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 is chaired by 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
