Our mission.

Our mission at NAEMI is to promote the artistic works of outsider artists, and reduce the stigma associated with mental illness by discovering, studying, promoting, exhibiting and preserving works of artistic excellence created by artists recovering from mental illnesses worldwide.

NAEMI strives to increase public awareness of this unique creative process.

Misleidys Castillo paper figure hero artwork

FEATURED ARTISTS

Proudly bringing forth the best art brut and outsider art talent.

FEATURED EXHIBITIONS

The Magic of the Outsider Object at CCE Miami - Feb 13.

Centro Cultural Español (CCEMiami), 1400 Biscayne Boulevard, Suite 116, Miami FL 33132

ABOUT US

The origins of NAEMI.

Founded in 1988, NAEMI emerges while Juan Martin, the Executive Director, worked providing counselling to mentally disabled persons at a community mental health center in Miami. After encouraging a client to paint as a way to escape his intense suffering, Martin remembers how he liked that art work and realized at that moment that there were probably many other talented persons in psychiatric hospitals waiting to be discovered.

Are you an art professional, researcher, art investor or collector?

We work directly with the artists on this website. If you are interested in a collaboration, artworks, if you are researching about this subject, or would like to simply learn more about what we do at NAEMI, you are more than welcome to contact us.

Get in contact with us

PRESS

Our Latest News & Updates

OUR WORK IN NUMBERS

Supporting, promoting and managing outsider artists since 1998

134

ARTISTS

1150

WORKS OF ART
IN OUR COLLECTION

14

COUNTRIES

We accept donations


NAEMI is a non profit organization based in the United States, founded in 1988. NAEMI’s main goal is to discover, study, promote, exhibit and preserve the art of people recovering from mental illness.

NAEMI seeks to increase artists’ credibility in a society that would otherwise ostracize them. Often ignored by society and the artists, themselves, we allow these artists to value their own work.

In the past three decades, NAEMI has developed numerous projects. In addition to the annual exhibition in Miami, the collection has traveled to numerous museums and galleries in the United States, Spain, Cuba, Belgium, Chile, Argentina, Peru, Paraguay, Bolivia and Mexico.

We welcome all contributions and donations. If you would like to donate to NAEMI via PayPal, please click the button below.

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NAEMI has been a pioneer in bringing to the public what some have known for many years; that many persons with mental illness possess unique artistic talents that often go unrecognized.

DANIEL CASTELLANOS, MD.
Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at FIU


Self-taught artists, outsider artists, artists who have mental illness, and artists who have been called "visionary" compel us to understand that the drive to make art is an essential aspect of human nature.

JORDANA POMEROY, PH.D.
Director of the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum at FIU

This and similar concepts (...) include as a fundamental platform the definitions realized for Art Brut by the French artists Jean Dubuffet, who in 1949 understood the phenomenon as "an operation completely pure, unrefined, raw and totally reinvented in every one of its phases".

Lic. CLAUDIA TABOADA CHURCHMAN
Art Critic & Curator