What makes Matt Sesow’s story unique

On the evening of June 7, 1975 (the year confirmed by Matt), Matt, then eight, was playing with other children near a grass runway in Lancaster County, Nebraska, when a small plane coming in to land struck him. The propeller severed his left arm. Surgeons reattached it, but his dominant left hand was later amputated. He paints with his right hand.

Source: The 1975 accident (with the Lincoln Evening Journal report of June 9, 1975) · The Washington Post, Debra Bruno, “The saga of Matt Sesow,” 2015–16 · Hartford Courant, Adrian Brune, “Painting From Pain,” October 13, 2005 · The one-handed painter: art and disability

He began painting in 1994, self-taught, with no formal art training, on evenings and weekends while he worked as a software engineer in Washington, DC. The early paintings deal with his childhood trauma.

Source: Begins painting in 1994 · Nightmares about the accident stopped after he began painting · The Washington Post, 2015–16

Beverly Kaye, an outsider-art dealer from Woodbridge, Connecticut, came across him at a street fair in Georgetown, where he was setting out his paintings. Matt recalls she was the first collector to buy his art, in 1995; before that he had sold only to friends and to guests at the Mt. Pleasant group-house parties where his paintings hung. She represented him from 1996 to 2001, his first dealer.

Source: Beverly Kaye, his first dealer · Beverly Kaye, “Outsider artist, up from the street,” 2008 · Beverly Kaye’s Folk Art Finder essay (1997) on ArtBrut.com · Georgetown Flea Market, 1995

17,000+ original paintings sold directly to collectors in 40+ countries since 1994.

Source: The artist’s own count (About this history) · Months of 100+ paintings sold

His first solo show, “Life’s Little Traumas,” hung in the White Walls Gallery of the Corcoran College of Art and Design, inside the Corcoran Museum of Art, May 14–25, 2001: 45 paintings.

Source: “Life’s Little Traumas,” 2001 · The Washington Post (ProQuest)

In 2013 the United Nations Postal Administration chose his painting “Dive Bomb” for “Break Barriers, Open Doors,” its stamp issue on disability rights, with work by Chuck Close and other artists with disabilities. It was unveiled at the UN High Level Meeting on Disability and Development in New York on September 23, 2013.

Source: The UN stamp, 2013 · United Nations, “Break Barriers, Open Doors” campaign page · UN Postal Administration bulletin 107 (PDF)

The American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore gave him “Matt Sesow: Shock and Awe,” a solo exhibition of 150+ paintings, from May 27, 2016 to May 28, 2017. The museum then selected 26 of his paintings for its permanent collection, as recorded in this history.

Source: “Shock and Awe,” AVAM, 2016–17 · 26 paintings at AVAM · AVAM exhibition page · BmoreArt review, 2016

In June 2009 he was the first American representative at the 42nd International Meeting of Naive Artists in Trebnje, Slovenia, and his “Beehive panel” entered the collection of the Gallery of Naive Artists there.

Source: Trebnje, 2009 · “Beehive panel” in the Trebnje collection · TIC Trebnje, 2009 events calendar

Before he painted, he wrote software. At 17, fonts and some icons for AgDisk at Harris Technical Systems in Lincoln, Nebraska, software that shipped for the original Macintosh in January 1984. He did not work for Apple; Apple’s 1984 “Macintosh Software Team” poster lists “AgDisk/Harris Technical Systems.”

Source: AgDisk, 1983

Raw Vision, the international magazine of outsider art, has covered him since 1996, with features in 2009, 2014 and 2016.

Source: Raw Vision #17, 1996–97 · Fall 2009 · 2014 · 2016

Museum exhibitions and collections with their own sourced records on this site, including the 2002–2005 museum tour “Revelations and Reflections of American Self-Taught Artists” (Arkansas Arts Center page, Wayback copy; the tour record). The full list is on the exhibitions page.