The Museum Of Everything

Posted on 05.11.10 to art by Emanuela Virago

A fantastic temporary museum has opened last Autumn in Primrose Hill in London. You enter through a tiny alleyway on a side street and find yourself in a huge building that began its life as a dairy and was until recently a proper recording studio.

The name of the eccentric location is The Museum Of Everything and it is the only public space dedicated to outsider art in the city: a massive collection of artworks created by untrained artists, operating outside the commercial art world, in remote or impoverished communities and sometimes in mental institutions. Crammed into a warren of corridors, cubicles, shaped rooms and one cavernous double-height space, is a big exhibition of the marginalised art of the past 200 years, which has at various times been labelled art brut, outsider art, folk art, naive art, visionary art. There’s a cosy tea room with wooden tables and vintage china, plus a mini retail space with a simple, handmade appeal, selling crafted things such as tea towels and badie. For those not in the know the Museum of Everything is an exhibition of what for want of a better term has been called ‘outsider art’. It’s been the smash hit of the autumn and it’s free.

The Museum of Everything
The corner of Regents Park Road and Sharpleshall Street
London NW1
Open: Thursday-Sunday 11am-6.30pm
Entry: Free