Visual Arts
Artists have been crossing the borders of tradition and expectation since art began. Many highly respected categories of art (like Symbolism, Impressionism, and Surrealism) grew out of artists thumbing their noses at the boundaries and taboos of their time. What today's interstitial artists are thumbing their noses at is the popular dependence on categorization, with its rigid demands that artists declare themselves to be one thing or another: fine artist or illustrator, painter or computer artist, installation artist or photographer, sculptor or puppet builder and so on. The IAF is here to give support to artists who work in the interstices between traditions, genres, and media.
On these pages contributors present an ongoing selection of artists, old and new; well-known artists and those whose very interstitiality may have kept them from the public eye.
Wendy Ellertsen, 2010
"Occasionally I encounter an artist so outstanding, skilled, driven and creative that all I want to do is stop and breathe in the spirit and dynamism of the work, then accept the challenge of the encounter to push my own work and thought process further. Such an artist is Thomas Wargin."
Chandra Peltier, 2010
"Not only is her work strikingly beautiful, but upon closer examination it becomes obvious why Connie's art was a perfect fit for the IAF: combining elements of photography, collage, assemblage, and sometimes even flash animation, Connie Toebe is the very definition of an interstitial artist, defying categorization."
Kendrick Goss, 2003
"David Lasky has spent more than 10 years producing comic art on the border of humorous illustration and fine art. His cartoon biographies of literary icons, musicians and scientists stretch the genre of comics in delightful and unexpected ways."
Kendrick Goss, 2003
An ongoing selection of recommended artists' web pages. "In choosing these links, I sought to assemble a group of artists ranging from the subtle to the outrageous, from the understandable to the absurd, from the more easily classifiable to the seemingly indefinable."
Interstitial Arts Foundation
Here is an ongoing list of publications that feature interstitial visual art recommended by diverse contributors. These are works that cross the borders of genre, media, tradition, and expectation. Different contributors have different ideas about what makes a work of art interstitial, which is why we have asked them to annotate and sign their recommendations.
