Established in 2008, the Visionary Award honors an individual, institution, or project that has made a unique and distinctive contribution to the field of self-taught and vernacular art. The Visionary Award was chaired by AFAM’s late Trustee Audrey B. Heckler and sponsored by the Foundation to Promote Self-Taught Art.

Past recipients of the American Folk Art Museum Visionary Award are:

• Phyllis Kind, 2008
• John Maizels and Raw Vision magazine, 2009
• Sanford Smith and the Outsider Arts Fair, 2010
• Sam Farber, 2011
• Lee Kogan, 2013
• The Corcoran Gallery of Art and its 1982 exhibition Black Folk Art in America 1930–1980, 2014
• Ruth DeYoung Kohler, 2015
• The Souls Grown Deep Foundation, 2016
• Rebecca Hoffberger, 2017
• Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, 2018
• Tom di Maria, Creative Growth Art Center, 2019