The Jessica Park Project continues to expand its focus. With Jessica Park's remarkable life and art as its model, the Project not only supports research about and highlights other artists with disabilities, but also explores marginalized community-based art such as Contemporary Folk and Native American art, Spanish American and Children's art. Project programs are also reaching out to the local community—Good Purpose Gallery and the College Internship Program, in Lee MA; Community Access to the Arts, in Great Barrington MA; the Bennington Museum, in Bennington VT; the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, in Brattleboro VT—and interfacing with organizations such as Pure Vision Arts in New York, the Groden Center in Providence, RI, The Poetry Studio in Marlboro, VT, Arts of Life in Chicago, and the Folk Art Society of America, whose missions embrace the creation and exhibition of Outsider Art.
The Project is now also working with the Center for Teaching and Learning at MCLA and the cultural arm of the college—MOSAIC—to establish an Outsider Art curriculum Archive, a resource for teachers and students to research and study how art can be a way to reach a deeper understanding of the values of inclusion and diversity.
Tony Gengarelly, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus of Fine Arts at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. He has written and published on a variety of subjects, including Native American painting and Outsider Art. Most noteworthy are articles for the Folk Art Messenger and publications on American poster art, Maurice Prendergast, and American landscape painting. . He has edited and written two books on the art of Jessica Park (Exploring Nirvana, MCLA 2008; A World Transformed, MCLA 2014). Gengarelly has curated, individually or with his students, over 40 exhibitions. Some of these have been featured at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williams College Museum of Art, MCLA Gallery 51, and the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center. For the past 17 years he has been the director of the Jessica Park Project, an educational and professional program at MCLA. He can be contacted at a.gengarelly@mcla.edu or 802-257-8972.
The Jessica Park Project
Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts
Project Director: Tony Gengarelly, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus MCLA
