"Outsider" Art

What’s powerful about this kind of grandiose vision—or mission, or paradise, or machine—is that it can’t be easily interrupted or ruined. Look at a single decorated toilet-paper tube or a painted sign taken from the Everlasting Gospel Mission of Sister Gertrude Morgan (1900–80), and you can still see the intensity of her vision. Remove a few “pretties” from Blagdon’s Healing Machine or hang a few strands of it in an exhibit (as the Philadelphia Museum of Art did), and you can still make out the grand obsession.