RELATED: Photos from The Visionary Award Presentation at the American Folk Art Museum

The Contemporary Center at the American Folk Art Museum on Tuesday presented its inaugural Visionary Award to art dealer Phyllis Kind, who, throughout her 40-year career based in Chicago and New York, has helped merge self-taught artists into the mainstream contemporary and folk art worlds.

The event, sponsored by the Foundation for the Promotion of Self-Taught Art, and held at the museum, was evidence of her achievement, bringing together dealers and collectors in town for the American Antiques Show, which ended Sunday, and the Outsider Art Fair, which opens with a gala preview tonight and runs through Sunday.

“I think it’s wonderful that the old guard is here stretching out and enveloping this whole new field,” Ms. Kind said at the reception following the award presentation.

The chairwoman of the museum, Laura Parsons, said she hoped the award would help spread the word that the museum is not only a place to find weather vanes, but also the work of self-taught artists of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Ms. Kind founded her gallery in 1967 in Chicago, and opened one in New York in 1975. For 23 years she had a gallery in each city. Today her only gallery is located in Chelsea.

She had four young children when she opened her gallery in 1967, and according to her daughters, Rachel Kind and Debbi Marovitz, the gallery became her “fifth child” as she integrated her family into her artistic pursuits.

“There were always artists staying in our home. There were field trips to visit artists. And we all worked at the gallery throughout our adolescence,” Ms. Marovitz said.

She applied her motherly instincts to artists and collectors, too.

Several attendees — including museum board members Didi Barrett and Selig Sacks, artist Gillian Jagger, and a member of the Contemporary Center’s steering committee, Audrey Heckler — noted in their Champagne toasts how Ms. Kind’s passion for art and her powerful intellect make her an influential mentor.

“For our first award presentation, we were set on honoring a real leader in the field,” the director of the American Folk Art Museum, Maria Ann Conelli, said.

Art dealer Carl Hammer noted Ms. Kind’s love of parties, and the founder of the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art in Houston, Marilyn Oshman, praised Ms. Kind’s peach pie. “It’s nationally known. I tasted it in Idaho. She has a knack for picking the sweetest peaches,” Ms. Oshman said.

“She is her art. She’s original, she’s honest,” a collector, George Viener, of Reading, Pa., said.

agordon@nysun.com