Category: Roadside Art

Jack 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

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Garage Doors of Chicagoland

In the 1990s Mark Williams and Anne Weitze conceived a project to document the garage doors of Olympia Fields, Illinois, Mark’s hometown. It was inspired in equal measure by the Dublin Doorways posters, whose quaintness was then ubiquitous, and by the industrial typologies of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Mark never completed the project, but in his memory Anne and I proceeded with the not-so-great snapshots that they took as preliminary sketches, made serviceable through Anne’s Photoshop wizardry. These doors will be instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with mid-century suburban vistas. It was Mark’s brilliance to see past the apparently tacky

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World’s Largest Small-Town Collection of Big Things

Little Casey, Illinois, is in possession of a number of world’s largest things as certified by Guinness, which requires largest things to be at least theoretically functional. Accordingly, in addition to its largest things, the town also boasts quite a few just large things, which are at least as cool as the largest things even if not putatively functional. Why all the big things? A brilliant idea, it seems, to draw tourists to a small town of no particular distinction in the middle of downstate Illinois. And it works. We were there on an October Tuesday afternoon and there were

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The Mid Century Glories of Peterson Avenue

Peterson Avenue: A cynic might say it’s where Prairie style went to die, and I’d say, yes and an honorable death. The mid-century buildings on this commercial strip range from late moderne to proto-post modern, with lots of typical Mid Century Modern buildings in between, all showing a range of Prairie influences. Peterson, from Western Avenue west to Central Park Avenue, is a case where economic stagnation (as opposed to decline) might be the best preservative for under-valued architecture. I doubt whether Peterson was ever a hot neighborhood, and it’s hardly hot now. But it’s also not falling apart. There

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The 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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Roadside Art Tableaus

There are isolated bursts of brilliance all along Western Avenue and other working-class stretches of Chicago’s orderly street grid. And every once in a while you come across a building or a sales lot where the signmaker’s art gives way to something far more ambitious than a simple commercial illustration. Here are three examples — all gone now — where the signage adds up to a large-scale piece of art.

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