Mirror shards and painted glass cover the building in front of you, glittering like nothing else in the city. The American Visionary Art Museum was founded in 1995 by Rebecca Alban Hoffberger with a mandate to collect and exhibit the work of self-taught artists — people who make art because they cannot not make it, driven by inner necessity rather than career calculation. The museum's collection includes massive whirligigs, intricate embroidered life stories, paintings done on found materials with house paint, sculptures assembled from salvaged junk, and works by artists who spent decades in isolation creating their visions with no expectation of recognition.
The exterior of the building, covered in a mosaic of mirror fragments, glittering glass, and painted images, is itself a piece of outsider art. The fourteen-story whirligig sculpture by the late folk artist Vollis Simpson stands in the plaza. AVAM has become one of Baltimore's most distinctive cultural institutions, a counterpoint to the formal museums up the hill.
It reflects something authentic about Baltimore — a city that has always made room for the eccentric, the homemade, and the genuinely weird, from the rowhouse art installations of Highlandtown to the films of John Waters. The museum is a reminder that creativity is not a credentialed profession but a human impulse.