In 2018, more than 40 years after his death in 1977, the memory of James Castle delighted admirers anew when an attentive demolition crew discovered a cache of 11 small sketches behind the walls of the house in Boise, Idaho, where Castle had lived with family members since the early 1930s.

Heralding unexpected works yielded by construction workers who uncovered the treasures behind Sheetrock, and as a nod to the widely accepted importance of the artist and his work, The New York Times carried a detailed account of the revelation. The article disclosed that the man recognized only since the early 1950s for his use of “found” objects—many of them nothing more than scraps of paper that he embellished with soot-and-saliva drawings—was known to have hidden examples of his art in various places on the family property. Not surprisingly, as the mystery of Castle’s need to hide his work remains unsolved, the appreciation for the pieces of his oeuvre that have come to light and made their way to skillfully curated permanent collections continues to grow.

“James Castle: Perspectives,” on display at the Boise Art Museum (through January 18, 2026), is simply the latest tribute paid to one of the 20th century’s most distinguished practitioners of outsider art. His work—in the holdings of such prominent cultural repositories as the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art—is the somewhat unlikely result of an urge to collect and create from his vantage point, far from cultural capitals and their coteries of creative souls.

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WRITTEN BY ROGER HARRIS

This story appeared in the Winter 2026 issue of MILIEU.