While Outsider Art has existed alongside human history since the earliest artistic expressions, it wasn’t until much later that the category was formally defined. The concept of Art Brut, coined by French artist Jean Dubuffet, emerged as a manifesto in which he described this form of art as unfiltered by societal or institutional constraints. “These artists derive everything… from their own depths, and not from the conventions of classical or fashionable art,” he wrote. Expanding on this definition in 1972, critic Roger Cardinal broadened the framework in his book Outsider Art, writing that “a paramount factor in the critical definition of the creative Outsider is that he or she should be possessed of an expressive impulse and should then externalize that impulse in an unmonitored way which defies conventional art-historical contextualization.”