Before I started photographing the gyros signs of Chicago — now collected as The Gyros Project — I had an idea to document signs at Chicago’s hot dog stands. I had become increasingly interested in roadside signs as examples of vernacular art, and hot dog stands have long been a ubiquitous part of Chicago’s street life. The red-and-yellow red hots signage that advertised and decorated so many of them literally set the local color for the city. I ultimately decided against hot dogs in favor of gyros, however, for two reasons. First, in those days (early 1990s) there were so
Continue readingRoadside Muskegon Marvels
No shortage of things to see to in this lakeside Michigan city. These photos mostly date to 2011. The Signs The Buildings
Continue readingHolland Truck Station
Holland Truck Station and its wonderful neon sign, whose wheels reportedly spun, once stood at the auspicious junction of U.S. Highways 45 and 50 just outside Flora, in southern Illinois. Initially a Pure Oil gas station and later Standard Oil, it offered broasted chicken among its treats and even hosted a disco at one point in its classic mid-century modern building. Bill and Martha Holland operated the truck stop adjacent to the Flora airport, which Bill, a Korean War-era fighter pilot, managed for a time. The Truck Station opened around 1957. These photos are circa 1993, after the business had
Continue readingRoadside Giants of Cross Plains
Back in the 1990s, the trio of roadside giants in the first image — pink elephant, towering Indian and modest knight — resided next to Loco Joe’s fireworks in Cross Plains, Tennessee, north of Nashville . Time took its toll, however. The knight disappeared and the other two figures weathered. They outlasted Loco Joe, however, as well as the adjacent antique mall. Today the elephant continues to decay in its original spot, glasses gone but still holding the martini glass complete with olive. The Indian moved across the road to Sad Sam’s fireworks and has been refurbished. You can read
Continue readingMansards Forever!
As Modernism lost its grip on the collective imagination in the second half of the 20th century, adding a mansard roof to a building must have seemed like an easy way to affix substance and class. Mansards proliferated, on buildings both residential and commercial. So why not achieve the same sort of upgrade by putting mansards atop signs, which were likely even more in need of classing up? I can’t speak for the whole country, but in the Chicago area our streets were once lined with this oddball expression of 1970s-era mansardism — signs with roofs. Back in 2003 I published a
Continue readingReview: Outsider Art
Outsider Art, Updated and Revised Edition, Colin Rhodes, Thames & Hudson, 288 pages, 200 illustrations, 2023. ISBN: 978-0-500-20486-3. Paperback $24.95 Colin Rhodes has written an accomplished survey of outsider art, its history, its current state and its future. His deep understanding of the field makes this book an authoritative and important document. About that title: He is not defensive about the term “outsider art,” arguing that its well-established use makes it still a useful label. It’s also the name not only of Roger Cardinal’s seminal 1972 volume, but also of Rhodes’ own 2000 book (Outsider Art: Spontaneous Alternatives) of which this
Continue readingReview: Singular Spaces II: From the Eccentric to the Extraordinary in Spanish Art Environments
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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Ernie Bushmiller: Master of Modern Art
Ernie Bushmiller loved making fun of modern art in his Nancy & Sluggo comic strips, but it turns out he was a master at creating the very art he ridiculed. When people talk about Bushmiller’s artistry they’re usually referring to things like his formal simplicity, the perfection of his line and the compellingly odd proportions in his cartoon universe. When they talk about surrealism and Ernie Bushmiller, it’s usually about the absurd goings-on, like all the times he broke the fourth wall and had his characters speak to him, the inexplicable geography and out-of-place factories, the martians and ghosts that
Continue readingThe 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
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