The version of brutjournal you’re examining right now is what we’re calling a sample or “teaser” issue, containing examples of the kinds of news items and articles the magazine will bring you each month, starting with the publication of its first regular monthly issue on September 1, 2021. Looking ahead to that inaugural issue, we’ll be publishing exclusive excerpts from Daniel Wojcik’s forthcoming book, Artist as Astronaut: The Otherworldly Art of Ionel Talpazan (which will be issued later this year by Strange Attractor in the United Kingdom and distributed in the United States by The MIT Press). A specialist in folk art and mythology who teaches at the University of Oregon, Wojcik is a well-known authority on the life and work of Talpazan (1955-2015), a Romanian-born, self-taught artist who immigrated to the U.S. and lived a hardscrabble life in New York City, where he sold his paintings and drawings on the street. The subject of his art was also his lifelong obsession: unidentified flying objects. Talpazan lived and breathed UFOs. Wojcik’s article to come promises to take us away... September’s inaugural issue will also feature another exclusive — our report about a discovery, in Switzerland, of a group of unusual paintings, painted ceramics, and mixed-media garments in an old house that was purchased by a foreign businessman. (See the separate box here on THE BIG PAGE.) As interesting as his big find turned out to be, so did his unexpected adventures in lawyerland. That’s because, even though the house’s former owners had sold it to him along with everything in it, its buyer wisely sought to obtain full intellectual property rights governing the artworks. There is a lesson in this unwitting new art collector’s experience, and we’re going to explain what it is. There are more, more, more verses to sing in our September-is-coming song. About, for example, the exhibition of “ordinary” people’s art the cross-dressing British artist Grayson Perry has organized for an art center in Manchester; it’s linked to his popular “Grayson’s Art Club” TV program on the U.K.’s Channel 4, and our special correspondent in northern England is going to see it.

brutjournal’s founder and editor in chief, the art critic, art historian, and curator Edward M. Gómez, sets the scene and the agenda for the new magazine, describing its thematic scope and the ideas and interests that inspired him and a group of collaborators to create a new publication focusing on, as its masthead announces, “outsider art, art brut, the unclassifiable, and the avant-avant-garde.” (What the heck is “the avant-avant-garde”?) As Edward explains, as much as we’ll be examining new, experimental, and innovative ways of making, showing, and living with art, we’ll also be looking at how various aspects of already familiar art forms and of everyday life can still be seen as radically inventive, depending on how you regard and appreciate them. Read his introduction here.

On June 26, 2021, in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center’s new Art Preserve building will celebrate its grand opening. This spacious annex to the arts center’s nearby main building will house its vast, diverse collections of outsider and self-taught artists’ creations in visible-storage settings. It will offer a wide range of educational programs inspired by and illuminating those varied holdings.