Fleisher/Ollman Gallery

About the Gallery
The Fleisher/Ollman Gallery opened in Philadelphia in 1952 as the Janet Fleisher Gallery. Over the next four decades, the gallery established a reputation as one of the premier galleries devoted to self-taught art, defining the field and helping to develop major public and private collections of this once-marginalized group of artists. Fleisher/Ollman was among the first to mount major exhibitions of artists such as Henry Darger, Sister Gertrude Morgan, Bill Traylor, and Martín Ramírez, and published early catalogues on James Castle, William Edmonson, and Joseph Yoakum. In 1997, John Ollman took over the gallery as its sole owner, and shifted the emphasis of its program toward the exhibition of contemporary artists whose work reflects the influence of the self-taught, including Anthony Campuzano, the Dufala Brothers, Jennifer Levonian, Isaac Lin, Tristan Lowe, Jayson Musson, Paul Swenbeck, and the late Bill Walton. Past exhibitions have explored the profound influence of artists like Joseph Yoakum and Martín Ramírez on the Chicago Imagists, while the more recent Castle in Context placed James Castle's soot and spit drawings and constructions alongside the work of such artists as Jasper Johns, Grant Wood, Terry Winters, and Forrest Bess.