Singular Spaces II: From the Eccentric to the Extraordinary in Spanish Art Environments, Jo Farb Hernández, 5 Continents Editions, 2 volumes of 532 pages each, 1,050 color illustrations, 2023. ISBN: 979-12-5460-018-4. Hardcover, $350 I began my review of Jo Farb Hernandez’s first study of Spanish art environments, 2013’s Singular Spaces, with the observation that is was “so epic that even a large-format volume of nearly 600 pages can’t get the job done, so a bonus CD adds thousands more thumbnail pictures and hundreds more pages of text.” Turns out it wasn’t enough. In the 10 years since that publication, she
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The Poles of D Bill – Near Normal
When D Bill, a retired toolmaker for Caterpillar Tractor, began carving utility poles, it must have seemed natural to him to create detailed engineering drawings for each design. The carvings are whimsical and imaginative, the drawings, technical, detailed and to scale. D Bill, who preferred an initial to his full name Darwin, mostly sold his work at the annual Sugar Creek Arts Festival in the nicely named Normal, Illinois. But he also used it to decorate his spread in Danvers, a few miles west. The poles were scattered around his house and workshop and lined the long driveway up
Continue readingMartha Timm Memorial Rock Garden
The Martha Timm Rock Garden is fenced off in New Hampton, Iowa’s Mikkelson Park, making photography a challenge but visiting easy. You can just walk up any time and look. An information sign supplies what little information I can find about this modestly scaled art environment: “Martha Timm and her husband were retired to a home in New Hampton from a farm southeast of the city when she began the building of her rock garden. It includes rocks from every state of the union, collected by her and for her by relatives and friends in their travels. The shards of
Continue readingArt On The Belmont Rocks
More than 250 works of art survive on a row of blocks preserved when the limestone steps north of Diversey Harbor in Chicago were replaced with a new concrete-and-steel revetment. The other blocks — there had to be thousands ripped out — hosted a treasure trove of art that is now gone forever. Those same blocks helped form the heart of Chicago’s gay community. I’ll leave it to Owen Keehnen, historian of the Rocks, to explain more in this passage from the Facebook group he manages. Although the gay scene at the Belmont Rocks did not survive the reconstruction, about
Continue readingThe Cross Garden
W.C. Rice’s cross garden art environment in Prattville, Alabama, near Montgomery, was one of the nation’s fiercest roadside views. The drift of his message was crystal clear, although the specifics were sometimes arcane. Rice, whose cross fixation extended to the large wooden one he wore around his neck, was said to be quite friendly to visitors. His signs and crosses stretched along two sides of the road. On one side was a shed that served as a chapel. On the other the signs and crosses filled a large vacant lot below a hillside trailer park that Rice owned. The messages
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