The mission of the AVAM is to collect and display the work of self-taught artists. Although many of these artists are sometimes characterized as folk artists, AVAM deliberately avoids folk art per se, promoting instead artists whose unique creative vision and intuitive approach set them apart from the established or inherited traditions that typify folk art or the academic fine arts.

AVAM, located on Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, opened in 1995 as a result of a grassroots movement led by its eccentric founder and director, Rebecca Alban Hoffberger. Having left high school before graduating and having established the AVAM independently, she was a controversial figure among the more traditionally educated collectors and scholars of outsider art. The museum’s self-conscious eccentricity and its embrace of the unique, the fantastic, and the avant-garde are reflected in its architecture as well as its collection.

AVAM’s main building combines a historical industrial structure with new architectural elements, including an enormous metal staircase cast by artist David Hess. The main building’s six galleries total some 35,000 square feet (3,250 square metres), displaying some of the 4,000 pieces in the permanent collection as well as temporary exhibitions, which occupy the bulk of the gallery space. The museum space also includes the Tall Sculpture Barn (once a warehouse owned by a whiskey distiller), the Sculpture Plaza, and the Wildflower Garden.

Although the museum maintains some continuity through its permanent collection, it regularly appoints guest curators to establish new exhibits.