WHEN “THEM” BECOMES “US,” AND “US” BECOMES “THEM”
Published on March 20, 2026
by Edward M. Gómez
NEW YORK — With its carnival-like vibe — it’s certainly the world’s most welcoming, festive art fair — and its exhibitors’ booths often packed to bursting with colorful paintings, drawings, sculptures, and other hard-to-classify confections, the annual Outsider Art Fair, which is now up and running, through Sunday, March 22, at the Metropolitan Pavilion in downtown Manhattan, offers an alluring cacophony of visual delights.
This high-profile event celebrates the collective, unbridled — and unpredictable — imagination of self-taught art-makers who tend to produce their distinctive creations on the margins of so-called mainstream society and culture. Its latest iteration takes place at a moment of unfathomable, multifaceted crisis in the United States and around the world, as useless, aimless, destructive wars launched or supported by Uncle Sam rage on, economies dangerously wobble and weaken, and the corruption, criminality, mendacity, and greedy profiteering of power elites everywhere go unchecked.
Against such a historical backdrop, and within the colorful, exciting setting of the giant, burst piñata that is the Outsider Art Fair, there is one big, bold, new artwork on view that dares to stand back from the fiesta to take the measure of the current moment of uncertainty and anxiety, even as it does so with humor, sass, and charm. It’s a work of art that refers to American political history without functioning polemically or in a propagandistic manner. It’s at once sophisticated and clever, and superbly well crafted.
This large-scale, mixed-media work, titled “Them! Us!,” is Della Wells and Anne Marie Grgich’s collaboratively produced “quilt,” as they call it; this thematically ambitious, timely creation offers a knock-out spectacle of meticulous needlework and fabric-based collage-making.
As far as its subject matter is concerned, as it uses the Stars and Stripes as its background and, technically speaking, its support surface, “Them! Us!” recalls and depicts a number of well-known figures from U.S. political history as a way of referring, in shorthand, to the pageant of American democracy’s evolution over more than two centuries. Among them: Richard Nixon, Shirley Chisholm, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Maxine Waters, and even Mike Johnson, Donald Trump’s lapdog Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Della Wells (born 1951) is based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and is known for the fine craftsmanship of her collages on paper, made with printed-matter elements and scraps of paper she paints herself. As she was growing up, Wells liked making up stories and characters inspired by her mother’s memories of her own childhood in North Carolina. Young Della’s story-making offered her what the modern British writer Graham Greene used to call a “way of escape” from the emotional impact of an unstable family life. It wasn’t until she was in her early forties that she began making art.
Wells’s images suggest character-driven narratives as they explore the lives of black women in society — their sense of identity and how social attitudes shape their sense of self; how they present themselves and are perceived; and how power in society, as its plays out in various forms and ways, affects their lives.
Anne Marie Grgich (born 1961) lives and works in Tacoma, Washington, just south of Seattle. Like Wells, Grgich is a self-taught artist who is known for her multi-textured images and complex compositions. Collage is also an essential creative tool in her image-making kit. Typically, she blends collage elements seamlessly into her mixed-media pictures, some of whose compositions are complex and packed with narrative ideas, and into her artist’s books, which are colorful objects radiating mysterious auras.
Grgich, who brought up by Croatian parents who passed along to her their strong work ethic, suffered a traumatic head injury when she was about 20 years old. She had long enjoyed making art, but in the aftermath of that major accident, creating her art become more satisfying and meaningful than ever.
Both Wells and Grgich have brought their interest in collage-making to their handling and use of fabric, sewing, and needlework techniques to create mixed-media, textile-based works they refer to as “collaborative quilts.”
Now, at the Outsider Art Fair, “Them! Us!” is on view in the booth of the Milwaukee-based gallery Portrait Society.
There, on the fair’s opening night, Wells and Grgich showed me their big, new work and described its character and messages. Wells said, “We call it ‘Them! Us!’ because, as we’ve all seen, over time and especially now, it seems that the two main political parties often behave the same way. There’s ambiguity in politics sometimes. So, sometimes ‘them’ can become ‘us,’ and ‘us’ can appear to become ‘them.’”
Grgich told me, “There’s a lot going on in this piece. We wanted to honor the role of black women and of women in general in American history.” She pointed to two female figures sitting back to back in their composition’s foreground; together, their heads bring to mind an iconic Janus figure.
Grgich also noted that the big artwork uses white lace to depict the Capitol Building. “We feminized that famous, historic building by depicting it with lace,” the artist said.
In a statement written to describe “Them! Us!,” Wells notes, “Many Americans view the two-party system as fostering polarization and gridlock. Many see both parties as failing to create political Yin and Yang or political balance to improve and protect the lives and rights of the American people.” (On the dome of their Capitol Building, Wells and Grgich have affixed a Yin and Yang symbol made of American-flag stars and stripes.)
Wells’s description of the quilt she has created with Grgich also observes that today’s “‘Them! Us!’ mentality needs to stop.” She writes, “Regardless of who we are, false political dogma is not going to save us from climate change, another pandemic, natural disaster, or war. If we don’t face the truth, we will continue to be stuck.”
Memo to curators from the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and other museums with an eye for historically important works of contemporary art and, ideally, something of an art-buying budget: Don’t wait to acquire Wells and Grgich’s “Them! Us!” — and then immediately put it on display.
This work of art is an instant classic, and it deserves to be seen by a wide, diverse audience.