Dennis Hollingsworth

Alice Mackler at Kerry Schuss Gallery

Alice Mackler at Kerry Schuss Gallery in the LES.

This is Alice's first solo show. She got a lot of press attention from Joanne Greenbaum's curated show at James Fuentes Gallery, titled Forget about the Swetbreads earlier this year. I'd love to recount her bio here, but I don't think I could do it justice, so I recommend seeing the show and talking to gallerist Kerry Schuss, who indulged my curiosity quite generously. One upshot of her history is that she would be nominally categorized as an "outsider artist", but I don't think this distinction has the same meaning as it once did. The art world apparently seeks an authenticity of total commitment in the outsider artist, and one could speculate that this might stem from an insecurity about how a creeping professionalism could be displacing authentic commitment in the art community. Outsiders, by definition, don't seem to care about their inclusion into the art world, but the art world seems to care a great deal that they don't care, in contrast. This concern seems to arise from the grassroots of the art community, rather than from the "top down".

At the opening, Alice did seem amused about her good fortune. I'm looking forward to seeing her subsequent work to see how the limelight might -or might not- affect her imagination.