Fleisher/Ollman gallery
915 Spring Garden St.
Philadelphia
Showing Jun 05 — Aug 15, 2025
Seen July 15, 2025
Fleisher/Ollman’s latest gallery show, “Outside,” is a group exhibit on outdoor art — by outsider artists.
The gallery, which primarily shows work by self-taught artists and individuals working outside the mainstream, currently looks something like a mailroom. Its walls are decorated with dozens of compact landscapes and scenes resembling postcards. The images, collected from at least 15 artists — some deceased and others up-and-coming contemporaries — are snapshots of locations and landmarks real and imagined.
The result is a mixed bag of perspectives on “being outside,” described through disparately dated works displaying utopic other-worlds beside realistic scenes of despair.
Some of these are familiar pictures. Gen-Z painter and skateboarder Nasir Young, for instance, captures the distant glow of a Chinese restaurant through oil on panel in his artwork “Yummy House.” Most neighborhoods across the country are dappled with shitty Americanized Chinese food; “Yummy House” is the specific signage that Young’s subject uses to sell itself in most simple terms. Young paints the sign “Yummy House” twice — as a banner on the building’s facade and as a poster on a street post — reflecting the redundancy immigrants sport as a means of making their culture understandable to popular audiences.
This is a different view from Gen X-er Samantha Nye’s opulent, queer pool scene, titled, “And if the world runs out of lovers, we’ll still have each other,” which positions naked women lounging around a private pool. Nye is inspired by photographer Slim Aarons’ 1960s portraits of wealthy people in their luxury homes, but inserts an intergenerational array of lesbian subjects into the picture. It’s a contained portrayal of an in-ground pool that is insular but inclusive; the swimming hole is bound by phallic-looking trees and foliage, but dotted with bent-over and otherwise undressed women who welcome the viewer in with open arms.
Sophie White’s plein air observations, on the other hand, paint outsider-dom in motion by showcasing gentrification time-lapsed in cities like Philadelphia and New York City. Her 2021 gouache on paper work, “Contrast,” describes new architectural ascent, blurring the lines between “outside” and “inside” by detailing the skeleton of a bare-bones building webbed in layers of gates, fencing, and signage. The end product could be high-rent apartments predicated on keeping certain renters outside its reach, but while under construction, the property is everyone’s business. Those pushed outside of their homes by development get to witness the whole phenomenon in action; the sterile metal planks of modern mass architecture intersect in White’s eye to form the illusion of windows looking through windows.
These intricate and colorful contemporary perspectives contrast with older artworks on display, such as Joseph Yoakum’s 1968 drawing of “Lake Ockachobia in Ever Glades South East Florida.” This landscape is a study in spatial awareness, understanding a place through simple symbols of little islands framed by water, trees and mountains. Yoakum pans out to the tributaries, tunnels and land masses that demarcate communication between entities. It’s an easy metaphor for modes of human disconnect: one world is split into several smaller ones that ultimately coheres into a collective forest.
The show’s stand-out image is James Castle’s undated and untitled drawing of totem poles stacked next to one another. Castle, who was born in 1899 and recognized as one of the preeminent self-taught artists of the 20th century, was born deaf and never learned to speak, sign or write. Using soot and his own saliva, he draws the silhouettes of totem poles — spiritually significant symbols typically specific to indigenous cultures — in shadowy gray like headstones in a graveyard.
It is, like nearly every artwork on Fleisher/Ollman's walls, an interpretative documentation of cultural death and rebirth. Together, these artists testify to what is lost when we are unable to look past homogeneity — and what is gained by inviting others inside our heads.
