Not all great artists attended art schools.

The artists featured in the High's Folk and Self-Taught Art collection instead were shaped primarily by lessons learned from family, community, work, and spiritual experiences. Some painted on canvas, while others depended on more readily available materials: stone from local quarries, decommissioned doors, scrapyard metal, leftover fabric, and even chewing gum. The High began collecting the work of living self-taught artists in 1975 and was the first general interest museum to establish a dedicated department in 1994. This collection of more than 1,200 objects primarily comprises work made in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries, with growing holdings of more historic folk sculpture.