Around the year 1910, a patient at State Lunatic Asylum No. 3 in Nevada, Missouri, who referred to himself as The Electric Pencil, executed 280 drawings in ink, pencil, crayon and colored pencil. These beautiful drawings of animals, people and buildings were executed on both sides of 140 ledger pages, each bearing the name of the hospital in official type across the top, thus dramatizing the interface of the institutional and the creative. The Electric Pencil's drawings were sewn into a handmade album of fabric and leather, which shortly afterwards was lost--for a century. Now that album is presented publicly for the first time since its making, displaying for contemporary audiences the strange and poignant beauty of the drawings. His many portraits--head-and-shoulders or just heads--feature formal, sometimes dazed-looking men and women with elaborate hats or razor-parted hair who stare out of the page with wide, piercing eyes that suggest both a possible chilling regime of "mental health" treatment and the unblinking, unsettling gaze of those who haunt the margins of sanity and society. The handsomely designed hardbound format of The Drawings of the Electric Pencil features an art folio book block within that opens flat. An essay by Lyle Rexer places the work in the broader context of outsider art, in which The Electric Pencil emerges as an artist of singular brilliance.

From the beginning, abstraction has been intrinsic to photography, and its persistent popularity reveals much about the medium. The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography is the first book in English to document this phenomenon and to put it into historical context, while also examining the diverse approaches thriving within contemporary photography. Author Lyle Rexer examines abstraction at pivotal moments, starting with the inception of photography, when many of the pioneers believed the camera might reveal other aspects of reality. The Edge of Vision traces subsequent explorations--from the Photo Secessionists, who emphasized process and emotional expression over observed reality, to Modernist and Surrealist experiments. In the decades to follow, in particular from the 1940s through the 1980s, a multitude of photographers--Edward Weston, Aaron Siskind and Barbara Kasten among them--took up abstraction from a variety of positions. Finally, Rexer explores the influence the history of abstraction exerts on contemporary thinking about the medium. Many contemporary artists--most prominently Ilan Wolff, Marco Breuer and Ellen Carey--reject photography's documentary dimension in favor of other possibilities, somewhere between painting and sculpture, that include the manipulation of process and printing. In addition to Rexer's engagingly written and richly illustrated history, this volume includes a selection of primary texts from and interviews with key practitioners and critics such as Edward Steichen, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and James Welling.

Although the status of Outsider Art has grown in the art world-with its own canon of classic works and artists, dealers, museum exhibitions, an annual fair, and even its own auction category at a major international house-most art lovers still can't say precisely what it is and don't know how to assess its worth. How is it different from "self-taught" or folk art? What does it have to do with conditions such as autism and schizophrenia? As outsider works increasingly command upwards of six figures, there is a pressing need for a book to help people navigate both the aesthetics and business of Outsider Art.

This is the only book that lays out the ground rules for understanding, appreciating, and evaluating outsider artworks. It provides an overview of the field; showcases the most exciting works, many never before published, by such important artists as Henry Darger, William Hawkins, and Adolf Wölfi; offers guidelines for aesthetic and collecting judgments; and gives compelling accounts of some of the field's spectacular successes. How to Look at Outsider Art attests to these works' growing importance to contemporary art.

The remarkable story of Jonathan Lerman, a young artist with autism, seized the attention of the art world in 2002 Outsider Art Fair. Coverage by The New York Times, the Today Show, 48 Hours, and other international media has brought him into millions of homes across the country. This selection of fifty drawings, with a text by critic Lyle Rexer, presents the full range and astonishing growth of Jonathan's extraordinary talent. Diagnosed with autism and at first scarcely able to communicate, Jonathan began drawing at age ten. By age twelve, his drawings were exhibited at K. S. Art in New York. Working with the assurance of a Matisse, the speed of a Picasso and the humour of a born cartoonist, Jonathan has created an unforgettable body of work. His drawings include portraits of actual figures as well as figures from his own imagination, all rendered with great acuity. These drawings overturn the stereotype of the so-called savant artist as an unchanging talent sprung to life fully formed. Instead, they detail the restless experimentation and rapid growth of an artistic sensibility. Jonathan Lerman: The Drawings of a Boy with Autism is a book not just for art lovers but for everyone who values the rich diversity of the creative imagination. In addition to an illuminating essay on Jonathan's work, the book also contains an afterword by Caren Lerman, Jonathan's mother, describing the sudden appearance of his talent and the challenges and satisfactions of raising a gifted child with autism.

Photography's Antiquarian Avant-Garde charts the full-blown rebellion of contemporary photographers against the advent of digital photography and their reversion to photographic methods used in the nineteenth century. These photographers seek to reengage the physical facts of photography, its material and processes, by turning to the history of photography for metaphors, technical information, and visual inspiration. The artists in this volume are from all over the world and use a wide array of photographic processes. Among the artists and processes featured are Chuck Close's daguerreotypes, Sally Mann's collodion prints, Jayne Hinds Bidaut's photogram tintypes, Shirine Sharif's photograms, Gabor Kerekes's carbon dichromates, and Laurent Millet's toned silver prints. For these artists, these steps into the past are a way to reimagine and redirect not only the photographic object, but also the act of photography itself.

This celebration of the American Museum of Natural History's first 125 years is chock full of natural and cultural history lessons, as well as being a historical narrative of the museum itself. The descriptions of the many museum expeditions, covering such diverse places as the poles, the Pacific Northwest, Africa, the American Southwest, and Mexico and led by such noted explorers and scientists as Robert E. Peary, Carl Akeley, and Margaret Mead, are fascinating and entertaining tales. The more than 240 illustrations and color plates complement the text very well. Not an essential purchase, but it should be considered for public and academic collections.

One hundred American self-taught painters of the twentieth century--including Victor Duena, Sister Gertrude Morgan, Henry Darger, and Freddie Brice--are captured in a collection of 260 full-color reproductions of their extraordinary artworks.