When Hans Prinzhorn wrote about the similarities between the “expressive impulses” of mental patients and contemporary artists in 1922 he could not have anticipated critic Peter Schjeldahl’s response to the inclusion of Outsider art in the 2013 Carnegie International: “When, as now, sincerity seems schooled out of professional artists, the straight stuff of it in demotic work becomes a heart’s oasis…our emotional and spiritual uses for art matter beyond our pleasures in formal sophistication.” Fostered by psychiatrists and by modern artists from Kandinsky to Dubuffet, the appreciation of what has been called Outsider, Self-Taught, Visionary, or Vernacular art has changed not only what is considered art but also what is considered important, generative, and authentic art. This class will explore where, when, how, and why those changes happened, through readings, discussions, and case studies.