THE MUSEUM OF EVERYTHING

A fantastic temporary museum has opened last Autumn in Primrose Hill in London. You enter through a tiny alleyway on a side street and find yourself in a huge building that began its life as a dairy and was until recently a proper recording studio. The name of the eccentric location is The Museum Of Everything and it is the only public space dedicated to outsider art in the city: a massive collection of artworks created by untrained artists, operating outside the commercial art world, in remote or impoverished communities and sometimes in mental institutions. Crammed into a warren of corridors, cubicles, shaped rooms and one cavernous double-height space, is a big exhibition of the marginalised art of the past 200 years, which has at various times been labelled art brut, outsider art, folk art, naive art, visionary art. There's a cosy tea room with wooden tables and vintage china, plus a mini retail space with a simple, handmade appeal, selling crafted things such as tea towels and badie. For those not in the know the Museum of Everything is an exhibition of what for want of a better term has been called ‘outsider art’. It’s been the smash hit of the autumn and it’s free.