This survey, the first museum exhibition on Carlo Zinelli (1916–1974) in the United States, coincides with the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of this revered and distinctive Italian artist—a canonical art brut figure included in Jean Dubuffet’s collection from the 1960s.
The show highlights four distinct phases in Zinelli’s oeuvre and new scholarship, through a selection of fifty-five paintings (many displayed double-sided), audio recordings of Zinelli, a film, and images by Life magazine photographer John Phillips.
The exhibition brings together artworks from the American Folk Art Museum and other private and public collections from the United States and abroad, notably the Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne, the Fondazione Culturale Carlo Zinelli, Verona, and the collection of Audrey B. Heckler, New York.