Jim Bloom, "Geographies of Freedom"
Woodmere Art Museum
9201 Germantown Ave.
Philadelphia
Seen April 20, 2025
Showing from Jan. 18 - July 13, 2025
Two men are looking at the same picture of avant-garde garbage. One wears a collared shirt and tie, the other nothing but a crown and tighty-whities.
That scene, built with paint on corrugated cardboard, is artist Jim Bloom’s straightforwardly titled “Two men looking at collage on wall" (pictured above). It’s one of several cynical outpourings drafted by the local painter that are currently hanging inside the Woodmere Art Museum as part of the retrospective “Geographies of Freedom.”
The works represent the epitome of outsider art. That’s not because of Bloom’s Basquiat-borrowed style of brusque scribbles. It’s due to how Bloom evidently sees himself as the odd man out in every situation, whether as the disillusioned subject of autobiographical self-portraiture or as the author of alienation through moments observed and imagined.
This is evident in his image “Golden Arches,” which shows a pair of clowns staring dejectedly at a far-off McDonald’s; “Scene in a Gay Club” details a trio of lurid transactions between half-naked and disgruntled men; “Mother and Child” subverts the Mother Mary archetype by illustrating a postpartum-depressed mother mid-sneer with a baby strapped to her chest. These are all hazy visions documented on wrinkled paper and otherwise unexpected canvases, suggesting that the artist behind them is, perhaps, not the most reliable narrator.
That said, I think Bloom’s perspective is reliable; it’s just not commercially relatable. The apparent and intense subjectivity of his hand is a form of honesty. Humans have a natural desire to want to fit in. But when we lie to ourselves as an homage to false uniformity, we bulldoze over the ways society manufactures chronic isolation from a true collective reality.
Born in Allentown and now residing in Philadelphia, Bloom began painting after a 2002 car accident left him with a debilitating back injury and movement disorder causing muscle contractions and tremors. For Bloom, disability became the factor that deeply distanced him from the buttoned-up perfectionism of mainstream culture.
“Two men looking at collage on wall” most clearly captures this sense of separation from others. While so much of Bloom’s work involves chronicling the everyday estrangement of people on the forlorn streets and straits of Philadelphia, the former piece alludes to the snobby sobriety of a gallery room.
He achieves the absurdist sensibility of private art exhibits by whacking white paint over a dismantled cardboard box. The meta sculpture features a smaller artwork hanging in the center of the show, an indecipherable play on Bloom’s usual abstract style. The focus is not on the interior piece of artwork, but rather on the composition of the two men observing it.
Whereas the patron of the arts who probably paid for museum admission wears slacks and a tie in a cog-in-the-machine-kind-of-way, the artist, Bloom, stands off to the side in nothing but his underwear, completely exposed to an audience that he clearly doubts could ever understand his point of view.
This functions as a commentary on the soul-sucking ways of the art world, but it more importantly describes Bloom’s deeply personal experience of expressing and then selling his perspective as a disabled artist. Bloom's artistic fixation on messy corruption no doubt lies in how high society values the emotional labor of so-called outsiders while doing little to materially improve lives occurring on the outskirts of institutions like schools, hospitals, and the nuclear family unit.
It’s a backwards system of reflection and production that Bloom articulates well not only visually but verbally. Of “Two men looking at collage on wall,” Bloom wrote in an artist statement: “We all compare ourselves to images, but we forget who created them.”
