In the early 2000s the Hyde Park community succeeded (with then-Senator Obama’s help) in blocking a government plan to strip away the quarried step stones around Chicago’s Promontory Point and replace them with a new concrete-and-steel revetment. That important act of preservation incidentally saved the many stone carvings that reside on those blocks — several dozen of the thousands of the carvings that line Chicago’s waterfront. The concrete-and-steel approach to shoreline reconstruction was nonetheless applied from just north of Promontory Point up to Montrose Harbor. The “shoreline protection project” demolished several miles worth of the old step stones along with
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
Continue readingReview: Gatecrashers
Gatecrashers: The Rise of the Self-Taught Artist in America, by Katherine Jentleson, University of California Press, 264 pages, 53 color photographs, 18 b/w illustrations, 2020. ISBN: 9780520303423. Hardcover, $50 Gatecrashers might best be described in terms more typical of a page-turner novel than an art book—it’s a story of tragedy and triumph, of drama and historic happenings. The overarching tragedy is the opportunity lost in the 1930s to open up the definition of art to myriad forms of creativity beyond the academy. That process seemed to be gaining momentum until it was precipitously halted in the early 1940s. It only restarted in earnest
Continue readingReview: Photo/Brut
Photo / Brut, by Bruno Decharme and others, Flammarion in collaboration with the American Folk Art Museum, New York, and abcd, Paris, 320 pages, 2020. ISBN: 978-2080204325. Hardcover, $55 Among the varieties of art brut creation, photography has historically received limited attention. A newly extensive, if not definitive, exploration built around the great ABCD art brut collection of Bruno Decharme takes some steps to remedy that situation. Photo / Brut, the exhibit and catalog, boasts impressive scale, and Decharme’s deep art brut experience gives him standing to help define what art brut photography might mean. That’s not exactly what this
Continue readingReview: Unheard Conversations/Carved Coconut Heads
Unheard Conversations: A Wonderful Collection of Carved Coconut Heads, by John Turner, Blurb, 72 pages, 103 color and 11 black-and-white illustrations, 2019. ISBN: 978-1714598229. Paperback, $85 Kitsch and art each have their virtue. Art, at least when recognized as such, is reputable, upmarket even when inexpensive, and trades on originality. Kitsch is disreputable, down market even when expensive, and trades on clichés. Yet kitsch can be fun, funny, and sometimes even meaningful. It is remarkably effective in evoking a time or a place or a feeling. Consider tikis, pink flamingos or Hello Kitty. It also can say a lot about a culture, revealing
Continue readingRoadside 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.
Continue readingThe Famous Bottle Cap Inn
Just added: a recently acquired Bottle Cap Inn postcard showing a different angle on the exterior. Click here for a full gallery of Bottle Cap Inn images, outside and in.
Continue readingBizarre Bazaars: More Funny Names
Here are another 42 great crazy business names from around the country and world. There are more than 600 in the Bizarre Bazaars crazy name hall of fame. Or buy the book. Click here for the new, expanded deluxe edition. Go to Bizarre Bazaars main page for 600 great names.
Continue readingWork From Home — Who’d A Thought It?
With a grip on the zeitgeist that is shaky at best, I rarely find myself ahead of big trends. But at least once I can claim to have been a halfway decent futurist. This 1981 piece describing the future of work was distributed by Columbia Journalism School’s news service to a handful of small newspapers. A version later appeared in the Santa Barbara News & Review, the first place I worked professionally. At the time the idea of office workers being employed at home was not widely foreseen, but I had come across a news item on a pilot program at
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Is Ersatz History Good Enough?
Does it matter that the history found in most Hollywood films based on real events and real people is ersatz? Watching 2020’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 and its frequent falsifications, I was reminded of a piece I wrote years ago about how a fake cinematic reality can all too easily substitute for actual historical knowledge. Hollywood producers certainly have the artistic prerogative to not care about rendering an accurate account of historical events, but it’s a choice with consequences (even if often without obvious dramatic rationale). Why? Because the Hollywood version is not only the most vivid account
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