Outsider Art Fair’s New Director Elizabeth Denny Discusses Her Role

Elizabeth Denny was named the new director of the Outsider Art Fair last week.

Founded in 1993, the fair is known for its focus on art brut, folk art, outsider art, and self-taught art, as well as Progressive Art Studios. It is currently scheduled to hold its next edition in New York in March 2026.

Denny’s previous experience in the art industry included director at Eric Firestone Gallery and founding her own namesake gallery in 2013, with locations in New York and Hong Kong. Denny holds a bachelor of arts in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and an masters of arts in Modern art from Columbia University. She also lectures at Columbia and Sotheby’s Institute, and serves as a founding board member of the organization Less Than Half, which seeks to address the gap of underrecognized women artists in the art world.

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Below, Denny spoke to ARTnews about her decision to take the new role, dealing with the uncertainty in the art market right now, and how she measures success.

ARTnews: Having attended so many art fairs as a gallerist, what attracted you to the idea of running one, and more specifically this art fair, instead of going to, say, Art Basel, Frieze, or Volta?

Elizabeth Denny: At the same time, as well, having my own gallery—I really thought I would have that gallery for the rest of my life, to be honest—the only other job that I was ever able to imagine myself having was working for an art fair. I just liked the idea of galleries being my client and being able to promote them. And how important art fairs are in the calendar, and I don’t want to say investment, because that sounds just purely financial, but how much planning, how many of the resources, and hopes for success of a gallery go into them. The output is that comes out of the other end is just so essential for whether a gallery survives.

And early in my experience, I was led into Untitled when I was a very new gallery, and that really helped me. It really kind of changed the course of being able to grow as a gallery. And then every time we were able to do a new fair that let us grow that profile, meet new people, meet new collectors, it was always such a big part of how I grew as a gallerist.

Even though it seems completely different, the actual combination of planning, curatorial relationships, sales, that kind of combination of those things is actually very similar in my mind and in my experience over the last few months, between gallery work and art fair work.

When I saw the advertisement for this particular fair, I did not even hesitate, like I knew that this was a fair that I would really care about. The contemporary art world has been a tough place over the last few years, and I just knew that every time I went to the Outsider Art Fair or visited one of the exhibitors at the fair, it was always a place that really transported me from that and back to what I love about art and a feeling of discovery, and the art and the artist really coming first.

It just felt like [Outsider Art Fair is] exactly the right place to be right now with the kind of feeling of—I really want to be careful about how I say this—things going downhill in the contemporary art world. I knew that this my dream.

That is the big elephant in the room. There are definitely still things that are selling, but there’s a lot of discussion about lower-priced art selling and doing well especially online. At this particular moment, how do you anticipate handling those challenges regarding the uncertainty of sales at art fairs, as well as the slowdown in sales that lots of galleries are reporting?

I think the art world has refused to change, to update a lot of things about their behaviors at the regular fairs that is making it harder for themselves. Things about not being very transparent with what prices are. I think new generations of buyers just don’t understand that, and they don’t want to buy art that way, and it’s not comfortable for them. The feeling of exclusivity and lack of transparency, lack of information— I just do not think that millennial and Gen Z buyers want to buy that way.

The experience of buying at the Outsider Art Fair is different. People who do not think of themselves as collectors at all are comfortable walking into that fair and buying things. I hear from people all the time. Artists tell me if they buy from that fair. Art world workers who don’t make a lot of money tell me that they buy from that fair. And maybe collectors that are a little bit more modest with their budgets because you can walk in there and buy something for three figures or four figures and love it forever, and it’s your favorite artwork that you’ve ever bought.

You’re not put through this kind of uncomfortable needing to prove yourself, or whatever, that you might be at one of the big fairs. I just think it’s a much better experience.

I wrote about that big report where people at galleries shared sentiments like “We’re tired of the art fair circuit,” and “We don’t know how much we need to pre-sell before going”, as well as concerns about the sheer costs of participating in these fairs. And that’s not even factoring things like exchange rates, if you’re a non-American gallery.

And our costs are much lower.

Having attended the fair and now stepping into this role, how do you define success, despite this current challenging moment? There are obvious numbers, such as growing the number of participants or attendees and sales. But I’m always interested in personal definitions of success separate from outside expectations.

To stick with your love of metrics first, I was excited to see that last year’s exhibitor surveys were really strong. Almost all exhibitors were happy with their sales, which I’m sure is not the outcome at other fairs. Ticket attendance grew a lot last year. I would like attendance to keep growing. However, there is a point at which to keep getting bigger attendance, we would need to have a bigger space, or it’s going to impact people’s experience.

All the exhibitors said it was very crowded throughout the fair last year. I went during what should have been a very quiet time, and it was absolutely packed. This was before I even knew about the role, so I was just going as a person, so I actually didn’t pay that much attention to things, but I remember it being very busy.

I think that I want to keep feeling like the fair is kind of growing in all of its directions. There’s all these different kinds of exhibitors that participate in the fair. You have the progressive studios, the galleries that have really been known for showing self-taught art forever, the bigger galleries, and then you would have some galleries that show a combination of contemporary and self taught and some international exhibitors that I think are really important. That’s a whole other topic that we can talk about. But I would really like the fair to kind of keep growing in lockstep and not go too much in one direction.

There’s a lot that’s just happened just this year with tariffs and all the immigration policies. Which things would you like to keep as they are, that are core to the ethos or the operations of the fair, and things that you would like to change for the next edition or the upcoming editions under your leadership? Keeping in mind that it’s always the challenge for a new director in how much you can change in the first year and the expectations that you’re being held to from prior editions.

One of the goals is to keep finding new exhibitors who bring really interesting, new things that people have never seen before. You might go to a Frieze and expect to see this same famous artist’s work, but at the Outsider Art Fair, your expectation is really that you’re going to see some things that are unexpected and new. And I want to keep bringing that to the fair, keep making it a place that regular non-art world people love, and the art world loves. I think is really important. Those are things that I would want to keep the same.

In terms of changing, I would love to be able to see the fair grow for the 2027 edition, to get a bigger space, have more exhibitors, and something I’ve been very focused on. Internally, I really want more partnerships that make the exhibitor experience better. I guess that’s my bias. I’ve been thinking a lot about, do we need a hotels partner, a logistics partner, a shipping partner? We need to make sure that we have a nice event for the exhibitors and other kinds of partnerships that really like make things as easy as possible on them right now. Because, it’s so difficult to be doing all these fairs, even if it is a super-profitable part of their timeline, we’re still needing to, as we know, make those investments three to eight months ahead of the fair, which is really tough.

We are going to have our curated space this next year feature Canadian Inuit art, and we’re going to be partnering with some of our Canadian gallerists to do that booth. I think that’ll be really special.

But really, I have gotten concerned emails from many exhibitors throughout the world, whether they’ve done the fair a million times, they’ve done it a couple times, or they’ve never done the fair before, saying, “I’m concerned about tariffs, I’m concerned about immigration, I’m concerned about rules changing.” And as much as I can write back in detail what the tariff laws actually are, the uncertainty is the problem, right? And I completely understand that.

There’s only so much I can talk about how how out of control we are, of what’s happening in the country. But I can only hope that it works out, because showing here and seeing their American clients for an international gallery, all galleries throughout the world, this is the market, right?

If they are a gallery that shows this work—Europe, Asia, wherever they want to come see their clients here—and it’s an incredible risk for them right now compared to what it was in past years. There’s only so much that I can mitigate those risks. They have to make their own decisions.

Tell me about your favorite memory from a previous Outsider Art Fair.

Last year, I just felt like there were so many different booths and so many different artists that I wanted to spend time in. There’s some artists that I definitely recognized, like Sal Salandra, who’s this older gay guy making super erotic detailed embroideries.

I love how it’s as if some of the artists just have no idea. No one’s ever said, “Oh, you can’t spend 20 weeks working on this one piece.” So you get some people who’ve made just incredibly detailed work, stuff you’d never see anywhere else.

It’s always great to see some of the contemporary artists alongside the more established artists. Martín Ramírez is an artist that I really love is always featured really prominently, but then there’s so many little discoveries to make in other places.

One year, [Abigail Goldman who] was a former defense attorney, made these tiny little crime scenes as little dioramas and she called them “die-o-ramas”.