The Mean Lean Disco was on the main drag into blues-laden Clarksdale, Miss. There was so much to love about this building, photographed in 1994.
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Midwestern Roadside Treats
Here are some roadside treats from around the central midwest, photographed over the last dozen years. Be sure to click through the three pages of galleries to enjoy all the roadside goodness.
Continue readingThe Rainbow Beach Carvings
The revetment and jetty at the south end of Rainbow Beach and adjacent to the northeast corner of the Sawyer Water Plant host more than 700 rock carvings, many made by lifeguards in the 1950s and 60s. These carvings represent a rich record of summer life at the beach as well as including a number of significant individual works of art. It’s also the location with the largest number of identifiable carvers. These galleries feature highlights from the Rainbow Beach carvings. Read the Chicago Lakeshore Art Story
Continue readingThe Morgan Shoal And La Rabida Rock Carvings
Many of Chicago’s oldest lakefront carvings are on the badly deteriorated revetments along Morgan Shoal in Hyde Park. The more than 1,000 carvings there, between 45th and 50th Streets in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, are in imminent danger of being lost. This section of lakefront is in terrible condition, with many of the old rocks topsy turvy and falling into the lake. The condition of the revetments is such that they cannot be rehabilitated, but that does not mean the rocks and their carvings must be abandoned. The city is proceeding with a project to rebuild and expand the shoreline here,
Continue readingTemple of Tolerance: A Walkthrough
Here is a 2021 slideshow through Jim Bowsher’s welcoming Temple of Tolerance art environment in Wapakoneta, Ohio. Click here for a March 2023 story about the creator’s health and the status of his environment. You also can cruise through thumbnails: Jim Bowsher’s own Web site.
Continue readingA Joe “40,000” Murphy Update
I believe the first content I posted to this Web site was a piece about Joe “40,000” Murphy, the Chicago usher who created an art environment inside his South Side house and nearby five-car garage. That was in 1994, not long after I had acquired more than 700 pieces of art previously salvaged from Murphy’s property in anticipation of its sale. Murphy had died in 1979. Bits and pieces of the work have been exhibited in the years since then, most notably at Randolph Street Gallery in 1994, Aron Packer Gallery in 1997 (both Chicago) and in a traveling show
Continue readingReview: The Tom Patterson Years
The Tom Patterson Years: Cultural Adventures of a Fledgling Scribe, by Tom Patterson. Hiding Press/Jargon, 208 pages, 10 pages of photographs, 2021. ISBN 9781733709897. Paperback, $18 If you follow the literature of the folk/outsider/self-taught art field, then you know the name of Tom Patterson. He wrote the definitive book about Eddie Owens Martin/St. EOM and Pasaquan, and, with John Turner, the first major book about Howard Finster, among other achievements. Now he’s written a memoir that includes numerous interesting anecdotes from his encounters with Martin, Finster and other figures from the world of folk and outsider art, including the folklore professor
Continue readingReview: The Gallery of Miracles and Madness: Insanity, Modernism, and Hitler’s War on Art
The Gallery of Miracles and Madness: Insanity, Modernism, and Hitler’s War on Art, by Charlie English. Random House, 336 pages, 16 pages of plates, 2021. ISBN: 9780525512059. Hardcover, $28 Charlie English begins his history of Nazi cultural preoccupations— – and the genocides that followed— – with the story of Franz Karl Buhler, a German blacksmith who turned painter after he was overtaken by mental illness and entered an asylum. He also was an artist collected by the pioneering psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn (who gave him the pseudonym Franz Pohl), and he was as well an early victim of Nazi genocidal policies. Prinzhorn, and his
Continue readingJack Barker’s Metal Art Fantasyland
I don’t love junk metal art. The idea of turning scrap into art is usually better than the results. But occasionally a maker brings enough imagination and creativity to the work that it transcends its lawn-ornament origins. Tom Every and his epic Forevertron in Wisconsin is one of the more famous examples of this. Jack Barker, whose metal art filled his Essex, Illinois, yard, did not work on Every’s monumental scale — physically or conceptually — but his creations were if anything weirder than Dr. Evermore’s. Barker’s use of materials could be disconcerting, as could his imagery. The ways he
Continue readingMy Comments for The Army Corps Chicago Coastal Study
Please accept this comment for the NEPA review of the Chicago Coastal Storm Risk Management study. The historical limestone revetments and related structures at Morgan Shoal, Promontory Point and La Rabida have done more than protect the Chicago shoreline from erosion and flooding. They also have served as a canvas for thousands of mostly anonymous Chicagoans who have carved portraits and other images, names, messages and more into the rocks for almost a century. I have spent the last few decades documenting the carvings on the revetments all along the Chicago shoreline, researching their history, tracking down and interviewing carvers,
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