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Excerpt from A State of GRACE by Lucy R. Lippard Deep in the labyrinth of dirt roads between the rolling fields, lakes, and patches of woods of the Northern Kingdom, art still has GRACE, a quality rare in current culture and just the right name for this organization. Twenty plus years of programs by Grass Roots Art and Community Effort have made artmaking contagious rather than exclusive. In the process some wonderful things have happened, as they do when people ignore conventions. Art is always better off without a name, when it can divest itself of the belts and corsets of categorization and expand comfortably into the vast domains of possibility, memory and invention. In recent years categories have been hotly contested -- from Folk Art to Outsider Art to Naive or Intuitive Art to Self-Taught or Untrained Art to Vernacular Art (my favorite). In Northern Vermont there is “art” and there is “GRACE art.” “Outsider” art is a somewhat arrogant term because it has no mirror image. Artworld artists don’t call themselves “insiders,” if for no other reason than the myth of all artists being outsiders, even outlaws. For most of the 20th century, “high art” has been seen paradoxically as the inside story told by these outsiders. Content, meaning and accessibility have seldom been priorities. Today much mainstream art, driven by fashion and the market, has gotten so far away from daily lived experience that expressions of basic needs have come to be seen as the turf of those “outside” of art history. Consequently, some perceive programs like GRACE to be run by “real artists” who have been “trained” to hand down their expertise to people who supposedly have not been “trained”. Yet sometimes the GRACE artists themselves teach workshops. And the people who staff GRACE have divested themselves of the bonds of their own fine art training (while keeping the inspiration) and allied themselves with fellow artists who have not been broken in to the high art harness.
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