There’s a huge world of creativity that exists outside of the traditional scene, made by artists without formal training or conceptions of what art should look like. Naming it can be a little tricky, as terms often had negative connotations that implied it was lesser than art made by people with formal training and displayed in institutional galleries. These days, it’s often called outsider art or non-traditional art.

Yuri Arajs founded the non-profit, volunteer-run art society and gallery Outsiders and Others in Strathcona, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, as one of the city’s only year-round collections of non-traditional art. It hosts monthly exhibitions in its 716 East Hastings Street gallery and six exhibitions a year in its 938 Howe Street window gallery, and exclusively works with artists who identify as outsider, folk, self-taught, visionary, intuitive, and artists with disabilities.

What do you do?

I’m the director at Outsiders and Others. I’m also a practicing artist as well.

How did you get involved with non-traditional art?

I’ve always worked with artists identifying with disabilities, mental health, artists that are working on the fringe. As a very formally trained artist, I’ve always been very intrigued by what I don’t see and what I don’t have the ability to do.

The gallery I run now had its first life in Minneapolis, Minnesota, many years ago [around 2003 to 2007]. It was similar in vein, and it was done in the same way: it was about creating a space that was open for everybody. It was in an abandoned funeral home building. But it was amazing, because everybody came, everybody was welcome. You could come in and look at art, just like I do it now. 

What is appealing about outsider or non-traditional art?

It’s a real generalization, but the majority of work that falls into this genre is much more visceral; it’s much more emotionally-based, it’s much more human-based, more experience-based. People respond to the majority of the artists that we work with in a way that we don’t see in other spaces.

The world is full of creative, interesting, fascinating artists that never have the opportunity to be seen. I love that. It absolutely goes against this formal training idea of: you go to school, you get your degree, you go to college, you get your job, you start teaching, you make your work, you go to a museum—it’s the opposite. This other person is thinking about this their entire life, but are so afraid and are so creative, and just continue because they’re driven to no end, to make their entire life, and to never be recognized for it. I’ve learned that there is so much out there that we just never ever know about, we never ever see. And I feel so lucky when I get that opportunity to be exposed to something like that, and then when I get the opportunity to share that.

How did the Vancouver gallery come about?

June 2020 was our first exhibition. I was having a conversation with Esther Rausenberg, who’s the director of the Eastside Arts Society Culture Crawl. She said, ‘We’ve always had this space, but we can’t do it.’ She offered me this window space, so I opened it up as a window gallery. For the first nine, 10 months, we were just a window gallery. And it was incredible: how much art we sold, how many people connected with us. It was like this beacon of light on East Hastings, because I left the lights on 24/7. You could go down there two in the morning and you would see the light from the window. You would see this thing and you could walk up to it in the dark and you were in this space, you know, in the middle of this pandemic where we’re just all freaked to even be next to each other. And you could go and you could fully immerse yourself in some great culture, and something generally that you’ve not seen before anywhere else. It was really great. I was really, really surprised.

And as a nonprofit, we’re not supposed to talk about sales, but at the same time, I mean, that’s what we’re supposed to do for artists. I kind of view us as a conduit for artist survival. But we were just lucky that it tapped into a sensibility that I think people don’t get enough of in our community.

Why is there less of a culture around non-traditional art in Canada than in the US?

All around the world, there are major museums dedicated to outsider, folk art, and so forth. Canada is one of those countries that’s just not there. My assumption is it’s just because we’re a very small country as far as humans go. We just don’t have a lot of cultural choices in our country. One of the reasons to open in Vancouver was for that to truly just create an option, a cultural option that we don’t really have here—and something that would be here on a regular basis all the time. This way, we’re kind of trying to establish that type of art culture in our community. As an international city, we need to have internationally-recognized art genres as well. And that’s what we’re trying to do: create another cultural option that we just don’t seem to have [much of] here.