February 27–March 2, 2025

Outsider Art Fair 2025, NYC

Alexandria Deters
Thedra Cullar-Ledford
Ario Elami

FFor the 2025 Outsider Art Fair, Bill Arning Exhibitions is bringing back two of the most beloved and well-received artists from earlier OAF presentations—Alexandria Deters and Thedra Cullar-Ledford—as well as introducing a recent addition to the gallery roster, Hudson-based artist Ario Elami.

About Alexandria Deters

Deters is best known for her deeply researched, ongoing series of embroidered portraits of female cult and religious leaders who have caused significant harm, including theft and murder. After studying and depicting over fifty women, she has now found a new field of study: male religious leaders who assert themselves as incarnations of Jesus Christ. These latest works include excerpts from the would-be prophets’ voices, texts that are startling in their insistent repetition of the desire to be known as the Second Coming incarnate. For example, the preacher who went by the name Father Divine stated in 1950, “As I declared many years ago before you heard ME say, ‘I AM GOD,’ thousands and thousands and thousands and even MILLIONS declared MY DIETY and continued to declare it.” Deters is also reproducing and showing cult ephemera, such as a Children of God poster with the perverse slogan “Hookers for Jesus.”

About Cullar-Ledford

Cullar-Ledford, last seen at OAF with a wall of breasts and vulvas painted on distressed metal trays, like Saint Agathe from art history. Those works were created in response to her experience of breast cancer and the profound sexism that permeates cancer treatments. After leaving Texas for the snowy North, Cullar-Ledford had the opportunity to stage her son’s wedding for which she started making exquisite artificial flowers by hand. Never expecting to find spiritual profundity in this domestic chore as “mother in law,” she deconstructed the petals and leaves and used them to create two large tondos, La Virgen (Verde) with the leaves and La Virgen (Morado) each surrounded by an almond-shaped mandorla. Appearing at first as religious images that might hang in a modern church, these depictions made of flowers slowly reveal themselves as sexualized shrines to the interrelated mysteries of sex, birth, and God—discussions of which are still taboo in our shame-filled society.

About Ario Elami

Ario Elami, a dual citizen of Iran and The United State, is a graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts graduate program in Boston, MA. Elami explores architecture as visceral and botanical analogy; and the tension between human design and nature on the verge of reclaiming the sacred sites he depicts. His art s developed in tandem with an understanding of the earliest architecture as numinous altars, upon which were laid sacrificial items such as teeth, eggs, skulls, and vertebrae; and a perception of nature as a roiling mass of aggressive life, perpetuating itself through overabundance. In this sense, architecture manifested out of spiritual violence and was a site for the inner to become externalized via depicting sacrificial sites. Elami sees architecture, revitalized with its primitive and mythopoeic qualities, as a portal of sorts back to complete unitary cosmos overflowing with untold mysteries.