Anthony Dominguez

1960-2014 · New York City, USA

At the end of the 1980s he threw his possessions and his art materials into a dumpster, walked out of his East Village flat, and spent the rest of his life homeless by choice, making art the entire time.

The life

Dominguez was born in 1960 in Fort Worth, Texas, the son of a successful commercial artist. He took university art courses without finishing a degree and moved to New York in his twenties. Then came the great refusal: he abandoned his apartment and lived for some twenty five years on the streets of the city as an act of radical freedom, never abandoning his practice. He made everything from scavenged materials, taught himself to read and write music in 2011, and added songs and lyrics to a late series he called Picture Songs. He took his own life in 2014, shortly before his 54th birthday.

The work

His early works are small black fabric discs, their imagery bleached in with custom stencils and hypodermic syringes, made to be sewn onto clothing; he covered his own jacket with them. Later came larger rectangular paintings, white on black, then black on white, with red arriving last, carrying skeletons, crosses and Christian imagery drawn from his Catholic upbringing. Andrew Edlin Gallery in New York represents the work.

Why we love them

Most artists talk about freedom. Dominguez priced it, paid it in full, and made a quarter century of work with the receipt.

Go deeper

• Anthony Dominguez at the Outsider Art Fair
• Andrew Edlin Gallery
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

← Back to the field guide