Even if the streets are slippery with snow, here are five reasons—and more—to head out this weekend: 

Outsider Art Fair 2016

Thursday, January 21-Sunday, January 24

Outsider Art was first defined as the English equivalent of "Art Brut," a term invented by Jean Dubuffet, who championed art created outside the confines of "official" culture. The popularity of this strain of highly individualistic artistic production is undisputed today, having been included in international exhibitions  from the Whitney's inaugural America Is Hard to See to the 2013 Venice Biennale, and the American Folk Art Museum's recent Art Burt in America: The Incursion of Jean Dubuffet.

For the 24th edition of the Outsider Art Fair, which first sprang up in the Puck Building all those years ago, the show takes place this year at Metropolitan Pavilion and brings together a stellar group of exhibitors of this maverick art form, described by organizer Andrew Edlin as "a community of zealots."

Outsider Art Fair, Metropolitan Pavilion, 125 West 18th Street, NY, NY. Info Tickets Photo above: Peggy Roalf

Winter Exhibitions, opening tonight, at The Center for Book Arts. Photo courtesy The Center for Book Arts

Winter 2016 Exhibitions at The Center for Book Arts

Opening Friday, January 22, 6-8 pm
Revealed Terrain: The Semantics of Landscape.
The landscape of book arts and design is ever expanding, as it embraces technology and formation, language and voice, audience and arena. Revealed Terrain: The Semantics of Landscape illuminates trans-disciplinary thought—structure and content, decontextualized pure typography, printing, bookbinding, the multiple, and two- and three-dimensional experimental design—as an experimental map for exploration. Typography once seen only as collective phonetics to convey a singular level of communication has been transformed and contemporized beyond conventionality. Info

One of two Featured Artist exhibitions also on view is the SWEAT Broadsheet Collaboration, a collaborative effort of South Florida artists and writers. The 46 artists and 40 participating writers were interested in the intersection of their respective genres – that is, artists interested in text and book arts, and poets and fiction writers attracted to visual images. Through a series of planned meetings, artists and writers from Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties met, shared their work and began to collaborate to create varied and vibrant limited edition artworks.

This exhibition consists of seventy-eight broadsheets—fine art prints created in a wide variety of media that explore new concepts and methodology through an ongoing process of artistic collaborations. Info

The Center for Book Arts, 28 West 27th Street, Third Floor, NY, NY. Info Winter Classes

Self-Taught Artists Consider the Cosmos 

Saturday, January 23, 4-6 pm

The Anne Hill Blanchard Annual Lecture presents Daniel Wojcik, Douglas Kent Walla, Misha Bittleston in a conversation about a common interest in cosmology and otherworldly phenomena, popular subjects among many self-taught artists, and ones that have fascinated artists for millennia found in works by artists MishaBittleston, Paul Laffoley, and Ionel Talpazan. Against a late twentieth century visual culture backdrop, awash in imagery of interstellar travel and extraterrestrial life forms, these three artists can be distinguished from their historical self-taught predecessors not only by excellence, but by virtue of their unflagging dedication to astronomy and their particular lived moment in history. All three matured after the advent of the atomic age and the first human landing on the moon, and witnessed great advances in space exploration and technology.

American Folk Art Museum, 2 Lincoln Squrae, Broadway at 66th Street, NY, NY. Info

Festival First Look 2016

Continuing through Sunday, January 24

Featuring A Matter of Visibility: International Avant-Garde and Artists' Cinema, introduced by guest curator Mónica Savirón, on Saturday; and Le Juif de Lascaux, introudced by director Louis Skorecki, on Sunday. 

Museum of the Moving Image, 36-01 35 Avenue, Astoria, NY. Info

For more things to do, including the Winter Antiques Show at the Park Avenue Armory, see this week's DART Board here