Fleisher/Ollman Gallery

The Fleisher/Ollman Gallery opened in Philadelphia in 1952 as the Janet Fleisher Gallery. Over the course of the next four decades, the Gallery established a reputation as one of the world's premiere sources of self-taught art, defining the field and helping to develop major public and private collections of this once-marginalized group of artists. We were among the first to mount major exhibitions for Henry Darger, Sister Gertrude Morgan, Bill Traylor, and Martin Ramirez, and we published early catalogues for James Castle, William Edmondson, and Joseph Yoakum. Since 1997, when John Ollman became sole owner, the Gallery's emphasis has shifted toward the exhibition of contemporary artists in order to reflect the influence of the self-taught. This revised curatorial mission—recently amended to remove from discourse entirely the “self-taught” label as a distinct entity—has become particularly relevant as many contemporary artists eschew the academic in favor of intuitive practice. In addition to our modern and contemporary interests (among them Joseph Cornell, H.C. Westermann, Ed Ruscha, and Alfred Jensen), we continue to showcase the most significant American vernacular artists of the 20th century, including the exclusive representation of Felipe Jesus Consalvos and the Philadelphia Wireman. Recently, due to our annual group shows of young Philadelphia talent, cutting-edge young artists like Anthony Campuzano have joined this pantheon alongside American modernists like Castle and Consalvos