detour art travels

More tributes to Mr. Imagination

2012-05-31T15:24:00.004-05:00

There has been an outpouring of love and remembrance all across the country...

Mr. Imagination, Gregory Warmack Obit Photo. Courtesy, the Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art

Chicago artist ‘Mr. Imagination,’ famed for using bottle caps, dies in Atlanta

Chicago Sun-Times

The Chicago artist known as “Mr. Imagination,” who charmed his audience with riotous, joy-filled works made of thousands of bottle caps and found materials, has died in Atlanta.

The rough-hewn art of the self-taught Mr. Imagination, whose real name was Gregory Warmack, can be found “all over the world,” according to Cleo Wilson, executive director of Chicago’s Intuit: the Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art....read more

Mr. Imagination remembered for his Bethlehem artwork

Lehigh Valley Live

Famed artist Mr. Imagination left Bethlehem in 2008 shortly after a fire destroyed his South Side home but his presence is still found throughout the city.

There’s his bottle cap mule outside of the Banana Factory. The millennial arch at Lehigh University. And the grotto-like bathroom he built inside of Home & Planet.

Local friends say that presence will live on following his death Wednesday. Mr. Imagination, whose real name was Gregory Warmack, died of an infection at an Atlanta hospital at the age of 64, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, a newspaper in his hometown.

“It’s been over five years since he’s been gone, but you can still feel his presence, especially on the South Side,” said Loly Reynolds, a city artist who said she considered Mr. Imagination her “art dad.”
Mr. I, as he’s also called, was crushed emotionally following the fire at his house and took up a friend’s offer to move to Atlanta, Reynolds said. While living there, Mr. I. was pursuing his dream of opening a museum of his work, known as outsider art, Reynolds said...read more

Mr. Imagination is Dead, Long Live Mr. Imagination

Derivative Works
It is a sad day for Chicago art. Today learned today that the great Chicago artist, Mr. Imagination, has died.

I got to know Mr. Imagination in the early to mid 90s when he lived in an apartment at Clark and Sheffield. He had a regal bearing and a gentle intelligence that always made me feel like I was before some ancient king. His thrones and staves, all made from bottlecaps and other make-ready items, might have helped with that impression as well. But it all befit him...read more

Famed Outsider Artist, Mr. Imagination, Dies

Bethlehem Patch

World-renowned intuitive artist, Mr. Imagination, who left his mark while he lived in Bethlehem, dies in an Atlanta hospital. He was 64 years old.

Famed outsider artist Gregory Warmack, better known to his friends and fans in Bethlehem and across the world as Mr. Imagination, has died in an Atlanta hospital, according to The Chicago Sun Times.

Mr. I, as he was often called, became well-known for fanciful creations made of discarded items like paint brushes, ping-pong paddles and lots and lots of bottle caps.

A Chicago native, Warmack moved to Bethlehem in 2002 “to get more peace and green in his life,” according to the Facebook page of Intuit, the Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in Chicago.

Artists like Mr. Imagination are known as "outsider" or "intuitive" artists because they have had no formal arts education or training.

Mr. I became a fixture in the local arts community, working at the Banana Factory teaching children and creating art that added a distinctive character to the space around the gallery, including the “bottlecap mule” and the unique painted and bejeweled bus shelter that sits on Third Street outside of the gallery...read more

Trade Street 'Memory Wall' creator dies in Atlanta

Winston-Salem Journal

The artist known as "Mr. Imagination," who created the "Memory Wall" on Trade Street in 1999, died Wednesday in Atlanta.

The artist, whose real name was Gregory Warmack, died of an infection at Grady Hospital. He was 64.

The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art brought Warmack to Winston-Salem nearly 13 years ago as a visiting artist to work on the wall, which is near the Campbell Transportation Center. Warmack and a group of volunteers completed work on 55-foot concrete wall, which features sculptures surrounded by stones, beads, seashells, bottle caps and other objects.

Remembering Mr Imagination: March 30, 1948 – May 30, 2012

2012-05-30T18:01:00.001-05:00

Mr. Imagination with his work at Folk Fest in Atlanta, 2009

Mr. Imagination embodied art and the creative spirit. The third of nine children, he was born on the South Side of Chicago in March 1948 as Gregory Warmack. While living there, he was seriously wounded in a shooting, and during his near-death state felt he was whisked across time and space, where cultures and civilizations revealed themselves to him in a way that he now translates into art.

I would love to think that he is now happy in those fantastic worlds that were revealed to him all of those years ago. Home with the kings, and Pharoah (his beloved dog) and all things of great beauty.

Mr. I with the guitar that was featured in the window of Bergdorf-Goodman in NYC

Both prodigious and prolific, the incredible world of Mr. Imagination is “a work of art in progress.” Mr. Imagination’s talent was such that when handed an object, he saw in it things that the rest of us couldn’t see. This extraordinary gift allowed Mr. Imagination to transform common material into resplendent objects of art with new life, vitality and meaning.

At Folk Fest in Atlanta, 2009

In 2002, he moved to Bethlehem, PA to create art near his friends at Lehigh University. Seven years later, he experienced a devastating house fire destroying his home, killing his beloved dog Pharaoh and charring much of the work he had stored there. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, he salvaged what he could to create new work.

Pharoah
(courtesy of Randy Mason and Mike Murphy, Rare Visions and Roadside Revelations)

(courtesy of Randy Mason and Mike Murphy, Rare Visions and Roadside Revelations)

In August 2009, he relocated to Atlanta, GA. With the help of many friends, Mr. Imagination bought a home to create an Angel Garden for all the children and artists of the world to come together and bring artistic life to everything that has been thrown away and discarded.

Also in 2009, Intuit presented Mr. Imagination with its Visionary Award in celebration of his incredible persistence, vision and contributions to self-taught and outsider art.

His work attained national and international recognition. He also was committed to inspiring communities with a series of outdoor embedded concrete sculptures (or “grottos,” as he calls them).

Detail from the Memory Wall in Winston-Salem, NC

The ever-active Mr. Imagination was commissioned by the city to build a memory wall outside the offices of the Winston-Salem Transit System. Residents were invited to bring mementos and artifacts from their own lives that Mr. I could incorporate into a concrete wall and bench located near one of the busiest bus stops in town.

Detail from the Memory Wall in Winston-Salem, NC

(portions of this was excerpted, rearranged and mangled from Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art)

More about Mr. I:

detour art travels: Visual arts preview: Mr. Imagination

Mar 04, 2011

detour art travels: Self-Taught Artists to Exhibit in Venice, Italy at the ...

Mar 30, 2011

Lonnie Holley, Gregory Warmack (a.k.a. Mr. Imagination), Charlie Lucas (a.k.a. Tin Man) and Kevin Sampson represent the virtuosity of African American Contemporary Outsider artists. Steven Ogburn (a.k.a. Blade), Chris Ellis ...

detour art travels: AVAM goes to Bergdorf Goodman!!!

Jun 30, 2009

AVAM goes to Bergdorf Goodman!!! Mr. I, fresh from the art debacle in Salina, in front of the window display featuring his art. (photo from Modelizing, the art of Window Shopping) ...

detour art travels: Mr. Imagination controversy in Salina, KS

Jun 17, 2009

After the Salina City Commission rejected Mr. Imagination's installation -- grotto sculptures on downtown planters -- local artist Katy England said she and Mr. Imagination, also known as Greg Warmack, are forging new plans.

detour art travels: Mr. Imagination's Fire

Jan 29, 2008

On Sunday, January 20, 2008, Gregory "Mr. Imagination" Warmack's home, gallery, collections and art studio in Bethlehem, PA was gutted by fire. Everything was lost including the centerpiece of the house, his bottlecap ...

detour art travels: More Mr. I news...

Jan 31, 2008

Daryl Nerl, a writer for the Bethlehem Daily Star, just posted a nice write up about the flickr site that I set up to collect photos for a book for Mr. I. Also rumored to be in the works is a fundraiser at Intuit in Chicago at the end of ...

detour art travels: Mr. I benefit at Intuit

Feb 05, 2008

Please join Intuit February 28th from 5-8:00pm as we host a fundraising benefit for Mr. Imagination. This event will include a silent auction, video and slideshows of Mr. Imagination's work. Food and wine has been generously ...

Road Trip SXSW

2012-03-18T15:01:00.001-05:00

Road Trip SXSW, a set on Flickr.

The road to South by Southwest - and back again...in a hundred or so photos.

The Electric Pencil documentary looking for funding

2012-03-15T09:56:00.002-05:00

Five years ago, New York based artist and art dealer, Harris Diamant, discovered an extraordinary hand made album containing 283 drawings done on ledger sheets from State Lunatic Asylum No. 3, in Nevada MO. The unknown artist was given the name THE ELECTRIC PENCIL, based on the title of a single drawing.

The album and drawings look like artifacts from a distant time; arresting portraits of people with startling eyes wearing 19th century clothing, Civil War soldiers, antique cars, fantastic boats and trains, country landscapes with roaming animals, and other drawings that seem fanciful and bizarre. Who was this artist? The artwork is a treasure-trove of clues… a diary that tells a story in the artist's own personal symbolic language.

http://electricpencildrawings.com

This feature length, broadcast quality documentary is looking for funding via kickstarter

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1265412620/the-mystery-of-the-electric-pencil

Charlie Stagg, visionary artist dies at 72

2012-02-21T08:35:00.000-06:00

The house that Charlie Stagg built is a sprawling complex of beams and bottles and concrete, with a big domed building that serves as his studio. Charlie did the work himself, hauling all the materials in "the way bugs do it," he told the guys from Rare Visions," a little at a time." He also sculpted huge helixes, DNA-like strands of color that reach second story heights.

The Vidor, TX visionary artist had been in and out of the hospital recently and died early Monday after suffering burns at his home after losing consciousness and falling in an open fire pit. Stagg, who lived in an unconventional home that began as an art research project in 1981, has created work that has been featured in the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, Md., National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" and the New York Times. His work is also on display at the Art Museum of Southeast Texas.

The above photos are courtesy of Larry Harris

More beautiful photos and a moving tribute can be found on his grand-nephew Ryan Price's website. http://thoughtsbyryan.wordpress.com/2012/02/20/a-tribute-to-a-great-artist-charles-stagg/

An excerpt from the Houston Chronical,
Reclusive Vidor artist dies following burns
By Allan Turner
Updated 11:38 p.m., Monday, February 20, 2012

"The only way you can progress to cultural enlightenment," Stagg said in a 2010 interview, "is to get where you're not comfortable anymore. ... You choose to be creative rather than accumulate things. I don't have anything against money. I just can't spend my life doing false things to accumulate it. I do what I have to do, and if it doesn't work that way, I've had a good life."

He 'lived his art'

Although early in his career Stagg produced pastoral paintings and portraits, his mature art was marked by a series of spiraling wooden sculptures resembling strands of DNA. One of his larger works, Tree of Life, which stands 40 feet tall, is featured at Baltimore's American Visionary Art Museum. Smaller works are on view at the Art Museum of Southeast Texas in Beaumont.

"He was an artist who lived his art," said Lynn Castle, the Beaumont museum's executive director. "The wood for a lot of his sculptures came from the pine trees on his property. He would rely on the material to guide the direction of the art."

Despite his training, Stagg was viewed by many as a folk artist.

"He was very eccentric," Castle said. "But he was very well-spoken about his own art. He could talk very intelligently about his influences and why he did what he did." Visitors to Stagg's compound often found it littered with fine art journals and magazines.

"His wood carving was pretty amazing," Houston art collector Stephanie Smither said. "He would take branches of trees and whittle them to make all kinds of forms. ... The way he could make movement, create movement in a piece of wood was so interesting."

Stagg's grand-nephew, Ryan Price, a College Station wedding photographer, said the sculptor was a "deep thinker" who enjoyed mentoring younger artists. "He really cared a lot about building up people, spurring them on," Price said.

No neighbors

Stagg said he chose a life of relative solitude because he found art world "committees" and conviviality adverse to his work. "This is what I'm going for and I can't be pressured by others," he said.

His compound, which at the time of his death consisted of several outbuildings and a bottle-studded, cone-like domicile about 30 feet in diameter and 20 feet tall, sat about a mile from the nearest road.

He lived without neighbors, computers or air conditioning, although visitors frequently would arrive - children in tow - without notice for impromptu tours. Friends in the Beaumont art community often donated truck loads of cans, which Stagg stacked and coated with concrete, and bottles.

Among Stagg's few modern conveniences were a small electric fan and a radio, on which he listened to National Public Radio broadcasts. Stagg's residence burned in 2006, and, recently, he lived in a small travel trailer while he rebuilt.

Stagg, who suffered from a heart condition, received severe burns after he lost consciousness and fell into an open fire pit, according to the Beaumont Enterprise. He died Monday at the University of Texas Medical Branch's Blocker Burn Unit. Price said Stagg recently had suffered ill health and "been in and out of the hospital."

"I'm just trying to live a good life that's productive," Stagg said in 2010, "and to help people through knowledge."

allan.turner@chron.com

Book "Surgeon" creates amazing art

2012-02-20T17:23:00.000-06:00

Atlanta transplant,Brian Dettmer, uses knives, tweezers and surgical tools to carve his masterpieces one page at a time. He never adds any artifacts to the out-of-date encyclopedias, medical journals, illustration books, or any other reference books that serve as his canvas.

Dettmer manipulates the pages and spines to form the shape of his sculptures. He also folds, bends, rolls, and stacks multiple books to create completely original sculptural forms.

"My work is a collaboration with the existing material and its past creators and the completed pieces expose new relationships of the book’s internal elements exactly where they have been since their original conception," he says.

"The richness and depth of the book is universally respected yet often undiscovered as the monopoly of the form and relevance of the information fades over time. The book’s intended function has decreased and the form remains linear in a non-linear world. By altering physical forms of information and shifting preconceived functions, new and unexpected roles emerge." Dettmer is originally from Chicago, where he studied at Columbia College.

20th Anniversary of the Outsider Art Fair

2012-02-01T11:52:00.000-06:00

Creating Artworks Without a Net

The 20th Anniversary of the Outsider Art Fair

By KAREN ROSENBERG

Published: January 27, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/28/arts/the-20th-anniversary-of-the-outsider-art-fair.html?_r=1

REPRINTS

Let’s all agree that “outsider artist” is a term of convenience, encompassing the self-taught, the visionary, the geographically isolated, the mentally ill or developmentally disabled, and (in one memorable episode) Homer Simpson. And in that spirit, we must judge the Outsider Art Fair, now celebrating its 20th anniversary, not by its title but by the vitality and variety of works on offer.

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James Estrin/The New York Times

Aldo Piacenza's church of wood and metal at the Dean Jensen Gallery's booth at the Outsider Art Fair.

Breaking news about the arts, coverage of live events, critical reviews, multimedia and more.

Go to Arts Beat »

A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York region, selected by Times critics.

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James Estrin/The New York Times

Tin-foil animals by Dean Millien at the LAND Gallery's booth. The fair has drawings by famed outsiders like Henry Darger as well.

The thread linking the fair’s 36 booths is a personal compulsion to make art, without a rulebook and with whatever materials happen to be at hand. At Marion Harris, for instance, are tiny peach-stone carvings by A. W. Gimbi, a 19th-century barber from McAdoo, Pa. They make up a none-too-practical tool kit of hammers, corkscrews, fishing hooks and other utilitarian objects — each no more than an inch in height.

At Lindsay Gallery, charts drawn on rolls of oilcloth by a Pentecostal minister, the Rev. Samuel David Phillips (1890-1973), illustrate sermons in a naïve hand but with plenty of preacherly imperative. You imagine the members of his flock sitting bolt upright in their pews after gazing at “Rome,” which depicts a bloody crucifixion, the flaying of St. Bartholomew and a pack of lions feasting on martyrs in the Colosseum.

The nightmarish scenarios in Penny Rockwell’s solo presentation at Pavel Zoubok tell a very particular story of mental illness. During a psychotic episode three decades ago, Ms. Rockwell had visions of electrical plugs bursting into flame; she eventually checked herself into Bellevue. After treatment, she started to confront her fear in black-and-white drawings and collages. In the most gripping of these works, the plug is a dragon-like creature that breathes flame from fraying wires.

If Ms. Rockwell’s drawings stoke anxiety, a group of drawings by Jim Work, at the Pardee Collection, seem meant to soothe it. Mr. Work, a developmentally disabled artist born in 1944, renders neat ribbons of highway and tidy brick houses in cheerful pink and green crayon on paper grocery bags. He seems to be guided by an inner GPS, drawing arrows on the roads to indicate the direction of traffic.

Some outsider artists have achieved celebrity on par with so-called “insiders”; Martín Ramírez and Henry Darger are examples. Drawings by both men are on view, but the energy of this fair has much to do with the spotlight it shines on many lesser-known figures. C. Grimaldis Gallery has a survey of Giorgos Rigas, a sort of Greek Grandma Moses who lives in Athens but paints the small mountain village of his birth from memory. And Packer Schopf has a focused presentation on Lee Groban (1947-2011), a self-taught Chicago artist whose intense oeuvre includes comic-psychedelic drawings and a 5,000-page epic poem, “A Cure for Insomnia.”

In some cases, familiar names are presented in new ways. The proprietor of MAKE Skateboards, Scott Ogden, is selling limited-edition skateboard decks that feature authorized reproductions of art by Adolf Wölfli and Royal Robertson. With Robertson, a Louisiana sign painter who believed in space aliens and the apocalypse, Mr. Ogden found an artist who easily crosses over from outsider to street art.

Also new to the fair are some high-profile institutional collaborators. One is the Collection de l’Art Brut, the Lausanne, Switzerland, museum of outsider art that houses some 5,000 works amassed by Jean Dubuffet, here showcasing its series of DVDs and monographs on outsider artists. Another is El Museo del Barrio, which is timing the opening of its show of “nontraditionally trained” artists, “Testimonios: 100 Years of Popular Expression,” to coincide with the fair. And as in previous years, the American Folk Art Museum is holding a series of talks.

Then there is an exhibitor called the Museum of Everything, which isn’t really a museum but rather a series of exhibitions of outsider art organized, and lovingly preserved in book form, by James Brett, a London curator.

For this fair, Mr. Brett has designed an attractive bookshop in which real shelves emerge from a trompe l’oeil wall drawing. Leafing through the four volumes of the Museum of Everything’s limited-edition catalog, you can read musings on outsider art by consummate contemporary-art insiders (Maurizio Cattelan and Carsten Höller among them).

At the Museum of Everything, and at the fair as a whole, enthusiasm for unorthodox creative expression meets disdain for the old-fashioned term that commonly describes it. As the Museum’s Web site proclaims, “Death to outsider art! Long live the outsiders!”

The Outsider Art Fair continues through Sunday at 7 West 34th Street; sanfordsmith.com.

A version of this review appeared in print on January 28, 2012, on pageC1 of the New York edition with the headline: Creating Artworks Without a Net.

The Electric Pencil

2012-01-20T09:56:00.002-06:00

THE ELECTRIC PENCIL, the story of Outsider Artist James Edward Deeds Jr. Committed for Life at the tender age of 17 to Lunatic Asylum No.3, Nevada, MO in 1925. Heavily subjected to psychotropic drugs and electric shock treatment, his is a tale of the need to create, even in the most adverse conditions. Deeds executed an extraordinary album of drawings, acknowledged as masterpieces of Outsider Art.

The Future Of Salvation Mountain Uncertain | KPBS.org

2011-12-20T15:20:00.000-06:00

The Future Of Salvation Mountain Uncertain | KPBS.org

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Photo by Angela Carone / KPBS

Above: Salvation Mountain, with the moon rising.

By Angela Carone

The Future Of Salvation Mountain Uncertain

Aired 12/20/11

The creator of a desert artwork known as Salvation Mountain has been placed in a long-term care facility in El Cajon. Now the future of the candy-colored mountain is unknown.

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Photo by Angela Carone

Above: Leonard Knight, outsider artist who spent years building Salvation Mountain out of adobe, straw and paint.

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Photo by Angela Carone

Above: The truck where outsider artist Leonard Knight sleeps. It's painted in the same style as his monumental work, Salvation Mountain.

Leonard Knight has been building Salvation Mountain out of adobe, straw, and paint for almost 30 years. The colorful, three-story mountain with the words "God Is Love" on its crest sits in the Imperial County desert, east of San Diego.

The 80-year-old Knight has lived at the mountain since 1985, sleeping in the back of a painted pick-up truck and caring for his life's work for hours every day. I made my first pilgrimage to Salvation Mountain in 2008 and wrote about it here (starring a terrifying swarm of flies).

Earlier this month, Knight was placed in a long-term care facility in El Cajon for dementia.

Preservation Challenges

Jo Hernandez is the executive director of Spaces, an organization that helps preserve outsider art. Spaces was instrumental in saving the Watts Towers in Los Angeles.

She has been working with Knight, both in documenting his project and trying to secure its long-term future. Hernandez says without Knight’s daily attention, Salvation Mountain is in jeopardy. "It's out in the middle of the desert and with the way it is formed and the kind of materials [Knight] uses, I just don’t see any possibility that in the end, it will be able to be 'saved.'"

Hernandez is referring to the over 100,000 gallons of paint Knight has used to adorn and layer the mountain. Much of that paint has been donated by the thousands of visitors who've wanted to support Knight's desert dream.

Without attention to deteriorating areas, sun, rain, and even earthquakes will have their way with this relatively fragile mountain. There's also the issue of protecting the mountain from vandals. As of now, a rotating group of volunteers are monitoring it.

Hernandez says it's heartbreaking, but this is a very difficult preservation case. "What we’re really hoping for is that it will be able to be maintained as long as possible so that people can come and enjoy it....But it’s an ephemeral piece and hopefully we can let it die gracefully. I hate to say that, but I'm just trying to be realistic."

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Photo by Angela Carone

Above: Paint cans are scattered all over the land surrounding Salvation Mountain.

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Photo by Angela Carone

Above: One of the interior shrines Knight built inside a portion of Salvation Mountain.

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Photo by Angela Carone

Above: A view of the sun setting from the top of Salvation Mountain.

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Photo by Angela Carone

Above: Artist Leonard Knight.

Hernandez says at her most optimistic, she thinks the mountain could be saved through a combination of financial support and non-profit oversight. She's working with some individuals who've helped care for Knight and the mountain over the years to establish a non-profit to work on the mountain's preservation.

The Land

One of the first steps in determining Salvation Mountain's future is figuring out who actually owns the land. One thing is certain, Knight has been officially trespassing since he began building his monument.

The parcel of desert land in the shadow of the Chocolate Mountains was first given to California by the federal government upon statehood in 1850. It was one of the "school lands," which were parcels in each township given to the state for the benefit of public education. Any proceeds from the sale of those lands would go to support public education.

The federal government took back this desert parcel during World War II for military use - resulting in the slabs that mark nearby Slab City - and it was then returned to the state in the 1960s. The distinct boundaries of what the state actually owns as of today are unknown.

Curtis Fossum is chief officer with the California State Lands Commission, which manages land for the state of California. Fossum says the state definitely owns the land neighboring Slab City is on, but he's not sure about Salvation Mountain. The state hasn't had the resources it would take to find out.

As Fossum points out, the Land Commission manages over four and a half million acres, and Salvation Mountain sits on less than one of those acres. "We are a small office. We don't have the ability to go down there and fence it off. We don't have the funding for it. But we'll be looking at those issues in the coming year."

Fossum says that if the mountain was designated a cultural resource and had to be preserved, "you'd have to have some responsible party to do it and as far as I know, no party has stepped forward to take responsibility of it and make sure it's not a problem."

Thousands of visitors come to Salvation Mountain every year. In 2002, Senator Barbara Boxer entered the mountain into the congressional record as a national treasure. PBS and the BBC have both made documentaries about Knight and his work. Even film director/actor Sean Penn featured Knight in his 2007 film “Into the Wild.”

Hernandez says groups with agendas are a threat to the mountain. Various church groups have approached Knight over the years, offering to adopt the mountain for their own missionary purposes. Knight's always refused, choosing the clarity and focus of one idea: "God is Love."

In the coming weeks, I'll be looking in to why Imperial County has not wanted to manage Salvation Mountain in the past and what the county's role will be in Salvation Mountain's future.

Buol Grotto to be saved by Kohler

2011-10-21T10:08:00.004-05:00

Preservation Wins: Dubuque Yard Grotto to be Preserved
By Sarah Oltrogge

An eleventh-hour rescue to save a rare Dubuque "yard grotto" will ensure its future as a link to a larger regional tradition.

With a strong history for preserving grotto environments such as this, the Kohler Foundation, Inc., in Kohler, Wis., has stepped in and acquired the yard grotto created by Madeline Buol. The grotto will be moved to KFI's conservation studio and restored before moving to its final location, yet to be determined.

Madeline Buol (1902-1986), built her grotto, a conglomeration of embellished concrete typically with a religious theme, in her back yard on Garfield Street in Dubuque in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The home, which remained in the family until recently, was sold to new owners who were not interested in keeping the grotto.

Lisa Stone, curator with the Roger Brown Study Collection (The School of the Art Institute of Chicago) and author of Sacred Spaces and Other Places: A Guide to the Grottos and Sculptural Environments of the Upper Midwest (1993), came across the Buol grotto while conducting research. Upon learning of its impending fate, she began reaching out to colleagues in the hopes someone would take an interest in saving the work.

"(My co-author) Jim Zanzi and I felt the Buol grotto was historically and aesthetically significant in its own right and therefore very deserving of preservation," Stone said. "The grotto is somewhat, but not completely, unusual having been made by a woman. She developed an original style of surface embellishment and there are lovely details. But the structures were deteriorating and the site needed attention."

The first three major grottos in the region - Grotto of the Redemption (West Bend; blt. 1912-1954), Dickeyville Grotto (Dickeyville, Wis.; blt. 1925-1931) and Rudolph Grotto (Rudolph, Wis.; blt. 1919-1983) - were all built by priests with some help from mostly male parishioners. Women were involved in some of the "spin off" grottos, such as the Paul and Matilda Wegner Grotto (Cataract, Wis.; blt. 1929-1942), and Mollie Jenson's Art Exhibit (River Falls, Wis.; blt. 1938). It was easy to see why it should be preserved.

"We were made aware this existed through Jim Zanzi and Lisa Stone," said Terri Yoho, executive director of the Kohler Foundation. "We knew immediately the work should be preserved. Several museums have been contacted regarding a final home for the collection and we are confident that we will be able to place the work for long term care. For now, the sculptures are being moved to Wisconsin for conservation treatment and documentation over the next few months."

The main part of the Buol grotto is clearly a reference to Father Mathias Wernerus' famed Dickeyville Grotto, about 15 miles away. Buol flanked her Grotto (ostensibly to the Blessed Virgin) with beautifully embellished renditions of the American and Papal flags, and shells arching over flanking side shrines with the words "Religion" and "Patriotism." One of the striking aspects of the Dickeyville Grotto was the pairing of the American and Papal flags, which stated Catholics' loyalty to the country as well as to the Vatican, which was especially important in the post-war years, and Buol picked up on this bold expression while flanking her grotto with wonderfully precarious, tall concrete rosaries.

"The Buol yard grotto is an example of highly original work," Stone said. "Madeline Buol made a marvelous contribution to the genre, and her joy in translating her religious devotion into works of art is expressed clearly and with exuberance."

The Kohler Foundation, Inc. supports education, arts and preservation initiatives in Wisconsin. Since the late 1970s, the preservation of folk architecture, art environments and collections by self-taught artists has been the major focus of the Foundation.

Top photo: Dated 1952, Madeline Buol appears next to her grotto for this photo which appeared in the Dubuque Telegraph-Herald.

Bottom photo: Close of up Madeline Buol and her grotto shrine "Religion."

Detour Art in Park City, UT

2011-09-27T08:24:00.001-05:00

"Iowa" by Melissa Polhamus, Virginia Beach, Va. Courtesy Collection of Kelly Ludwig

Dazzling undiscovered art from America’s back roads

BY GLEN WARCHOL

The Salt Lake Tribune
First published Sep 23 2011 05:46PM
Updated Sep 23, 2011 11:20PM

For many humans, making art isn’t a profession; it’s an obsession.

The most striking example of this primal and irrepressible urge is found among the so-called "outside" artists — amateurs who often are destitute, isolated, marginalized, mentally ill or even imprisoned. The only unifying factor between these folk artists is that they have no formal training in art production or history.

The phenomenon, which has created remarkable edifices, such as the Watts Towers in Los Angeles, Houston’s Beer Can House, and Salt Lake City’s Gilgal Garden, seems to be under-represented in the Intermountain West, and in Utah. Or at least yet undiscovered, according to two experts who spoke recently at the Kimball Art Center’s "Detour Art: Outsider, Folk Art, and Visionary Environments from Coast to Coast."

The Kimball exhibition is drawn from the outsider-art collection of Kansas City-based Kelly Ludwig, who travels America’s blue highways to find and document outside artists. The show presents the spectrum of the often primitive or childlike genre — from the graceful wood carvings of Kentucky’s Minnie Adkins that draw from the folk art of duck decoys, to the crude but powerful tin cut-outs of Betty Sue Matthews, plus the intuitive modernism of Thornton Dial.

Ludwig says outsider art is a "celebration of creativity." She labels the genre as "detour art" because it’s an escape from so-called fine arts, and usually requires driving into rural backwaters to find.

"These artists are thrifty," Ludwig says. "Nothing ever goes to waste. The best definition I can think of for outsider artist is: Ordinary people using the material they have at hand to make art."

In the exhibit’s "Indian Chief," Jimmy Lee Sudduth of Fayette, Ala., used dirt, Pepsi-Cola, and leftover house paint to create. Charlie Lucas, also of Alabama, used bicycle sprockets and a broken rake to make "Face."

Terms applied to the genre — including "folk art" and "outsider art" — are fuzzy and getting more so, as academics, collectors and media continue to discover outsider artists, says Duff Lindsay, a collector and dealer in the art form from Columbus, Ohio.

"I call it ‘contemporary self-taught,’" Lindsay says. "Outsider art is almost a historical term now." After all, can anyone be "outside" anymore, asks Lindsay, a former television producer, given the media saturation of the modern world.

It’s nearly impossible for folk artists — with the exception perhaps of the severely mentally ill — to be unaware of the greater world of art and the growing market (and upward-spiralling prices) for outsider art, Ludwig says. But she doesn’t think that scrutiny and study will destroy what’s sometimes labeled art brut; that is, works that grow out of an almost obsessive need to create with "whatever material at hand." "This art just transforms," Ludwig says. "It will evolve."

Ludwig and Lindsay ended a tour of the Kimball exhibit with a challenge to aficionados: Find outsider/folk/untrained artists in Utah.

"This art is everywhere you go," Ludwig says. "But I don’t know of any self-taught artists in Utah. But I know they are there."

gwarchol@sltrib.com

RIP Bob Cassilly - City Museum founder

2011-09-27T08:19:00.002-05:00

Bob Cassilly, founder of City Museum, found dead in bulldozer at his Cementland project

By Dale Singer, Beacon reporter

Updated 4:08 pm Mon., 9.26.11

Bob Cassilly, who turned a collection of unusual artifacts into City Museum, a top tourist attraction in downtown St. Louis, was found dead Monday morning at a former cement plant that was being turned into his next project, Cementland.

CC Licensed Flickr photo by Bill Streeter

Bob Cassilly

Cassilly, 61, was found in a bulldozer at Cementland, 9403 Riverview in north St. Louis. Police had no further details available immediately. Mayor Francis Slay said on Twitter shortly before noon that "The City has lost some of its wonder. RIP Bob Cassilly."

In a stark message, white type on a black background, the museum's website posted a message that said:

"City Musem is saddened by the loss of our founder and inspiration, Robert Cassilly. 1949-2011"

A spokesman for the St. Louis office of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration said it was investigating the scene of Cassilly's death to determine the cause and see whether any health or safety laws had been violated. He said the department has six months to complete a report on the matter and it was too soon to release any information about what its investigation has found.

As word of Cassilly's death spread, tributes to his work began to appear online.

LIVING ST. LOUIS

The Nine Network of Public Media

Bob Cassilly appeared on a segment of Living St. Louis in 2005.

Cassilly, described on the site as a "classically trained sculptor and serial entrepreneur," worked with a team of artisans to create what he boasted had "urban roots deeper than any other institutions'."

In typical fashion, he said on the website:

"City Museum makes you want to know. The point is not to learn every fact, but to say, 'Wow, that's wonderful.' And if it's wonderful, it's worth preserving."

Cassilly’s latest venture, Cementland -- which has been several years in the making and was running behind schedule -- is a 54-acre site at the old Missouri Portland Cement plant that a New York Times article described in a headline in 2007 as “one part cement, two parts whimsy, one odd park.”

The story depicted Cassilly’s vision this way:

“Imagine a park peppered with Mr. Cassilly’s lively animal sculptures, but also with obsolete cement-making machinery grinding away, industrial silos and other remnants of the 54-acre former factory. Then add navigable waterways, waterfalls and beaches atop dirt hills.”

It added:

“Pointing south, he rhapsodized about how downtown St. Louis would look from Cementland: ‘In the afternoon, when the sun shines on the city, you get this nice reflection. You don’t see all the trash and stuff. It’s the best view of the city.”

Panoramic photos of the ongoing work at Cementland can be found here and here; a Twitter feed from "cassilly crew," who describe themselves as "the personal build monkeys of creator Bob Cassilly," linked to them earlier this month.

File photo by Christian Losciale | Beacon Intern

The City Museum's roof opened to visitors in 2009.

City Museum is a regular stop for those seeking an offbeat experience in St. Louis amid more traditional fare like the Arch, the Cardinals, the Botanical Garden and the Zoo. It appeals to all ages with its variety - an aquarium, a funhouse, salvaged materials, a mega slide and MonstroCity, a huge outdoor jungle gym.

In a story about Cassilly and the museum on its 10th anniversary, the Post-Dispatch wrote that Cassilly "admits that he struggles to maintain his passion for City Museum and makes no promises about its future. 'You shouldn't assume things are going to last forever,' Cassilly said. 'It would be great if it all collapsed onto itself like Camelot. We would have had this brief shining ah-moment. But that's just the romantic in me.'"

Actually, City Museum almost collapsed, not under the weight of lack of interest but from a much more prosaic cause: divorce and other legal wrangling.

In 2002, after protracted, bitter proceedings between Cassilly and his former wife, Gail Cassilly, the board of directors at City Museum agreed to sell the attraction to Cassilly, who had guaranteed $1.6 million of the museum's debt, according to a story in the St. Louis Business Journal.

Gail Cassilly had been dismissed the previous year in a dispute over what direction the museum should take, the story said, and Cassilly had expressed displeasure over the museum's non-profit status.

As the couple's divorce dragged on, the museum had problems raising money. Cassilly eventually stopped working there, though he later returned and moved into an apartment in the building.

Despite the acrimony, Gail Cassilly expressed admiration for her ex-husband and pride in what they had built, telling the Post-Dispatch:

"I knew he was the master builder, and he knew I was the master organizer. I don't think it would have opened without that partnership. We really set the mark for fun."

The museum was the subject of other non-fun stories as well. In 2006, a jury awarded $100,000 to a woman who lost two fingers when she put her hand in the "Puking Pig," a metal tank that dumps about 150 gallons of water every 90 seconds or so. The jury said the woman was largely responsible for her injuries.

Last year, the family of a 10-year-old Kansas boy who fractured his skull after he fell 13 feet from the museum's outdoor jungle gym settled its case out of court; terms of the settlement were kept confidential.

Cassilly earned both bachelor's and master's degree in sculpture from Fontbonne after attending the Cleveland Institute of Art. Besides his many works in St. Louis, he created fiberglass hippos for Central Park in New York City; a giant giraffe for the Dallas Zoo; four bronze lions for Busch Gardens in San Diego; and a recreation of ancient stone ruins at Busch Gardens in Williamsburg, Va.

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Cassilly's Cementland, in the Riverview neighborhood of St. Louis

As Folk Art Museum Teeters, a Grave Loss Looms

2011-09-19T13:40:00.003-05:00

CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK

Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

The American Folk Art Museum recently sold its West 53rd Street building to the Museum of Modern Art. More Photos »

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: September 19, 2011

Please. Someone, everyone, do something to save the American Folk Art Museum from dissolution and dispersal. Or at least slow down the process, so that all options can be thoroughly considered. New York’s contemporary artists, and New York as a whole, need the creative energy of this stubborn, single-minded little institution, its outstanding exhibition program and its wondrous collection, an unparalleled mixture of classic American folk art and 20th-century outsider geniuses.

American Folk Art Museum, gift of Kiyoko Lerner/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

"Untitled (Two Girls and a Dog Sitting in Garden)" by Henry Darger is in the collection of the American Folk Art Museum. More Photos »

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At the moment it almost seems that the museum’s trustees can’t wait to end their flawed stewardship of this great but historically fragile institution. Last spring, having defaulted on a $31.2 million construction bond, they sold the museum’s 10-year-old building to its neighbor, the Museum of Modern Art, and retreated to its small, rather grim Lincoln Square branch.

The museum tried to put a bright face on things — after all, it had been without a home before, for four years in the 1980s, and had then spent 12 years operating out of Lincoln Square as it went through the tumultuous process of financing and constructing its new building. Now it would be downsized but not defeated, and would regroup and rise once more. The important thing was that its great collection would remain intact.

Or so the story went, until last month, when word came that the trustees are exploring ways to dispose of the collection and dissolve the 50-year-old institution entirely. They are said to be considering ceding the collection to the Smithsonian Institution, the Brooklyn Museum or some combination of the two. According to people close to events, who were not authorized to speak about the situation, the board heard proposals at a meeting last Thursday from the Smithsonian, the Brooklyn and also from staff members determined to keep the museum going. It will vote on the proposals in a meeting this week. After that the New York state attorney general’s office and the state Education Department would have to approve any transfer. Needless to say, this is an extremely sorry mess, one that may not have needed to happen. Many of the board’s failures of judgment have already been noted, including the choice of a building design that gave the museum a crowded interior, even when empty of art, and a mute, uninviting exterior. In a recent article in The New York Times, Tod Williams, who designed the building with his wife, Billie Tsien, admitted that the building’s facade might have been overly discreet, especially for an institution situated in the shadow of the Museum of Modern Art.

It probably didn’t help that the museum’s last director, Maria Ann Conelli, who took over in the spring of 2005, was a novice who had never headed a museum before and didn’t have much experience with folk art either. But obviously there were several inter-related problems: failures of vision, leadership, fund-raising, trustee giving and marketing. Some articles, sadly, have suggested a failure of glamour: folk and outsider art may not be sexy enough to the big spenders that museum boards need to attract.

But we should be clear about one thing: There was no failure of curatorial vision. During its 10 years in its new home the museum functioned more or less as the center of folk-outsider art research and development in this country, if not the world. It mounted exhibitions of outsider greats equal to any insiders the 20th century produced, among them Martín Ramírez, Adolf Wölfli and Henry Darger, the Chicago recluse who is represented by a gift of some 5,000 artworks and related materials. Drawing primarily from its collection it has organized inspiring exhibitions of quilts, painted furniture, whitework coverings and sandpaper paintings, and the thick-piled, often pictorial textiles known as bed rugs. It took the survey of Thomas Chambers, one of the great undersung masters of 19th-century American marine and landscape painting, originated by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The Folk Art Museum’s erasure from New York’s cultural skyline would be a tremendous loss, for the city in general and for its role as a center of both art viewing and art making. A full-blooded expression of centuries’ worth of instinctive, self-taught artistry is crucial in a city as fashion-forward and sometimes art-frivolous as New York. It helps keep artists, especially, grounded and in touch with the essential and visceral nature of their enterprise.

It’s not like this idea is new. Modern art has long taken inspiration from the self-taught: folk art, outsider art, art brut. Its importance was appreciated by no less a visionary than Alfred H. Barr Jr., the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, who considered work by self-taught artists to be a “tributary of one of the main streams of modern taste.”

These words appear on a wall label at the Modern next to three paintings by Morris Hirshfield (1872-1946), a Polish immigrant who took up the brush after retiring from jobs in textile and shoe factories. When Barr made his statement, the work of artists like Ramírez, Wölfli and Darger — and others showcased at the Folk Art Museum, including Bill Traylor, Morton Bartlett, Eugene von Breunchenhein and James Castle — was either unknown or yet to be created. I wonder what Barr would say if he were around today to see how much his “tributary” has widened.

It could be argued that we need a museum of folk art the way we need a museum of modern art, to shine a very strong, undiluted light on a very important achievement. That undiluted light will be hard to muster in the near future without a building, but the collection exists, and the goal of keeping it together and eventually finding it a new home of its own should be widely embraced.

The first tactic should be simply to buy time. The museum could temporarily suspend the organization of exhibitions and concentrate on straightforward, ideally dense displays of different parts of the collection in the Lincoln Square space. If need be, it could place large swaths of its collection on long-term loan to other New York museums. Or perhaps it could find a larger space to rent for $1 a year, as it does for its Lincoln Square quarters. If you’re wondering what you might do, write letters, organize petitions or just go to the museum’s Lincoln Square galleries (they’re free right now) and put some money in the slotted box near the entrance.

City officials need to look at the intact museum and collection as a civic and business asset, as well as a cultural one. The success of the recent extravaganza of red and white quilts at the Park Avenue Armory — which was organized by the staff of the Folk Art Museum and which attracted thousands of people from around the country — offers compelling evidence.

The transfer and dispersal of the collection should be fought to the bitter end, with every ounce of passion and ingenuity
that the museum and its supporters can muster. New York, so fabulously full of so many kinds of refined high art, needs a museum dedicated to the great D.I.Y. low of the folk and outsider kind.

Bishop's Castle - Beulah, CO

2011-07-10T19:31:00.001-05:00

Bishop's Castle, a set on Flickr.

Nothing can prepare yourself for the moment you see the castle. Winding roads up the mountain, a sketchy cell phone call to the folk art GPS master – Narrow Larry Harris – to be sure if we were on the right path (yeah, I gotta adjust the app coordinates – it was a bit further up the mountain than I thought).

Jim Bishop is high, as he likes to say, high on a drug the government can’t control. It’s called adrenaline and after one look at Bishop Castle, you’d get no argument from me. Soaring towards the clouds for some 16 stories in all, it’s made from stone; hand selected, hand carried, hand lifted and mortared into place by, you guessed it, hand. Jim Bishop’s hands. He’s been working the site for nearly 40 years now, that is when he isn’t busy fighting with the government about giving it up. It’s surrounded by National Forest land, and they’ve been itching to get his for some time now. But that’s another story and it distracts from the sheer magnitude of what he’s created.

16 stories tall? No drawings. Towers and flying buttresses and rooms of glass and stone? No engineers. A fire-breathing dragon on the roof? No plans. No plans indeed, except for those in Jim’s head. (thanks Randy from RVRR for sharing your well-crafted insights, and letting me pass some of them along…)

Cano's Castle

2011-07-10T19:05:00.001-05:00

Cano's Castle, a set on Flickr.

Photos from my recent journeys...just now finishing up the editing.

Entirely made of recycled materials, with more than 100,000 beer and soda cans, hubcaps, screen doors, wooden windows, bicycle reflectors and more, this amazing folk art environment was built by Dominic "Cano" Espinosa, a Native American Vietnam vet. Inspired by "Vitamin Mary Jane" and Jesus, Espinoza has spent over 30 years working on what he calls "Jesus' Castle."

Espinoza began building Cano's Castle in 1980 in thanks for having his life spared during the Vietnam War. The four main structures: "The King" (the largest tower), "the Queen" (the tower standing next to the King), "the Palace" and "the Rook" (flanking the King).

"Rolling Through the Bay" AMAZING Kinetic toothpick sculpture!!!

2011-06-22T17:57:00.000-05:00

Scott Weaver's Rolling through the Bay from The Tinkering Studio on Vimeo.

(courtesy of The Tinkering Studio)

Scott Weaver’s family has lived in San Francisco for 3 generations. Scott started building toothpick sculptures in 1968, when he was 8 years old. Early structures were abstract and about 2 – 4 feet tall. Then he built one sculpture that had a ping-pong ball roll through it. In 1974, Scott started a new sculpture and added the Golden Gate Bridge and Lombard Street, which also had a ping-pong ball roll through it. This is what started what is now Rolling Through the Bay.

Over the years Scott has worked on Rolling Through the Bay, on-and-off, sometimes not working on it for years at a time, to do other projects and get married to his beautiful wife, Rochelle, and have a wonderful son, Tyler.

Scott loves working with toothpicks and hopes to do so for years to come.

Artist’s website

See Rolling through the Bay in action!

Phonehenge West maybe torn down.

2011-06-13T14:42:00.000-05:00

'Phonehenge West' creator found guilty of additional violations

From the LA Times http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/06/an-acton-man-already-facing-criminal-penalties-for-building-an-elaborate-structure-called-phonehenge-west-without-permi.html

An Acton man already facing criminal penalties for building an elaborate structure called “Phonehenge West” without permits was found guilty Friday of additional building code violations; his creation is likely destined for the wrecking ball.

But the Antelope Valley jury deadlocked on three other misdemeanor charges against Alan Kimble Fahey, who has been released on his own recognizance.

The mixed verdict came three days after Fahey was found guilty of a majority of charges in the controversial case that has played out at the Lancaster courthouse since May 26.

Fahey worked for about three decades on the massive, reddish cluster of structures until county officials ordered him to stop due to building-code violations. His case attracted international attention and support from fans who considered Phonehenge West a work of art, and who sympathized with his clashes with building inspectors.

Fahey’s attorney, Jerry Lennon, said Friday that Fahey could pay fines as high as $500 for each of the 12 counts on which he was found guilty. He is likely to be required to do some community service, and would only be allowed to remain out of custody if he complies with the judge’s orders to immediately vacate the buildings that don’t have permits, Lennon said. Before his official sentencing, scheduled for July 8, Fahey has been ordered to consult with county officials to determine a plan for demolishing the unlawful structures, the defense attorney added.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Patrick David Campbell argued during the trial that Fahey was a proud and talented artist, but also stubborn, and didn’t feel that code enforcement rules applied to him.

Lennon defended Phonehenge West as an artistic creation. The defense attorney insisted that Fahey was aware of the safety issues and wanted to work with code enforcement officials, but that officials ignored him or were too disorganized to follow through.

The jury deliberated six days and had so much difficulty reaching a complete verdict that attorneys at one point were ordered to re-argue certain portions of the case. Jurors twice reported that they were deadlocked on several charges, but Superior Court Judge Daviann L. Mitchell ordered the panel of eight men and six women, including two alternates, to deliberate further.

Prosecutors are expected to announce later whether they will seek to retry Fahey on the three counts on which the jury deadlocked. Fahey has said he will appeal the verdicts against him.

Phonehenge West owner has nine strikes against him — so far

Creator of 'Phonehenge West' to testify in code enforcement case

-- Ann M. Simmons

Photo: Alan Kimble Fahey and his "Phonehenge West." Credit: Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times

MoMA to Buy Building Used by Museum of Folk Art

2011-05-11T08:24:00.000-05:00

New York Times
By KATE TAYLOR
Published: May 10, 2011

The Museum of Modern Art is buying the building of the struggling American Folk Art Museum on West 53rd Street, officials said Tuesday.

The folk art museum will continue to operate in its much smaller Lincoln Square branch.

The building to be bought is between MoMA and a vacant lot that MoMA sold in 2007 to the developer Hines. The 2007 sale came with an agreement that Hines would construct a building on the lot connecting internally to MoMA on the north side of the block and provide additional gallery space.

Although there are no current plans for Hines to develop, MoMA ultimately planned to expand in that direction, MoMA’s director, Glenn Lowry, said. He said owning the folk museum’s building would allow it to connect its galleries on both sides of the block.

The folk art museum’s building was designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects and opened in 2001. It was not clear whether it would be torn down. The folk art museum took on $32 million of debt to construct the 53rd Street building. But attendance never met expectations, and after sustaining investment losses in the financial crisis, the museum defaulted on its debt.

Neither museum would say what MoMA was paying for the building, but the folk art museum’s chairman, Laura Parsons, said it was enough to retire the museum’s debt.

The folk art museum pays $1 a year in rent for its Lincoln Square space, which is only 5,000 square feet, one-sixth the size of the building it is selling.

Ms. Parsons said the folk art museum might put on shows in other locations in the city or put parts of its collection on tour.

Ms. Parsons said she could not say how many of the museum’s staff members would be laid off. She said there was no deadline for vacating the building and that, for now, it would stay open.

A version of this article appeared in print on May 11, 2011, on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: MoMA to Buy Building Used By Museum Of Folk Art.

Benetton Cancels Sponsorship of Outsider Artists in Venice Biennale

2011-05-01T20:15:00.002-05:00

Folk Art Museum Show for Venice Canceled

by stephanie cash 04/25/11

Art in America http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/news/2011-04-25/folk-art-museum-venice-cancellation-benetton/

An exhibition of African-American self-taught artists and graffiti muralists, organized by the beleaguered American Folk Art Museum in New York, has been canceled by exhibition sponsor Benetton. The show was scheduled for June 1-30, to coincide with the opening of the Venice Biennale.

"Vision and Vernacular: Eight African American Artists in Venice" was to have been held at the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, a property owned by the Benetton Group near the Rialto Bridge. Curated by Carlo McCormick and Martha V. Henry, it would have featured works by Outsider artists Lonnie Holley, Mr. Imagination (Gregory Warmack), Charles Lucas and Kevin Sampson, and site-specific murals by street artists Blade (Steven Ogburn), Daze (Chris Ellis), Quik (Lin Felton) and Sharp (Aaron Goodstone).

According to a Benetton spokesperson, the 13th-century Fondaco dei Tedeschi has been unoccupied for many years and "due to its condition, we were unable to obtain the necessary permits, certifications, and finish the modifications necessary to insure the safety of the crowds expected for this exhibition. The project has been postponed to the reopening of the Fondaco after its renovation by Rem Koolhaus." Plans call for the structure to become a retail and exhibition space.

Benetton told A.i.A. that the cancellation is "in no way related to the American Folk Art Museum" and that it hopes to mount an identical exhibition in the future. The fashion house was sponsoring the exhibition, offering the space to the museum for free, and providing exhibition support and an opening-night party.

Reached by phone, McCormick told A.i.A. that Benetton and the Folk Art Museum "bickered every step of the way." Though the reasons for the cancellation were unclear, McCormick suspected it had to do with who would pay for what. He was notified of the cancellation yesterday.

Museum director Maria Ann Conelli stressed to A.i.A. that "it was solely Benetton's decision to suspend the show." She said, "The museum, curators and artists were all surprised by this turn of events, especially since we were ready to open on June 1."

The museum has been in financial straits, and has not made payments on the $30 million it still owes for its $32-million building, designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, which opened in 2001 next to MoMA on 53rd Street.

As reported in the New York Times on Feb. 22, the museum entered into a forbearance agreement with ACA Financial Guaranty last summer. That agreement expires on June 30, with payment due in July. The museum's financial statements for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2010, reflect a deficit of $3.6 million. Conelli told the Times in February that the institution had a balanced budget for this fiscal year.

The Venice exhibition had a budget of upwards of $400,000, much of which was provided by individual donors and foundations, including the Ford Foundation.

* An earlier version of this article reported in the first paragraph that the Folk Art Museum canceled this exhibition. The exhibition was canceled by the Benetton Group.

Benetton Cancels Venice Plans - artnet Magazine

BENETTON CANCELS VENICE PLANS

Apr. 28, 2011

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A noteworthy plan to take artworks by eight African-American artists to the 54th Venice Biennale, June 4-Nov. 27, 2011, has been suddenly canceled at the last minute by its corporate sponsor, Benetton. Originally undertaken in collaboration with the American Folk Art Museum, the exhibition was called off because the planned site, the unoccupied and historic Fondaco dei Tedeschi adjacent to the Rialto Bridge, could not be renovated in time, according to the clothing company.

Cynics might be forgiven for suspecting a different reason: The celebration of graffiti in Los Angeles, via "Art of the Streets" at LA MOCA, prompted a conservative cultural backlash as well as a reported eruption of tagging in the museum neighborhood, and the idea of encouraging graffiti in Venice with a prestigious art show must have struck some city fathers as less than a great idea.

Under the Benetton scheme for Venice, curators Martha Henry and Carlo McCormick selected four graffiti artists (Blade, DAZE, QUIK and Sharp) and four Outsider Artists (Lonnie Holley, Mr. Imagination, Tin Man [pictured] andKevin Sampson) to show at the biennale -- plans that are now cancelled. "It seems the Folk Art Museum and Benetton spent all their time fighting with one another rather than getting together to make this happen," said one insider. Will Benetton stiff the eight black artists on their promised payday? Stay tuned.

http://senzala-senzala.blogspot.com/2011/04/benetton-cancels-venice-plans-artnet.html

Marwencol - PBS Independent Lens documentary - therapy becomes art

2011-05-01T10:35:00.000-05:00

Watch the full episode. See more Independent Lens.

On April 8, 2000, Mark Hogancamp was attacked outside a bar in Kingston, New York, by five men who beat him literally to death. Revived by paramedics, Mark had suffered brain damage and physical injuries so severe even his own mother didn't recognize him. After nine days in a coma and 40 days in the hospital, Mark was discharged with little memory of his previous life.

Unable to afford therapy, Mark decided to create his own. In his backyard, he built Marwencol, a 1/6th scale World War II-era town that he populated with dolls representing his friends, family, and even his attackers. He used the small dolls and props to redevelop his hand-eye coordination, while he dealt with the psychological trauma from his attack through the town's many battles and dramas.

Mark started documenting his miniature dramas with his camera. Through Mark's lens, these were no longer dolls — they were living, breathing characters in an epic WWII story full of violence, jealousy, longing, and revenge. And he (or rather his alter ego, Captain Hogancamp) was the hero.

When Mark's stunningly realistic photos are discovered and published in an art magazine, his homemade therapy suddenly becomes "art," forcing Mark to make a choice between the safety of his fictional town and the real world he's avoided since his attack.

Shot over the course of four years, Jeff Malmberg's documentary intertwines the dual realities of Mark Hogancamp to tell the whole story of Marwencol — a surprising tale of love, secrets, pain, and adventure.

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/marwencol/film.html

Roy Sproule.......paints mural and does not like milk

2011-04-05T18:30:00.001-05:00

Self-taught mural artist Roy Sproule donates his time and talents to Phoenix's downtown art scene.

The 27 year-old enlisted airforce, avionics technician stationed at Luke Airforce base saw the wall in downtown Phoenix, and was inspired to promote Valley Youth Theater He began it in March 2008, spending up to 40 hours a week over the course of 18 months, and over $1000 of his savings.

“If you are not saying anything, you are just decorating,” he says.

807 N. 3rd St.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6woN7WINr4&feature=player_embedded

http://www.artinphoenix.com/gallery/RoySprouleArt

http://www.downtownphoenixjournal.com/2009/12/04/man-mural-roy-sprole-valley-youth-theater/

Self-Taught Artists to Exhibit in Venice, Italy at the Biennale

2011-03-30T12:43:00.003-05:00

Mr. Imagination (photo courtesy of Rare Visions)

Lonnie Holley, Gregory Warmack (a.k.a. Mr. Imagination), Charlie Lucas (a.k.a. Tin Man) and Kevin Sampson represent the virtuosity of African American Contemporary Outsider artists. Steven Ogburn (a.k.a. Blade), Chris Ellis (a.k.a. Daze), Lin Felton (a.k.a. Quik), and Aaron Goodstone (a.k.a. Sharp) will represent different aspects of the urban vernacular of Graffiti.

Artwork by Mr. Imagination (from the Detour Art Collection)

THE AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM

TO EXHIBIT FOR THE FIRST TIME

IN VENICE DURING THE BIENNALE, JUNE 2011

MADE POSSIBLE BY A PARTNERSHIP WITH BENETTON

INSTALLATIONS BY CONTEMPORARY SELF-TAUGHT AFRICAN AMERICAN ARTISTS

New York, NY—The American Folk Art Museum (AFAM) announced that they would partner with Benetton for an exhibition of self-taught African American artists during the Venice Biennale. Luciano Benetton, chairman of the Benetton Group, said “It gives me great pleasure that our first use of Fondaco dei Tedeschi will be an exhibition with an American Museum of such importance that has not been seen in Venice during the Biennale before. My family and I have great respect for the nature of their collection. The work that they have chosen to show is in keeping with the philosophy of the ‘One World of Benetton,’ whose principals have gilded not only our business but our personal philosophy, philanthropy, and lives.”

Lonnie Holley

“The inclusion of these African-American self-taught and graffiti artists at the Venice Biennale will be revolutionary. These artists have never had the opportunity to situate themselves within a broader contemporary art dialogue— but their time has arrived” said Dr. Laura Parsons, president of The American Folk Art Museum (AFAM) board. Maria Ann Conelli, AFAM’s executive director, stated “The exhibition will present a truly American artistic vision to an international audience, and the central location and historic significance of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi ensures the installation will be one of the most visible and celebrated during the 2011 Biennale. While Venice has long prided 2 Itself on presenting the most cutting edge art environments, the exclusion of contemporary self-taught and graffiti artists is a serious omission, but one that will be rectified this June. The American Folk Art Museum has been a national leader in celebrating the contributions made by African-American artists. This exhibition advances the much-deserved stature on an international stage. Who becomes a self taught artist is so interwoven with issues of race and economics. This work tells a great American story.”

Artwork by Charlie Lucas (from the Detour Art collection)

Charlie Lucas

Eight artists have been chosen by AFAM to be showed in Venice. Each will execute an original site-specific installation for the Fondaco dei Tedeschi. Lonnie Holley, Gregory Warmack (a.k.a. Mr. Imagination), Charlie Lucas (a.k.a. Tin Man) and Kevin Sampson represent the virtuosity of African American Contemporary Outsider artists. Steven Ogburn (a.k.a. Blade), Chris Ellis (a.k.a. Daze), Lin Felton (a.k.a. Quik), and Aaron Goodstone (a.k.a. Sharp) will represent different aspects of the urban vernacular of Graffiti. This exhibition showcases the diversity of contemporary African American self-taught artists by pairing two distinctive yet complementary approaches to art making, using the building’s architecture as inspiration for the work itself.

The four-floor Fondaco dei Tedeschi surrounds a grand glass covered central courtyard. It is for this courtyard that the four outsider artists’ installations will be created. Surrounding the courtyard is an arched passageway, where the four graffiti artists will create their murals.

Benetton’s commitment to this project, in addition to the use of this extraordinary building, includes the involvement of Fabrica, Benetton’s communication research center and educational foundation, who will design and install the exhibition. Further Fabrica students will be assisting the artists with the constructions of their installations.

Said Maria Ann Conelli, “Benetton has proved to be a most generous friend to our Museum. But this is unparalleled. It allows us to show this art on a world stage. We are most grateful to Mr. Benetton. His vision is legendary. ”

Kevin Sampson (photo courtesy of Rare Visions)

ABOUT THE FONDACO DEI TEDESCHI:

The Fondaco dei Tedeschi (Venetian: Fontego dei Tedeschi "The Germans' Inn") is a historic building in Venice, situated on the Grand Canal near the Rialto Bridge. First constructed in 1228, the building was rebuilt between 1505 and 1508, after its destruction in a fire. The reconstruction produced a very functional 4-floor building which surrounds a grand inner courtyard. Its architecture is typical of the cinquecento (Italian Renaissance) style, but the basic concept (and the word fondaco) is derived from 3 a type of building in Arab countries. Like the Fondaco dei Turchi, the Fondaco dei Tedeschi was a palazzo, warehouse, and restricted living quarters for its population, in this case mainly Germanic merchants from cities such as Nuremberg, Judenburg and Augsburg.

At one time this building was the headquarters and restricted living quarters of the city's German merchants. A broad definition was taken of the term German which included what would today be regarded as separate nationalities.

The ground floor of the building is accessible by water and was used for storage, the first floor was dedicated to offices and an upper area contained about 160 living quarters. The facades were covered with frescoes by Titian and Giorgione, but their work has not survived the Venetian climate (fragments survive in the collections of museums such as the Ca' d'Oro).

The German merchants arrived shortly after the building was originally constructed in the thirteenth century and stayed until the Napoleonic occupation. It was one of the city's most powerful colonies of merchants, and consequently the fondaco became an important trading center for goods passing from the Orient on their way towards the Alps. The Venetian Republic took commission on the transactions of the fondaco. In the nineteenth century the leading figure of this community was the wealthy merchant Vittorio Tedeschi who had ties with the Transylvanian Nobility in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

In the 20th century the building served as the Venice headquarters of the Poste Italiane. Edizione Srl, the holding company of the Benetton family, having acquired the building, has entrusted it to the renowned Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, who will plan its renovation and transformation into one of the city's most important centers for culture and retail.

ABOUT FABRICA:

Fabrica, Benetton’s communication research center, was set up in 1994. The fruit of the Group’s cultural legacy is based in Treviso, Italy in a complex restored and enlarged by Tadao Ando. Fabrica is not a school, advertising agency or university. It is an applied creativity laboratory, a talent incubator, a studio of sorts in which young, modern artists come from all over the world to develop innovative projects and explore new directions in myriad avenues of communication, from design, music and film to photography, publishing and the Internet. These artist-experimenters are accompanied along their research path by leading figures in art and communication, blurring the boundaries of 4 culture and language and transgressing the traditional borders between a diverse range of communication mediums. Communication research at Fabrica services a wide variety of social causes and disciplines such as economics, social or environmental sciences. Fabrica’s aim is to grasp the future by giving innovative exposure to cultural or scientific projects, which open a window onto tomorrow’s world.

For more information go to: http://www.fabrica.it/

ABOUT THE AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM (AFAM):

The American Folk Art Museum is the premier institution devoted to the aesthetic appreciation of traditional folk art and creative expressions of contemporary self-taught artists from the United States and abroad. Based in New York City, The Museum preserves, conserves, and interprets a comprehensive collection of the highest quality, with objects dating from the eighteenth century to the present. Since its founding in 1961, the American Folk Art Museum has built an outstanding collection of more than 5,000 artworks from the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. The collection naturally divides into the broad categories of traditional and contemporary self-taught, sharing a common non-academic language and complimentary sensibilities. The artwork under the auspices of Contemporary Self Taught is united by time—most of the work was created in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These artists have created a powerful and moving but frequently unacknowledged body of work that is essential to a full understanding of the art and culture of the world.

For more information go to: http://www.folkartmuseum.org/

ABOUT THE BENETTON GROUP

The Benetton Group, present in 120 countries around the world, has its core business in fashion apparel: a group with a strong Italian character whose style, quality and passion are clearly seen in its brands, the casual United Colors of Benetton, the glamour oriented Sisley, the leisurewear brand Playlife. The Group produces over 150 million garments every year. Its network of around 6,000 contemporary stores around the world, offers high quality customer services and generates a total turnover of over 2 billion euro (before final customer sales). 5 The development of Benetton's commercial network, characterized by prestigious locations in historic and commercial centers and by the high level of customer services offered, has been supported by a major program of investment worldwide. As in the case of the commercial network, a constant commitment to innovation, a crucial factor for development, has always characterised the Group’s business organisation, from communication to IT, from research into new materials to integrated logistics.

Detroit's Tyree Guyton to put 10,000 shoes on Heidelberg Street

2011-03-05T07:19:00.002-06:00

Heidelberg Street; photo by Jeff Nyveen

Tyree Guyton is planning to cover a street in Midtown for several weeks as part of a series showcasing the works of Kresge art fellows next month.

The medium? Shoes.

"I think it's going to take 10,000," he said Wednesday. The Heidelberg Project, a nonprofit founded by Guyton, officially announced the project Tuesday.

The "Street Folk" installation will cover all of Edmund Place from Woodward Avenue to John R. Street with shoes. It's meant to address the issue of homelessness, with the shoes symbolizing life on the street and also those who use the streets and pass by homeless people every day, he said.

"How can we not see it?" he said of people sleeping in doorways and on heat vents. "We're all a paycheck away from the streets."

Guyton is working with a shoe distributor and collecting donations to hit the estimated 10,000 mark. Some of the shoes will be painted, contain notes or be otherwise artfully touched up.

"If people need shoes, we welcome people to take them as well," said Heidelberg Project Executive Director Jenenne Whitfield.

University Cultural Center Association President Sue Mosey helped obtain permission from the city of Detroit for the project, Whitfield said.

Guyton, a 2009 Kresge visual arts fellow, is preparing the work as part of Kresge Arts in Detroit's Art X Detroit series, produced by the UCCA. Kresge Arts in Detroit is a fellowship program funded by The Kresge Foundation and administered by the College for Creative Studies.

The program runs in two-year cycles, and the first cycle wrapped up at the end of 2010. The first year of the cycle awards $25,000 fellowships to visual artists and the second year to literary and performing artists.
The fellowships were awarded to 18 visual artists in 2009, followed by nine performing and nine literary artists in 2010. The next cycle will give 12 awards for each category, said Mira Burack, assistant director for Kresge Arts in Detroit.

Also for each cycle, two artists receive a $50,000 Kresge Eminent Artist Award.

Art X Detroit is the first showcase of the works of these artists, who were commissioned to produce pieces specifically for this series. Many, such as Guyton, are working to meet the deadline of April 6, the day the series begins. The series runs through April 10, but some works, including Guyton's, will stay up through April 24.

Two highlights will be the unveiling of a public art installation by Charles McGee, who won Kresge's first Eminent Artist Award in late 2008 as the fellowship program kicked off, and performances by musician Marcus Belgrave, who won the award the following year.

McGee is working on a 20-foot wide by 8-feet tall curved panel to appear at John R. Street and Farnsworth Street on the grounds of the Rackham Building, said Annmarie Borucki, marketing manager at UCCA. Called "Spirit Renewal," it likely will be composed of black and white figures that portray a sense of motion, a theme to McGee's previous works, she said. It will be part of UCCA's Midtown Loop Greenway project.
McGee donated the piece to Kresge, which in turn donated it to the city, with UCCA as caretaker.
The Kresge Foundation set up Kresge Arts in Detroit as a way to directly support artists, as opposed to funding organizations, Burack said.

The Kresge fellowships are highly sought-after by Southeast Michigan artists.

"There is no other fellowship that we know of now that directly supports metro Detroit artists," Whitfield said.
Oliver Ragsdale, president of the Virgil H. Carr Cultural Arts Center, said it is rare for grants to support individual artists and that Kresge deserves credit for filling a void in arts funding in recent years.

"My gut feeling is that a lot of communities would be jealous that such a grant exists," he said. "They're the players that stepped up as various organizations have gone away."

Other works for Art X will appear in a long list of Midtown establishments, including the several museums that populate the neighborhood, the Magic Stick, G. R. N'Namdi Gallery, Leopold's Books and The Scarab Club. The main exhibition will be at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.

Besides art exhibits and installations, also planned are panel discussions, performances and readings, for a total of 50 different elements to the series.

A website, artxdetroit.com, is planned to go live this week.

Meanwhile, shoes for Guyton's installation are coming from Guyton's fans far and wide. The Heidelberg Project, begun in 1986, has drawn fans and visitors from throughout the world. The project is a house and large yard on Heidelberg Street in Detroit's east side that's covered with discarded items. Whitfield said 275,000 people visit the house every year.

During a telephone conversation Wednesday, he said he'd just received a box of shoes from Iraq. Kuninori Matsuda, consul general at the Japanese consulate in Detroit, happened to stop by The Heidelberg Project last month and later sent in a pair, as did two students from Cairo who had come by as part of the filming for a television documentary called "On the Road in America."

"We put the word out there," Guyton said.

from Crane's Detroit March 3, 2011
Gary Anglebrandt

Visual arts preview: Mr. Imagination

2011-03-04T13:09:00.000-06:00

By Eileen Drennen

For the AJC

5:47 p.m. Thursday, February 3, 2011

"Wait right here," Mr. Imagination says before ducking back into the dark, art-choked living room of his compact ranch, in the northwest Atlanta neighborhood of Riverside.

The renowned visionary artist emerges into bright sunlight with three blackened sticks and a reverent smile. With the air of a weathered rock star -- black beret, lots of silver rings, a goatee he sometimes braids with copper wire -- he looks barely 50, much less 62.

"These are the first three bottle-cap staffs I ever made," he says of the singed metal-and-wood pieces. "They had been in my first show at Carl Hammer [Gallery in Chicago]. I managed to save them from the fire. They were stuck to the floor in a cube of ice. Had to use a crowbar to get them out."

The man whom Rebecca Huffberger -- founder and director of the American Visionary Art Museum - calls "one of the supreme practitioner of visionary art" in the world has earned a reputation as a genius of creative reuse, deeply original, highly prolific, a model of perseverance.

His works have traveled the globe and landed in permanent collections at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. While Atlantans may recall the 11-foot Coke bottle he decorated for the 1996 Olympics, or have seen one of his large installations at House of Blues locations in Las Vegas, Chicago or Orlando, they may not know he moved here just over two years ago, and makes his grand local debut in a show at Barbara Archer Gallery on Feb. 17.

With it, the much-loved artist who defies most self-taught artist stereotypes -- he's from the urban North, a seasoned networker and famously gregarious -- hopes to let the art world know he's back, stronger than ever.

For while he's made a nice living in the transformation business for decades by taking the castoffs of others -- industrial sandstone, old bottle caps, paintbrushes, wood and cement -- and turning them into big-ticket works of art, these past few years have challenged even his relentless optimism. His latest body of work isn't so much centered around reclaiming what others had thrown away as it is salvaging what pieces of his own art survived a devastating 2008 house fire -- and finding new life in them.

It was three years ago last month that Gregory "Mr. Imagination" Warmack faced the latest in a long line of epic tragedies, when his home and studio in Bethlehem, Penn., caught fire while he was away. By the time he got back, he was met with the blackened remains of a life he'd spent decades building: art made by himself and others, collections of books and artifacts, and the charred and frozen bodies of his dog Pharaoh and several cats. Friends from all over the world responded with benefits and offers of help. But the scale of the loss, and his conviction that some "so-called friends" had stolen work before he got back to town, sent him into a tailspin.

His favorite number is three, he says, lining up yet another trio of rescued remains -- three charred cans of spray paint -- along a porch railing. Past, present and future; life, death, rebirth.

His story can be told in three parts, the first and longest in Chicago, where he was born and raised, recovered from a gunshot wound and a coma, and made a name for himself his as a gifted artist and teacher. Industrial sandstone, in which he carved faces, figures and names, was where he started; worldwide fame came courtesy of his bottle-cap creations -- giant thrones and mirrors and even a hat and suit of his own clothes.

The second starts in 2001, when his brother died. He left Chicago for Pennsylvania, where he built new networks, turned his home-studio into a community arts center and traveled far and wide, teaching workshops and making art. Then that world went up in flames.

In the spring of 2009, he moved to Atlanta, certain the city's rising Phoenix was a sign. Fellow artist and Riverside neighbor Lake Sirmon, who'd known him from Chicago, had been after him to move South.

After the fire, she said, "it was important for him to be somewhere that he had somebody he knew he could trust." Too many people had "attached themselves to him just to further their own ends." Personal connection was what he needed to heal, she thought. So was Atlanta's combination of green spaces and city life -- in which he found "new trees. . .and different ways of working."

He brought some of the burnt things he'd salvaged and stored the rest. One day, he was able to see the beauty in what survived; see a power in what the fire hadn't been able to take. Something had shifted.

"Even though I lost lots of things," he said, "I still have my gift."

Sirmon's friend Keith Sharp helped Mr. I find an old house on a large lot not far from the river, where he envisions a new home, with a sculpture garden and lodging for visiting artists. When the rains came a few months later, flooding the house and outbuildings to the tops of their doors, the plan was put on hold. Still, pointing out the place's possibilities on a recent sunny day, the artist noted with relief a set of deep black burn marks around a window and exhaust fan. Maybe, he joked, it's fireproofed.

"He's one of those people that brings people together," Sharp said. "He's a catalyst."

Meanwhile, he's made new roots, led workshops for kids and seniors, and started to work. He's repaired some of the damaged works, left others in their burnished state, and set about making things he'd never tried before.

The art world may think he's done, he said, given how long he took off from work. But they need to think twice.

"Mr. I," he said, "is about to rise!"

Visual Arts Preview

Mr. Imagination

Opening reception 7-9 p.m. Feb. 17. Exhibit runs through April 9. Barbara Archer Gallery, 80 Elizabeth St., A012, Atlanta. 404-523-1845, http://www.barbaraarcher.com

Thorton Dial Retrospective

2011-02-21T17:00:00.004-06:00

Josh Anderson/The New York Times
Thornton Dial in his studio in Bessemer, Ala.

Letting His Life’s Work Do the Talking

By CAROL KINO
Published: February 17, 2011, The New York Times

THORNTON DIAL has never been one for talking much about his artwork. Ask him what inspires his monumental assemblages, made from twisted metal, tree branches, cloth, plastic toys, animal bones and all manner of found materials, and he is likely to respond tersely, as he did while showing me around his studio here one bone-chilling day last month.

“I mostly pick up stuff,” he said. “I start on a picture when I get a whole lot of stuff together. And then I look at the piece and think about life.”

Now 82, Mr. Dial has had a lot of life to think about — especially over the last year, during which he endured hernia surgery, pneumonia, a stroke and heart problems. Only recently did he return to making art in this cold and cavernous space at the back of Dial Metal Patterns, a fabrication shop run by his children. As he huddled in a chair, looking frail and slightly wary, his three sons hovered about him protectively.

For one paintinglike piece, made on canvas-covered plywood, Mr. Dial had used branches, metal, clothing, paint and a pair of work boots to create a lean figure fording through a tall jungle. “That’s Obama,” he said. “I show the struggle he got through without getting bit.”

Another, saturated with powdery white pigment, presented a baby doll nested in a field of cotton-covered twigs and twisted steel. A rope encircled the doll’s neck, suggesting a noose or an umbilical cord. “That’s the way they come,” Mr. Dial said, chuckling, when asked about the rope’s significance. “You probably see many things in my art if you’re looking at it right.”

Because Mr. Dial is self-taught and illiterate, he has generally been classified as a folk or outsider artist. But that pigeonhole has long rankled his admirers, because his work’s look, ambition, and obvious intellectual reach hew so closely to that of many other modern and contemporary masters, from Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg to Jean-Michel Basquiat. “If anybody else had created a major opus of this scope,” said Joanne Cubbs, an adjunct curator at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, “he or she would be recognized as a major force in the art world. Instead Dial struggles at the margins.”

But his marginalization may not last much longer. Mr. Dial’s first career retrospective, “ Hard Truth,” opens at the museum in Indianapolis on Friday. And on March 19 the Andrew Edlin Gallery in Chelsea will open Mr. Dial’s first solo gallery show in New York in 11 years. “This feels like the moment when the cultural world is ready to understand Mr. Dial and perhaps to embrace him,” said Ms. Cubbs, who organized the museum survey.

That exhibition, which runs through Sept. 18 before traveling to New Orleans; Charlotte, N.C.; and Atlanta, includes examples from many different periods, starting with the pictures that made Mr. Dial’s name in the early ’90s, when he used the tiger to symbolize the struggles and triumphs of African-American life. He has continued to invoke the specter of slavery, in pieces like “High and Wide (Carrying the Rats to the Man),” a large 2002 construction in which a grinning Mickey Mouse toy is chained to the hull of a ship.

The show also includes work he made in response to the 2001 World Trade Center attack and the gulf war: sculptures like the monumental “Crosses to Bear (Armageddon),” dated 2001-4, in which a nine-foot-high expanse of rusty iron crosses is festooned with rag and rubber detritus; and paintings that appear to be made from torn and bloodied American flags, like “Don’t Matter How Raggly the Flag, It Still Got to Tie Us Together” (2003).

“The power and clarity of his work measures up to any artist of any color in the last decades,” said Maxwell L. Anderson, the director of the museum, noting the works’ superficial resemblance to those by Julian Schnabel and Anselm Kiefer. “But unlike those figures this work is imbued with an experiential dimension. For Dial, politics is personal.”

Certainly Mr. Dial has one of the more amazing art historical biographies on record. Although he had little formal schooling, he developed an intimate acquaintance with postmodernist art-making materials early in life.

Born in 1928 in a cornfield in the tiny rural hamlet Emelle, Ala., and raised by his great-grandmother, Mr. Dial went to work as soon as he could walk, harvesting sweet potatoes and corn, and gathering twigs and “the stuff my great-grandmother needed to make fire,” he said. After her death Mr. Dial and his younger half brother went to live with another relative in Bessemer, a small industrial town, where he hauled ice, poured concrete, raised cattle, did carpentry and laid bricks, among other things, until he found employment as a metalworker at the local Pullman-Standard boxcar factory. He worked there on and off until it closed in 1981.

All the while — throughout his long marriage to Clara Mae Murrow, who died in 2005, and the birth of his five children (one daughter died at 28 from cerebral palsy) — Mr. Dial was quietly observing and honing his skills. “I was just watching people that make stuff,” he said. “I watch everything.”

He was also making things himself, from the functional, like fishing nets and lures, chimneys, bricks, funerary monuments, furniture and houses (“I made a whole lot of them and tore them down,” Mr. Dial said) to the less obviously useful, like animal sculptures made from tin and tree branches or plastic bread wrappers, or a slave ship built from metal and wood. As his sons recalled, during another interview in the shop office with nearly a dozen relatives and family friends in attendance, Mr. Dial would come home from work, watch the evening news, do some farming out back with his children and then set to work making things again.

Even with something ostensibly practical like a lure, “it was odd, the way he took his time and painted them and stuff like that,” his son Richard said. “Whatever he worked on had to be different from somebody else.” Mr. Dial was so prolific, he added, that his wife often made the boys tidy up by burying his old work in the yard. (Mr. Dial has said in the past that he sometimes hid his work himself because he feared the attention it might attract during the Jim Crow years.)

Life changed dramatically for Mr. Dial in the late ‘80s, when he was discovered by William Arnett, a wealthy white Atlanta collector who was obsessively scouring the South for unheralded African-American work. (Among his discoveries are the Gee’s Bend quilters, whose work toured to 12 museums in a widely lauded show.)

Mr. Arnett was smitten from the start. “Dial possessed a combination of pride, dignity and determination, along with a wry sense of humor,” he wrote in an e-mail. “His earliest artworks demonstrated an unlimited creative imagination. All he lacked was encouragement and opportunity.”

For Mr. Dial the meeting was transformative. “He didn’t have to bury stuff anymore,” his son said, “because Mr. Arnett would give him money for things, and Daddy was kind of fascinated. There was a point where he said, ‘Ya’ll been laughing at me, but look at what the man just paid me for doing this.’ ”

Or, as Mr. Dial put it, “That’s the time I did start thinking about art.”

Mr. Arnett gave him a monthly stipend in exchange for right of first refusal, which allowed Mr. Dial to make art full time. Mr. Arnett visited frequently, and introduced Mr. Dial to curators and other collectors, including Jane Fonda, who remains a major supporter. He also set the wheels in motion for Mr. Dial’s first museum exhibition, “Image of the Tiger.” Organized by the critic Thomas McEvilley, it opened at two New York institutions, the Museum of American Folk Art and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, in November 1993. The show seemed poised “to break down the border between outside and inside,” Mr. McEvilley said. Critically it was successful: “He has a genuine talent that he brandishes fearlessly,” Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times. But soon after the opening “60 Minutes” ran a segment that suggested Mr. Arnett was exploiting the folk artists whose work he had championed, particularly Mr. Dial. Suddenly “my show died on the vine,” Mr. McEvilley said. And so did several other major exhibitions of Mr. Dial’s art in the works.

Since then, although Mr. Dial has exhibited in galleries and been included in many group outsider art shows, as well as the 2000 Whitney Biennial, he has had only one other major museum solo exhibition, “Thornton Dial in the 21st Century,” at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston in 2005. (Mr. Dial, who remains close to Mr. Arnett, memorialized the debacle with the 2003 self-portrait assemblage “Strange Fruit: Channel 42”: it involves an eyeless scarecrow-like creature wearing a bloody tie strung up from a television antenna.) Yet the event had one positive effect on Mr. Dial, Ms. Cubbs said: “It made him re-evaluate what the relationship would be between his art and its audience, and his work became more complex and powerful.”

How did he do that? Mr. Dial isn’t telling. “I remember all of my art,” he said, “but I can’t talk about all of it, because I did it 20 or 30 years ago. You ain’t going to think about all you done did in life either.”

But pressed to explain why he makes art in the first place, he finally found an answer: “I make it for people to love.”

A version of this article appeared in print on February 20, 2011, on page AR28 of the New York edition of the New York Times.

detour art travels

More tributes to Mr. Imagination

Remembering Mr Imagination: March 30, 1948 – May 30, 2012

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Creating Artworks Without a Net

The 20th Anniversary of the Outsider Art Fair

By KAREN ROSENBERG

Published: January 27, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/28/arts/the-20th-anniversary-of-the-outsider-art-fair.html?_r=1

James Estrin/The New York Times

James Estrin/The New York Times

A version of this review appeared in print on January 28, 2012, on pageC1 of the New York edition with the headline: Creating Artworks Without a Net.

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