Welcome in. Browse our unique collection of folk, outsider, visionary and surreal art from Latin America and the United States.

                           
                                Featured Artist Jose Francisco Borges

 

            Jose Francisco Borges (1935-) is the greatest self-taught master of Brasilian folk woodcut. A true outsider, he has only attended 10 months of school in his life yet he has designed thousands of woodcut masterpieces and written hundreds of folhetos; chapbooks of narrative verse.

            Mr. Borges woodcuts have been exhibited in the Louvre in Paris, France: the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, United States: and the Museum of International Folk in Sante Fe, NM, United States. The Library of Congress in Washington has preserved a collection of his art in their archives. UNESCO recently honored him for his contributions to world culture. It’s very rare for a living outsider artist to receive such accolades yet Mr. Borges remains humble.

            True to his diverse Latin culture, Mr. Borges' subjects range from the bawdy to the divine. Catholicism, Afro-American religions, Brasilian culture and folklore, current events and the beauty of the Brasilian countryside have all served as inspiration for his artistic and literary work. His collected stories read like a Brasilian Canterbury Tales. An innate but naive sense of design enables him to tell compelling stories visually with more power, pathos or humor than the written word.

 

Please click the "Gallery Artists" link in the upper left to see Mr. Borges work