Outliers and American Vanguard Art is delightful to explore. Cooke's lead essay, "Boundary Trouble: Navigating Margin and Mainstream," provides a useful foundation for understanding the history of American modernism and its intersections with artists out of the mainstream. Shorter essays by John Beardsley (Dumbarton Oaks), Douglas Crimp (University of Rochester), Darby English (University of Chicago), Suzanne Hudson (University of Southern California), Katherine Jentleson (High Museum of Art), Thomas J. Lax (Museum of Modern Art), Faheem Majeed (artist in Chicago), Jennifer Jane Marshall (University of Minnesota), Richard Meyer (Stanford University), and Jenni Sorkin (University of California, Santa Barbara) focus on more specific artists and movements. Perhaps most enchanting are the catalog's ca. 300 reproductions, most of them in color, which beautifully illustrate the achievements of these highly diverse group of artists-even if they may not all be true outliers.
