the opportunity to buy one early on. Are there any other more well-known outsider artists that you feel are missing from your collection, in your opinion?
The challenge to answering this question is that in 1998 my wife and I gave 80 pieces to the American Folk Art Museum. In that collection was one of the original Morton Bartlett dolls and a great construction by Elijah Pierce of monkeys at a card table; there was a Wolfli that we gave which is the only one we had, and many other works that we and they thought were worthwhile … so I am missing these things. I gave them the best Hawkins picture ever, in my mind, that he painted just before he died. Darger and Basquiat are the artists that I clearly missed though.

Monty with his recent Marlon Mullen purchase at the Adams & Ollman booth at the 2020 Independent Art Fair

11. A conflicted term at present, but can you tell us about your opinion of the term outsider art, how you feel about it and if there are any other words that you think we should be using instead?
I am well aware that the term Outsider Art is somewhat controversial, and from some points of view, politically incorrect.  As I have thought about the art that I like & respond to, I have recognized that the environments, the histories, the contexts and the personal motivations of the artists have varied wildly, and in some [many?] cases, may be unknown or unknowable.  But it seems to me that virtually all of the substitute monikers that one might apply to this art are even more limited in their descriptive power or effectiveness. 

"Self-taught" may be accurate for most, but seems to me this focuses on just one narrow aspect of the artists', situation, creation and power, and does not always apply to all of "my" artists.  "Vernacular" is, I think, appropriate when applied to the works of many Southern, self-taught African-American artists who are independent, to say the least, creators, but who can be seen to be working in a particular vernacular tradition ["yard art", quilting, etc].  "Contemporary" refers only to works that have been produced relatively recently, and is only useful, maybe, in distinguishing from more traditional (19th century & before) folk art.  For much of my early collecting career, I was generally comfortable with the term "20th century or contemporary folk art" (cf: Hemphill & Weissman's book and the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Museum that features both traditional and more contemporary works), but over time other folks [the field?] have become sensitive about more clearly distinguishing what I call outsider art from traditional 'folk art".  So the term "folk art" has become generally applied more narrowly to pre-twentieth century works.

Perhaps the best term other than Outsider Art is "Non-Mainstream Art", coined (or at least actively promoted) by my friend Randall Morris.  This term is both broad and inoffensively non-descriptive enough to be a big tent for many forms of artistic achievement.  But for me, it is vague about the difference between "mainstream" and "non-mainstream" art and therefore less useful in defining the field than "outsider art".  I would expect that very many successful darlings of the art world would certainly characterize themselves as "non-mainstream", at least until they get represented by Zwirner or Gagosian or have their first solo show at the Whitney or MoMA.

For me, the term "outsider" is more useful than "non-mainstream", because it captures the thought that this art is generally being produced literally outside the traditional academic or generally established art market channels.  I recognize that this difference is becoming harder to identify as the market and distribution channels for outsider art have become more developed (the OAF, the many more galleries, Creative Growth and its ilk, etc).  I've identified a number of paths [at least 8] that might lead to the creation of art outside these channels: (1) individuals with certain developmental challenges, whether working in the context of a supportive "atelier" (Judith Scott, Shinichi Sawada, etc) or living out in the world (Susan Te Kahurangi King, George Widener), (2) individuals working in more "restrictive" environments (prisons, mental institutions) (Ramirez, Wolfli, Podhorsky), (3) technically untrained artists working in their societal vernacular traditions, such as the Gee's Bend quilters, Thornton Dial, Joe Minter, etc, (4) "isolates" pursuing their distinctive personal artistic visions independent of any audience or market (Darger, Eugene Van Bruenchenhein, Morton Bartlett, Consalvo, maybe James Harald Jennings), (5) the "driven", by which I mean people who feel the need to produce art to help them achieve some other, frequently religious, objective (Finster, Blayney, Sister Gertrude Morgan, Calvin & Ruby Black at Possum Trot), (6) the late bloomers (Ha!), artists who came to producing art "on their own" late in life (Traylor, William Hawkins, Simon Sparrow, Mose T, Tim Morgan), but with no obvious disability or limitations, (7) "oddballs" (double Ha!) like Justin McCarthy or William Mortensen, who had some training but whose artistic tastes and production took them far from their more technical academic roots, (8) anonymous "independent" works, like memory jugs, or the Philadelphia "Wire Man", (9) and there are certainly other paths that could be identified...

One could certainly create a matrix of characteristics of all these artists (institutionalized or no; isolated or integrated with society, trained or totally untrained, mentally or emotionally challenged, producing for personal consumption or for sale, etc.), and many of these artists would fit in more than one, maybe several of these boxes.  There is obviously a lot of crossover and commonality among many of these groups; where, for instance, might Purvis Young fit, exactly?  In many of these boxes, I think.

With all these different wellsprings of creativity and artistic production, I think any term would be challenged to be 'fair" to all these artists or "schools" of art.  But to reduce verbal cumbersomeness, and in the interests of conversational efficiency, I have settled on "Outsider" as the term that is most descriptive a "catch-all" and most useful for me.  The "art history" example I use as a touchstone for my shorthand is "the Impressionists".  I think except among the most pedantic of art historians, the term the Impressionists conveys a sense of artists working mostly in France and working mostly between, say, 1865 and 1900.  Depending on how precise one is being, it could range from Manet to Cezanne and Gaugin or Seurat (even including Douanier Rousseau).  Not all of these artists worked at exactly the same time or even with the same "impressionistic" techniques, but you can find them all, I think, in a museum of "Impressionism", and the world is not poorer for the over general characterization that the term conveys.

I regret that some of my [outsider] artist friends object to this term and feel that it is condescending or belittling.  "I'm not an outsider artist!  I'm an artist!"  And I agree that all of the creators I've been talking about above are Artists!, not "Outsider Artists".  They produce art that is great and that satisfies and stimulates me.  But they have generally produced work that is clearly independent of and outside the main environments and structures of the art world.  So I find "Outsider Art" by far the most useful description of this art that I love so much.

12. Is there anything else that you would like to add?
Not that I can think of. Thank you for all your stimulating questions! This has been a fun conversation!

Monty and Che’s apartment