The American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM) is an art museum located in Baltimore, Maryland's Federal Hill neighborhood at 800 Key Highway. The museum specializes in the preservation and display of outsider art (also known as "intuitive art," "raw art," or "art brut"). The city agreed to give the museum a piece of land on the south shore of the Inner Harbor under the condition that its organizers would clean up residual pollution from a copper paint factory and a whiskey warehouse that formerly occupied the site. It has been designated by Congress as America's national museum for visionary art. AVAM's 1.1 acre campus contains 67,000 square feet of exhibition space and a permanent collection of approximately 4,000 pieces. The permanent collection includes works by visionary artists like Ho Baron, Nek Chand, Howard Finster, Vanessa German, Mr. Imagination (aka Gregory Warmack), Leonard Knight, William Kurelek, Leo Sewell, Judith Scott, Ben Wilson, as well as over 40 pieces from the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre of London. AVAM artists, the museum boasts, include “farmers, housewives, mechanics, the disabled, the homeless. . . all inspired by the fire within.” The museum's Main Building features three floors of exhibition space, and the campus includes a Tall Sculpture Barn and Wildflower Garden, along with large exhibition and event spaces in the Jim Rouse Visionary Center. The museum has no staff curators, preferring to use guest curators for its shows. Rather than focusing shows on specific artists or styles, it sponsors themed exhibitions with titles such as Wind in Your Hair and High on Life. The museum's founder, Rebecca Alban Hoffberger, takes pride in the fact that AVAM is "pretty un-museumy". History The founder and director of the AVAM is Rebecca Alban Hoffberger, who while working in the development department of Sinai Hospital's (Baltimore) People Encouraging People (a program geared toward aiding psychiatric patients in their return to the community) began to develop the idea for a visionary museum, an idea that eventually blossomed into the American Visionary Art Museum, or AVAM. Initially, Hoffberger was simply interested in the artwork created by the patients in the People Encouraging People program, and found herself “impressed with their imagination” and looking to “their strengths, not their illnesses.” Hoffberger found inspiration on a visit to the Collection de l'art brut in Lausanne, Switzerland, which was established by French artist Jean Dubuffet as a collection of “l'art brut” or “raw art because