Out of My Head: The Imaginary Creatures of Josep Baqué, by Brian Chidester and Josep Baqué, Fantagraphics Books, 538 pages, color illustrations, 2023. ISBN 978-1683966814. Hardcover, $49.99. If you grew up watching Japanese superhero shows like Ultraman or the Power Rangers, you might have been amazed at the far-fetched creatures they invented week after week for the heroes to fight. Many of these monsters made Godzilla look unimaginative. How could they not eventually run out of ideas? Josep Baqué, a Barcelona policeman, left 1,500 drawings of equally fantastical creatures, each one more bizarre than the last. His reasons for creating this menagerie remain
Continue readingBook Review: Symbolization and the correctness of life, by Heinrich Herrmann Mebes – The Complete Works
Symbolization and the correctness of life, by Heinrich Herrmann Mebes – The Complete Works, by Thomas Röske, The Prinzhorn Collection/Wunderhorn, 548 pages, many illustrations, 2023. ISBN 978-3884236802. Hardcover, 70 Euros When German psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn published his pioneering study Artistry of the Mentally Ill in 1922, he gave reduced attention to two artists, thinking that each deserved an individual publication. Those projects never materialized, but Prinzhorn’s namesake collection in Heidelberg published an Else Blankenhorn book in 2022 and now has come out with a hefty volume collecting the work of Heinrich Mebes. Mebes, by profession a watchmaker, was married, had
Continue readingEmpty Signs – The Roadside Gives Up The Ghost
When people talk about ghost signs they usually mean wall signs advertising a brand or business that may or may not still be around but was once promoted in a grand, or at least large-scale, manner. There is another class of ghost signs, however, that is spookier. These are the vacant frames of (usually) unknown businesses emptied of their most critical content. They are still standing only because no one has taken the trouble to pull them down. These mostly mute signs have a charm of their own, intriguing in their very blankness.
Continue readingNew Crop of DIY Carvings at Promontory Point
Here is the new crop of artwork from the June 2026 carving workshop at Promontory Point, sponsored by the Promontory Point Conservancy. Every year since 2022 artists Roman Villareal and Joel Cardenas have helped the regular folks who just show up add their own carvings to the thousands that line Chicago’s Lake Michigan shoreline. Without intending to, they all become co-creators of the collective work of art that stretches along that shore for 22 miles. And this June group added 40 new carvings to the 120 made at previous workshops. You can read more about the Chicago lakefront rock carvings
Continue readingRoadside LA Highlights
Visually, LA is a great place to visit. Here are some highlights from the Society for Commercial Archeology’s recent LA road trip.
Continue readingNewly Visible at La Rabida
The strip of land that runs along Lake Michigan from the entrance to Jackson Harbor at 64th Street, behind La Rabida Hospital, then down to 67th Street is home to more than 1,000 rock carvings. Those carvings, some dating to the 1930s, are on limestone blocks that once formed a revetment protecting park and beach from the lake. The beach is gone as is most of the revetment’s structural integrity. Where it isn’t a jumbled pile of large blocks, it’s a line of rocks now mostly under water. Lower lake levels in 2025 and 2026 brought many carvings out of
Continue readingThe Barcelona Rock Carvings
Chicago’s lakefront rock carvings are unique in the world for their quantity and their extent along a modern shoreline. But the impulse to carve on rock is not unusual, from prehistoric to Roman times to now. The modern example closest to the Chicago carvings is on the Mediterranean shore in Barcelona, Spain. Two decades ago, Sebastian Bugallo, an Argentine artist then managing a restaurant in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter, decided the best way to recover from the night before was to go to the seaside at Barceloneta and carve rocks. His medium was mostly granite, specifically the large boulders piled topsy-turvy
Continue readingThe Art of Street Food – Update
The era of Washington, D.C., hot dog wagons featuring hand-painted signs is nearly over. These colorful trucks and trailers once lined the National Mall, which stretches from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol and is home to most of the Smithsonian museums. But these days there are fewer trucks, and photographic imagery has replaced the old painted signage. In other words, like most art environments, this one is disappearing. There are a few remnants, however, as seen in 2026 images below. And you can see this portable, spontaneous art environment in its glory days here.
Continue readingOutsider Art Fair 2026
Some highlights from the 2026 edition of New York’s Outsider Art Fair. Pardon the not-so-great photography, please.
Continue readingMargaret’s Grocery
If you took the cutoff from Highway 61 into Vicksburg, Mississippi, and had need of 1. sundries 2. spiritual uplift or 3. a powerful folk-art environment, you could stop at Margaret’s Grocery. The Rev. H.D. Dennis, who encased the country store inside and out with his sculpture and fantastic architecture, would preach you a personal sermon while his wife Margaret stood ready to meet your earthly needs. These pictures are from 1995. The site decayed after the couple’s passing, but rehab is happening under the auspices of the Mississippi Folk Art Foundation and its director, Suzi Altman. You can learn
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