Public Art Review issue 07 - 1992 (summer/fall) by forecastpublicart

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PUbicArtReview Spontaneous Construction Environments By Self-Taught Artists

Exhibition on view October 11 - January 3 Galleries 1 and 2

PUBLIC ADDRESS: KRZYSZTOF WODICZKO A 20-year survey of work by this renowned Polish-born artist. Known for his metaphorical, socially engaged vehicle designs and large-scale slide projections that transform the exteriors of public landmarks. Wodiczko has established himself as one of the most innovative voices in public art. In addition to the indoor exhibition which includes drawings, sculptures, slide projection environments, and documentation of his previous projections. Wodiczko will create a new

RELATED EVENTS ARTIST'S TALK Wodiczko discusses his Twin Cities exhibition and projection. Sunday. November 22. Walker Auditorium. 3:00 pm. Tickets: $5 ($4 members)

PUBLIC ART: WHAT IS IT? WHERE IS IT? A4-session

projection on the State Capitol building in St. Paul. The projection is scheduled for viewing during

class on public art led by Walker associate curator Peter Boswell

the evenings of October 2 3 . 2 4 and 25.

and Twin Cities artist Seitu Jones. Thursdays. October 2 9 November 19. Walker Lecture Room. A-8 pm. Course fee: $57 ($51.30 Walker membersl

Walker Art Center

Minnesota Artists Selected: EARCIE ALLEN, VIRGINIA BRADLEY, ERNESTINE GATES, DAVID HALL & LAURIE VAN WIEREN, ERKI KANNUS, DONALD MYHRE, KATHRYN NOBBE, ELLEN PETTY, MARJORIE PITZ, JEFFREY RABKIN, KENT SCHEER, SARA ROTHHOLZ WEINER & JANCIS CURISKIS, MAURA MATULA WILLIAMS

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1992

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he stirring, often startling works featured in the special section of this issue of Public Art Review are remarkable for many reasons, not the least of which is the amazing variety of artistic and cultural issues they manage to bring up. Large-scale environments built from a wide array of different materials, these creations are constructed almost exclusively by individuals operating independent of the "official" art world and often mainstream society as well. Thus, these environments and their often eccentric creators tend to exist in a kind of art historical and sociological limbo — eluding attempts at summary and easy labeling, challenging the way we analyze, critique, and appraise the relative "talent" of individuals or the "worth" of cultural artifacts. Yet it's just this kind of evaluative slipperiness that tends to energize culture (and cultural discourse) the most. As proof of that, this issue of PAR presents a collection of compelling essays on a range of topics engendered by these examples of "Spontaneous Construction." For the authors and photographers we've brought together — with the invaluable aid of guest editor Joanne Cubbs — identifying, studying, and lobbying on behalf of these kinds of grassroots environments is a thrilling, consuming and complex task. Ironically, the endeavor is complicated by many of the same characteristics which give the works their rare energy and charm — their conspicuous lack of institutional associations or sanction, their often cryptically personal symbolic nature, their fundamental situation outside of the typical procedures by which art is introduced into a public setting. Although it's true that not all of this work is necessarily found in strictly public spaces, it is essentially "public" in a manner that much of what we call public art can only pretend to be. These environments grow organically from the social soil through a process that most public projects, because of their highly structured systems of implementation, simply cannot mimic. These grassroots works reflect all the passion, immediacy, and serendipitous beauty that the public realm promises, but is so often prevented from delivering by the constraints of regulations and committees. Routinely confounding conventional expectations of what public art can and should be, many of these provocative works explore the most delicate, intimate fantasies — and exorcise the darkest, most personal demons — of their uncommon creators. Yet it would do the art and the artists a disservice to simply consign them to the realm of indecipherable curiosities. Fantastic, eccentric, naive, visionary, outside: All of these words have been used to describe the compelling works of art that we focus on in this issue of PAR. But despite a certain evocative accuracy, such descriptions fail in their task if they leave the reader with the impression that the most important thing about these works is how odd and anomalous they are. In the end, I believe this work is ultimately less a manifestation of some sensibility lying distantly outside of the social norm than an example of the potential for magnificence and mischief that lies inside each of us as we chart our own personal paths — always dreaming fantastic dreams and sometimes even doing fantastic deeds, essentially ordinary creatures who occasionally discover extraordinary means to announce our private selves within the great public world. Jeffrey Kastner Editor, Public Art Review

Public Art Review Editor: Jeffrey Kastner Guest Editor: Joanne Cubbs Project Manager: Jack Becker Associate Editor: Judy Arginteanu Art Director, Design and Production: Shannon Brady Advertising Representative: Beth Christofferson Copy Input: Barbara Heyen Editorial Advisory Board: Amanda Degener, Regina Flanagan, Patrice Clark Koelsch, Cathey Billian, Barbara Grygutis, Kinji Akagawa, Cheryl Miller, Lance Nekar, Fuller Cowles, Christine Podas-Larson, Lori Lane, Mariann Johnson, Gordon Thomas, Rebecca Sterner, Jerry Machalac. Published by FORECAST Public Artworks Managing Director: Paula Justich FORECAST Board of Directors: Fuller Cowles, Lori Lane, Scott M. Nelson, Ellen Valde, Jim Billings, Pixie Martin, Mary Sullivan Rickey. Printer: Printed Media Services © 1992 Public Art Review (ISSN: 1040-21x) is published semi-annually by FORECAST Public Artworks, 2324 University Avenue West, Suite 102, Saint Paul, Minnesota USA 55114 Tel. (612) 641-1128. Annual subscription dues are U.S. $12 for USA, $16 for Canada, and $22 for foreign. Public Art Review is not responsible for unsolicited material. Please send SASE with material requiring return. Opinions expressed and validity of information herein are the responsibility of the author, not FORECAST, and FORECAST disclaims any liability for any claims made by advertisers and for images reproduced by advertisers. POSTMASTER: Send change of address to Public Art Review, FORECAST Public Artworks, 2324 University Avenue West, Saint Paul, MN 55114 U.S.A. Public Art Review is made possible with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the McKnight Foundation; as well as the Cowles Media Foundation; St. Paul Companies; and advertisers, subscribers and supporters of FORECAST. For information about advertising, contact ad representative Beth Christofferson at (612) 827-6625.

On the cover: Simon Rodia's Towers in the Watts district of Los Angeles. (Photo by Seymour Rosen, courtesy SPACES)

Spontaneous Construction

Does It Ulork? The evaluation of art in public places and institutions By Malcolm Hiles

Public Art as Analgesic The healing mission of British Health Care Arts By Debbie Duffin

Pardon Our Appearance Scaffolding and construction fences as canvases for public art By Cynthia flbramson

Fenced Out Andrea Blum's "Split Pavilion" divides Carlsbad, Calif. By Philip PTegill

Introduction: Spontaneous Construction ii brief critical history of "outsider art" environments By Joanne Cubbs

Seeking the Grassroots Artist One intrepid observer looks back on his ouin 30-year odyssey By Gregg Blasdel

(Inter)Cultural(lnterlConnections Eddie Williamson, Tyree Guyton and the cosmogonic crossroads By Judith M.HcllJillie

Live Wires and Yard Shows Botes on homegrouiit public art environments in the American South By Tom Patterson

Site-Specific Six more environments from around the world Texts and photos by Robert flmft, John Haizels, Seymour Rosen, Jan Schoonover, Susanne Theis and Karen Daldes

From Garage to Gallery James Hampton's capital monument By Lynda Roscoe Hartigan

The Ark of the Broken Covenant HOUJ the

city of Heuiark sunk Kea Tauiana's dreams By Holly Hetz

Private Spaces, Public Places Thoughts on "outsider" environments in Europe and Horth Rmerica By Ulillem llolkersz 3 PUBLIC ART REVIEW

SUMMER/FALL

1992

In her article in the Fall/Winter 1991 issue of Public Art Review ("In the Museum Garden," p. 13), Jane Dodds mentions a "traffic pattern which moves the visitor through the tunnel under Jefferson Avenue to the Museum." That tunnel has in fact been closed since 1979, when it was converted into a storage area. Incidentally, the last vestiges of the sealed-off tunnel (a downward-leading staircase and entrance hall) were recently removed as part of a major renovation now underway of the Hirshhorn's plaza. The renovation, developed in collaboration with museum staff by landscape architect James Urban of Annapolis, Md., will feature, among other elements, areas of lawn, new trees, granite paving, and ramp accessibility from Jefferson Drive. So this "other" space for outdoor sculpture at the Hirshhorn — a 2.7-acre rectangular site with the circular fountain and elevated museum building at its center — will be considerably transformed by the end of 1992, when it is expected to reopen. Sidney Lawrence Public Affairs Officer Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Washington, D.C.

Please note that PublicArtReview has a n e w address: PublicArtReview FORECAST PUBLIC ARTWORKS 2 3 2 4 University Ave. W. St. Paul, M N 5 5 1 1 4 612/641-1128

ART on FILE

Slides of Public Art, Architecture and Design In the United States The ART on FILE Collection includes works by: • Contemporary American Sculpture: Acconci, Andre, Armajani, Artschwager, Aycock, Bartlett, Bayer, Borofsky, Burton, Butte rfield, Blum, Carpenter, Caro, Chamberlain, di Suvero, di San Falle, Ewing, Ferrara, Flanagan, Fleischner, Holzer, Haas, Highstein, Dorrien, Hamrol, Hollis, Holt, Irwin, Leicester, Lere, Jimenez, Judd, Lewitt, Liberman, Lin, Miss, Morris, Nauman, Noguchi, Oldenburg, Oppenheim, Pepper, Poirier, Puryear, Rickey, Segal, Serra, Simpson, Smyth, Stackhouse, Schwartz/Walker, Terry, Trakas, Turrell, Wegman, Zimmerman, Tucker, Voulkos, von Schlegell • Historic & Modern American Sculpture: Archipenko, Ball, Bailly, Bertoia, Borglum, Boyle, A. Calder, S. Calder, Chagall, Dallin, Dubuffet, French, Kitson, Hepworth, Kelly, Lipchitz, MacMonnies, Manship, Milles, Miro, Moore, Nevelson, Pomodoro, Rush, Remington, Saint-Gaudens, Smith, Story, Shrady, Saarenin, Taft • Architecture: Ambasz, Barnes, Caragonne, Frasca, Gehry, Giurgola, Graves, Goff, Hardy, Isozaki, Jahn, Johnson, Meier, Moore, Moss, Nelson, Pei, Pelli, Piano, Prince, Predock, Rogers, Rauch, SITE Architects, Soleri, S.O.M, Stirling, Torre, Venturi ART on FILE photographers, Colleen Chartier and Rob Wilkinson, have documented over 1000 artworks, buildings, historic districts and public spaces throughout North America. The projects have been thoroughly researched, often from original source materials. The extensive project descriptions which support each slide have been of particular benefit to faculty in contemporary art, architecture, urban planning and landscape architecture. A complementary catalog describing ART on FILE topics, slide collections, and individual projects is available upon request. r m individual project slides are now available. A new order form with instructions will be included in the next mailing, or you may request one via mail or FAX.

ART on FILE, Inc., 1837 Easl Shelby, Seattle, WA98112 Phone: 206 322 2638 FAX: 206 329 1928

4 P U B L I C A R T R E V I E W SUMMER/FALL

1992

Does It Work? The equation of art in public places and institutions By

M a l c o l m

M i l e s

rt plays a wide role in social settings. Its enthusiasts claim it contributes to urban regeneration, lends identity to public places, and contributes to well-being. This may be so, but many projects for "public art" have stated aims which are vague, and measuring outcome can be difficult. Sometimes, especially in the United Kingdom, organizations which promote projects are so consumed by the need to raise funds that evaluation is a low priority. There is no tested method for measuring success, although William H. Whyte and the New York-based Projects for Public Spaces have pioneered ways to look at the conviviality of public spaces.

acute care hospitals is more difficult, because most patients spend a very short time there, and art is a marginal factor compared with clinical treatment, though it can contribute to an environment and atmosphere conducive to healing. Art may act as a landmark to aid navigation, and the culture of a hospital may affect its success in recruiting and retaining staff. A pioneering study is being designed at the University of Washington State Medical Center by a group of arts and hospital professionals convened by Lynn Basa, director of the art program there. It will focus on the work of the "bedside artist" and be conducted through 1993.

It) the long term, enthusiasm mill not be enough. Mdjor

In the long term, enthusiasm will not be enough. Major public investment inevitably, and rightly, leads to an evaluation of outcomes. Does public art do what people say it does? We need to find out. In the case of art in health care buildings, the situation is simpler. The needs of a hospital are clearly set: to aid patient recovery and value staff. The staff is easily defined, but the patients come and go. Evidence that environmental factors can affect rates of recovery was published by Roger Ulrich in a 1984 issue of Science magazine; surgical patients in an L-shaped ward recovered much quicker and needed lower analgesic doses when they had a view of trees than when looking at a brick wall. It sounds like common sense, but this controlled study based on medical records is one of the few pieces of hard evidence available. If one environmental factor has a positive effect, we could speculate that others, including art, do also, and set up studies to investigate it.

So, within health care the evaluation of arts projects is beginning, allied to the aims of health care. How could a similar process be initiated for art in the city? The first need is to determine what a city is there to do. If it is only a corporate megastructure, then art may be marginal, as the expensive but remote "parachute" art of the 1970s bank plaza often seemed. If a city plaza or park is a place for all kinds of incidental human exchanges, then perhaps artists have a larger role. The criteria for evaluating urban design (and art in it) for conviviality are contained in Whyte's work: his contribution to the zoning laws of New York City still has impact. More recently, artist Jack Mackie has collaborated with landscape architects in creating schemes for the bus tunnel at Seattle, and at St. Louis and Chattanooga. In Britain, sculptor John Maine is a consultant to the local planning authority in the London borough of Lewisham. These would be exemplary vehicles from which to measure outcomes in terms of public response, use of space, and feelings of local identity and confidence.

ineuitably, and rightly, leads to an eualuation of outcomes. Does public art do ujhat people say it does?

In British long-stay hospitals (for the mentally ill and physically handicapped), each resident has a care plan which is monitored by nurses. These frequently contain goals such as regaining self-esteem, communication and mobility skills, and making independent choices. The Northern Health Authority in England has employed two researchers to study such projects during 1992 and collate the results, noting residents' responses to stimuli, and the observations of staff while monitoring care plans. Measuring the impact of art in

Enthusiasm is great to get things moving. But after more than 20 years of rapid growth in percent-for-art projects and other varieties of public art, it is time to take a rigorous look at what it actually does, with a subtext that the city should be designed for conviviality. Malcolm Miles is director of British Health Care Arts and a member of the board of the Society of Healthcare Arts Administrators (USA).

Directional signs at St. George's Hospital in Tooting are both image- and color-coded.

Public Art as Analgesic

The healing mission of British Health Care Arts By

D e b b i e

D u f f i n

ost people who come to hospitals are reluctant visitors and may have long waits for treatment or when accompanying relatives. Similarly, staff working under the many pressures inherent in such an environment need to feel their job is eased by smooth operation in appropriate workspaces, with good communication and working relations. Meeting these kinds of needs is one of the aims of British Health Care Arts (BHCA), an organization that develops projects designed to provide a stimulating visual environment in health care facilities. BHCA has been instrumental in pioneering the integration of artworks into the refurbishment of hospitals, with art and artists involved from the design stage. Works of art are seen as a part of a whole process which includes a well-planned use of space, easy access to staff, attractive decor, and clear information. "As soon as patients walk in the door they are affected by their environment," says Malcolm Miles, director of BHCA. A nervous accident victim who can't find the receptionist, or has no comfortable seat to ease the anxiety, becomes more difficult for staff to help. On the other hand, a patient soothed by calming decor, friendly staff, and efficient service, is likely to be more at ease and more cooperative, thus saving the hospital time and energy in dealing with complaints or aggressive behavior aggravated by uncomfortable conditions. As Miles explains, "Details are important. They are the first things patients notice, whether it is the flowers on the counter or the ease with which they can find someone to help [them]." The incorporation of art in hospitals obviously involves a diverse group of people, with different needs and desires: the hospital management, who want to provide a good working environment; medical staff and receptionists, who want to do their

jobs efficiently; patients, who want to be in and out as quickly as possible; and artists for whom the making of the work is paramount. These priorities might seem quite divergent — so how does it work? Peterborough District Hospital is one example of a success. Their Accident and Emergency Department was completely refurbished in 199091. "It was horrendous; now it's the nicest part of the hospital," said one staff nurse. Patients also had plenty to say, particularly those who remembered the department as it was. One mother and accident-prone son, whose regular visits provided some colorful anecdotes, talked enthusiastically about the new-style waiting room and

Above: Walter Richey's 1988 carved brick panel for the Bristol Eye Hospital. Below left: "Sea Piece," a stained glass screen by Mike Davis and Cate Watkinson.

the stained glass windows at the entrance. These were created by Shirley and Stuart Palmer and depict recognizable scenes of Peterborough collaged, stained, and etched in softly colored glass. Others were more concerned about the greater efficiency, including shorter waiting times and clear but minimal use of information. Clutter has been removed — no old notices or unnecessary labeling remain: the only things left on the walls are the artworks and one central information system. A well thought-out children's area was also created. The small anteroom with no doors, which can be seen from the main waiting room, includes large unbreakable playthings, as well

as artist Ben Quayle's child-like prints of the local railway. While I was there, one small boy played happily on his own in the area, and as a waiting relative commented, "It keeps them out of mischief; they can be seen but don't disturb us." Another use of artworks can be seen at St. George's Hospital in London. Here, images created by Terry Wright have been incorporated into color-coded signposts which direct patients to their destinations, helping to simplify a complex network of corridors. Sets of photographs — for example, green trees — are placed strategically along a green route, the color scheme also echoed in the decor. One important element of all projects initiated by BHCA is the relationship the work has to the locality. In Peterborough, all the artists have used local scenes, industry, and events — this is popular with patients who are keen to point out recognized landmarks. In others, materials produced in the region have

been used in the construction of more abstract images. The local connection also extends to artists. "We don't advertise nationally," says Miles. "We rely on recommendations from local arts resources and Regional Arts Boards." Management satisfaction and enthusiasm for the incorporation of artworks is high. As was noted by Michael Lilliman, the nursing manager at Peterborough District Hospital who was involved from the start of the project, "We had three major aims in refurbishing: safety, good treatment, and a welcoming atmosphere." This has certainly been achieved. Most medical and administrative staff, although enthusiastic about their new surroundings, did not pay much attention to the artworks, and most maintained they had a job to do and would do it under any circumstances. Patients were divided into two camps: those who definitely appreciated the artworks and the decor, and those who

Continued on page 26

5 PUBLIC ART REVIEW

SUMMER/FALL

1992

Pardon Our Appearance Scaffolding and construction fences as canuases for public art By

Cynthia

Abramson

ment," he added, "and that's what public art is all about." On the other side of the Atlantic, a French construction firm has raised scaffolding to an art form. For over a decade, the Layher company has succeeded in creating wildly imaginative, spectacular, and transformative building coverings and backdrops which are featured centerpieces in national spectacles and special events. One such project was the transformation of a monument to Charles de Gaulle into a giant 1940s style radio, much like those from which the French heeded "the call to arms" on June 18, 1940. For Bastille Day 1990 at the newly completed Arc de la Defense, Layher hung netting over the surface of the entire monument in order to create a reflective surface for a synchronized laser light show projected to the music of Jean-Michel Jarre. Layher's projects also include many cultural institutions, including the Bastille Opera House and I.M. Pei's Louvre Pyramid, which was the largest scaffolding job in the world.

s we leave the 20th century, we are witnessing the most monumental urban face-lift in history. Due partly to the rampant construction and redevelopment of the 1980s, and partly to a growing realization of the need to keep urban centers and infrastructure intact as far into the next century as possible, practically every major city in the world is experiencing some form of architectural resuscitation. More often than not, the efforts that presage a building's arrival (or its eventual salvation) are marked by the quasipermanent installation of unsightly and inconvenient wooden barricades, construction fences, and scaffolding, which appear to climb up one building facade and down another, for blocks on end. The effect that these ersatz jungle gyms have on our cities is to obscure those elements which help to define their charm and flavor, and to render them virtually indistinguishable from one another. City centers, which house the largest numbers of buildings being adaptively reused and redeveloped, as well as those requiring preservation and repair, are areas where these activities are most highly concentrated. What can be done to mitigate the dramatic effects of pedestrian-level construction on the look and feel of urban streetscapes? In New York, Paris, and southern California, artists, scaffolding companies, and municipal authorities are using buildings under construction and exteriors under repair as sites for public art to improve the look of their cities and to enable businesses, institutions, and communities to regain and reassert their street presence. Perhaps the most recognized type of construction site art is the construction fence mural. These are usually commissioned by real estate developers or corporations who want their project to attract public attention while, at the same time, want to soften the effect that construction may have on both clients and passersby. The company which is responsible for many of the murals which grace construction barricades in New York, Miami, Baltimore, and Boston is Evergreene Painting Studios. Since 1978, Evergreene has brought impressionist landscapes, architectural and pictorial images, and send-ups of 20th-century masterworks to sidewalk bridges, construction fences, and canvas banners for building fronts throughout the United States. Like the scenes from Central Park which unfold on the front of a new building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and the art deco trompe I 'oeil street facade painted on the construction fence for Miami Towers, the images they select evoke the cities in which a building is located and often depict scenes taken directly from the area surrounding a

building site, transforming the sites from eyesores into placemakers. Evergreene regularly works for municipal authorities as well, such as New York's Port Authority and the Long Island Railroad (LIRR), for whom they are creating their most ambitious construction site project to date: a 750-foot by 8-foot-long modular construction fence for installation in Penn Station. Mural designer David Horowitz calls the work "a WPA-style mural" which depicts 14 images of historic stations, trains, and figures from the LIRR. The mural will be installed this summer and will remain in Penn Station indefinitely. The majority of Evergreene's murals remain in place from three months to three years, after which many get recycled and installed in other locales. A mural created after George Seurat's "La Grande Jatte,"

6 PUBLIC ART REVIEW SUMMER/FALL

1992

which stood for two years in front of a well-known lingerie shop in New York City, was sent to an Ohio art museum; the mural for the Miami Towers building was reconfigured into a freestanding structure and installed in the architecture department at the University of Florida; and a construction fence for New York's Herald Square was given to a children's hospital. The Evergreene Painting Studios has evolved in another direction as well; they are one of the foremost architectural restoration firms in the country. Currently they are restoring the U.S. Customshouse, a national landmark in lower Manhattan's Bowling Green. When asked why Evergreene continues to do temporary murals for construction sites, president Jeffrey Greene explained that their murals are a way to enliven the cityscape. "It humanizes the environ-

Layher began collaborating with artists in 1985 to create canvas murals on scaffolding for installation on the facades of restaurants, churches, theaters, and museums throughout Paris. One of their first art projects was the Musee d'Orsay. Layher hired artist Jean Verame to create a mountain landscape in red, blue, and black, which enabled the museum to maintain a visual identity during its extensive renovation. Verame's work inspired Catherine Feff, a young French painter, to use the immense surfaces deployed on scaffolding as canvases for paintings. Ms. Feff is now one of Layher's most versatile and prolific scaffold artists. She creates decorative and trompe I'oeil images for the majority of Layher's scaffold projects and works on projects with artists from her own firm, Batisseurs d'Ephemere. Some of Feff s most notable works include a life-size replica of the Church of the Madeleine painted on the canvas covering the church itself; three 500square-meter trompe I 'oeil scaffold books with such titles as "The History of the Future" for a project entitled "Rue des Livres" on the Avenue Matignon; and a giant camera which this past May was placed in front of the Eiffel Tower and reflected its inverted trompe I'oeil image. Corporations have taken an active interest in Layher's work, since they perceive the visual impact and advertising potential of Layher's scaffold projects to be enormous. Corporate commissions include Ion Condesciu's banner for Citroen which depicts the client's car poised regally on the third floor of a building; his four-story-high Dunlop tennis ball which was installed at the Porte Maillot; and a skyscraper-sized bottle for Orangina. It is the architect or building owner who selects the design

livability of downtown Long Beach. Community-based scaffolding artworks can be exciting visual additions to streetscapes in transition. However, they can also act as identity markers which communicate a neighborhood's distinct personality to both visitors and residents. First, scaffold artworks can depict images recalling historically significant people and events that occurred in a particular place. Second, these artworks can serve as a sort of community bulletin board, visually providing information about community services and listings of

and installed in an interior public space, such as a public school. In this way, a community would be able to start its own collection of contemporary public art. As buildings continue to undergo repair and new ground continues to be broken in cities around the world, scaffolding will be part of our urban backdrop for years to come. However, artistic attention, community involvement, and public sponsorship of art projects for construction fences and scaffolding can transform streetscapes undergoing urban face-lifts into uplifting public places. These projects can act as catalysts for the creation of public collections of portable and temporary artworks that will have lasting meaning to a community and give emerging public artists a chance to work in the public domain. The results will surely send public art soaring to new heights.

Artistic attention, community inuoluement, and public sponsorship of art projects for construction fences and scaffolding can transform streetscapes undergoing urban face-lifts into uplifting public places.

events and activities. Third, they could take the form of a neighborhood map, highlighting local points of interest and helping tourists and visitors find their way around. Artworks for scaffolding can be installed on a temporary or rotating basis with the final piece purchased by a local merchant or arts council,

Two of Catherine Feff's trompe I'oeil works for Layher in Paris: A set of monumental books executed for the "Rue des Livres" project on the Avenue Matignon (above), and a giant radio at the Place de la Concorde. (Photos by Cynthia Abramson)

which ultimately appears on their Layher scaffolding project. However, when the scaffolding comes down, the artwork becomes the property of the artist who created it. Layher's scaffolds appear to take on a life of their own; sometimes they bear no relationship either to the building they cover or to the surrounding site. It is through this process of transformation, however, that they are able to inject new life and meaning into a place and enable one to see and understand it as if for the first time. As we have seen, scaffold art plays a variety of roles in urban settings â&#x20AC;&#x201D; from construction mitigation agent to street spectacle. Scaffold art can also play an active role in the day-to-day life of a community: it can serve as a communal canvas and venue for community-based cultural expression. A locally-sponsored scaffold art program could lead to the creation of a public art that would reflect and be meaningful to the community in which it was placed. Moreover, it would be a means of providing local artists with public commissions and exhibition opportunities, and would enable communities to become

actively involved in identifying and encouraging their own emerging artists; these artists, in turn, could act as catalysts to the creativity of others. Since the mid-1980s, the Long Beach (Calif.) Redevelopment Authority (LBRA) has been commissioning construction fence murals by community artists for numerous new large-scale downtown developments. These community artists have worked with high school students to create murals depicting lush tropical landscapes, trompe I 'oeil theater marquees, and lively dance parties which brighten the streets and provide glimpses of the finished buildings that are to come. In one instance, a construction fence mural was so successful that it became a permanent public artwork installed in the lobby of the building it had encircled. Because completion of several major downtown building projects is still years away, these community murals will continue to play a vital role in sustaining the

Scaffold art can also play an actiue role in the day-to-day life of a community: it can serue as a communal canuas and uenue for community-based cultural expression.

Cynthia Abramson is a public art and amenity planner with Project for Public Spaces, Inc. in New York.

Fenced Out Andrea Blum's "Split Pauilion" diuides Carlsbad, Calif.

P h i l i p

P r e g i II

he contention that "art should provoke rather than stroke" is a fixture of late 20th-century aesthetics. Gone are the days when, as Matisse noted, serious art could play to the senses in a relaxed manner. Since the 1960s and 1970s, when conceptualism forged a link between formal and theoretical concerns, many artists have shunned strictly formal solutions for approaches that require a measure of intellectual involvement on the part of the viewer, sometimes with jarring results. Yet to the casual observer, art that confronts often evokes suspicion, and at times, hostility. Relegated to the confines of a gallery or museum, such work continues to generate healthy debate, but some disagreements over controversial art — especially work in the public domain — have generated litigation over, and on a few occasions, even removal of the pieces. Andrea Blum's "Split Pavilion," perched on a wedge of land overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Carlsbad, Calif., currently rests in limbo between public acceptance and rejection. Opponents of the work have continued to pursue its outright removal for more than a year — often by employing skillful and creative means to keep the issue alive and in the minds of the public. For example, recognizing the value of effective public communication, foes of the piece have erected billboards, circulated decals, and produced colorful T-shirts about the work proclaiming, in a pun on the title of the Bruce Brown surfing film, "Endless Bummer." At recent public

hearings and city council meetings, citizens have taken the opportunity to speak for and against the work, often in blunt terms, with disgruntled individuals walking out of meetings, exasperated with what they perceive as city officials' cavalier attitude regarding the propriety of a contemporary artwork on their shores. Why "Split Pavilion" continues to stir such controversy in Carlsbad after a lengthy public information and approval process stems from both the nature of the work and its siting in a highly visible location along the city's coastal edge. Conceived as an important element in a larger street improvement plan, Blum's spare, minimalist work — in the tradition of her elegant spatial revisions of the Fillmore Center Plaza in San Francisco and 107th Street Pier in New York — adds identity to an otherwise ambiguous street intersection surrounded by disparate residential and commercial elements. Charged by the city to design a project that "had water, lighting, and would separate the site from the coastal highway," the artist responded by establishing a spatial focus — the pavilion and its adjacent reflecting pool — and by creating a visual frame for the ocean beyond. Formal concrete shapes bordered by drought-resistant ground cover echo in miniature the few undeveloped areas in the region that still contain undisturbed mesas covered by native grasses and chaparral. Also, to imbue the roughly 7,500-square-foot, west-facing site with a sense of enclosure without completely separating it from surrounding pedestrian and automobile traffic, Blum wound galvanized metal fences or "scrims" — some over eight feet in height — around and through the site. Though certain details failed to survive final planning and construction, including specific surface treatment and landscaping, the work succeeds in portraying the sense of regional landscape forms that defined the physical identity of the locale before the introduction of 20thcentury horticultural treatment. The result is a bold statement, expressing Blum's predilection for line in her

The Pacific Ocean stretches out behind Andrea Blum's "Split Pavilion" on the Carlsbad, Calif., beachfront. (Photos by Philip Pregill)

design, which in this instance, imparts to the work a skeletal appearance reminiscent of classical fragments at Cape Sounion, Segesta, or Paestum. Despite these classical associations, however, opponents view the work as an uncompromising example of contemporary art, one that is wholly repellent, due mostly to its metal scrim — a detail, which for some, conjures up the image of a penitentiary exercise yard or "gorilla cage." Aesthetic concerns are not the sole reason in Carlsbad for the opposition to "Split Pavilion." In fact, an equally common objection to the work is its location. Not that the work is considered inappropriate for a coastal site — opponents heartily welcome the idea of moving the project to some other beachfront location in one of the nearby coastal towns. However, opponents view the Carlsbad site as suitable for more functional uses, including needed beach facilities such as restrooms and showers. Support for these uses stems from the traditional function of the site as a surfers' rendezvous, sometimes involving two or three generations of surfing devotees. For example, in 1982 members of the Carlsbad community hosted a regional surfing contest at the beach below the site. On weekends and evenings surfers used the location to park their vans and cars and to swap stories and mull over surfing conditions. Some of the most vocal opponents of "Split Pavilion" retain memories of the site when its primary function was a staging area for beach activities. Ironically, and to the chagrin of the local parks department who maintain an eye for possible liability, Blum's solution has quickly become an ideal spot for skate boarding, which itself is a land-bound descendent of surfing. When initial opposition to the work occurred more than a year ago, the principle objection concerned construction activity that threatened to disrupt tourist trade in the area. More vociferous reaction to the project ensued at the completion of the project when the community had the opportunity to fully assess the newest addition to Carlsbad's public art

offerings. Jolted by the lean, minimalist aspect of the work, the community divided along lines regarding aesthetics and location, with the opposition forming an organized, determined group. After several public hearings, the Carlsbad Art Commission met with Blum to make changes to the completed work. The artist agreed to remove a part of the scrim — a section bordering a local cafe and parking lot — and consented to the substitution of shrubs for the low-profile ground cover. Despite these not insignificant changes, the more intractable

compromising individuals continued to press for complete removal of the project. By June, community opposition to the form and location of the work revealed a simmering and deepseated contest for control of "Split Pavilion," for the option to alter or remove the project in the future, and for more direct public involvement in subsequent public art commissions. With both sides attempting to hold their positions, the Carlsbad City Council convened on June 10, 1992, for what would become a watershed moment for "Split Pavilion." At issue was the legality of seeking a waiver

"as an uncompromising example of contemporary art. one that is wholly repellent, due mostly to its metal scrim - a detail, uihich for some, conjures up the image of a penitentiary exercise yard or "gorilla cage."

members of the opposition continued to lobby for complete removal of the work and for dedication of the space as a traditional park with beach facilities. At a public hearing on May 7, 1992, members of the community once again aired their opinions, proffering compelling reasons for either retention or removal of the project. Proponents tended to appeal for time and reason, citing other works in the United States and Europe that have evolved from unwelcome additions to the urban landscape to venerable landmarks. Opponents countered by citing excessive cost, possible hazardous conditions created by the bars and the small reflecting pool, the loss of parking and beach facilities, and the lack of aesthetic appropriateness. Armed with these objections, foes of the project called for a confirmation of Blum's intention to make design changes, though less

from the artist, granting the city relief from state laws and federal regulations that protect works of art from alteration or removal. With such a waiver the city could conceivably remove the work, or at least have the opportunity to alter the design several years hence, when opponents believed the community might wish to convert the site to a different use. In an attempt to clarify the matter, the city attorney advised the council that extensive litigation was likely if the town sought to override federal public arts legislation and the California Arts Preservation law. A motion to seek a waiver and subsequent removal of the work failed to pass, but a second motion, containing the changes tentatively agreed to by the artist, passed unanimously. Contacted shortly after the meeting, Blum affirmed the design changes but refused to consider granting the city a waiver.

Responding to the issues generated by "Split Pavilion," the city has recently proposed to refine some of its procedures regarding the conduct of public art commissions. Foremost is a move to inform the public about the proposed commission. For example, rather than exhibiting models and supporting graphics at one location — the city hall, for example — the Carlsbad Art Commission has proposed to make such information available in at least three different locations which sustain heavy pedestrian traffic, including the proposed site. Further, as changes occur to a work during design and working-drawing phases, the art commission will review such changes to assure reasonable conformance to the original scheme. And to preclude the dissemination of inaccurate illustrations of proposed works, the commission has proposed to allow the respective artists to approve any representations for accuracy and consistency with the design proposal. As Carlsbad continues to refine its public art procedure and to debate the fate of what Blum described as the most powerful site in her list of commissions, the opportunity for the community to enlarge its public art offering now appears to rest with the vicissitudes of territoriality and political compromise. Yet despite moments of acrimony, the community appears to have gained a greater insight into the power of art to shape public opinion. Early in the project, Blum summed up the value of the work by noting that it deals with the "psychology and sociology of the space, which ultimately is the politics of the space." As such, her words were a prescient preview of what turned out to be the politically charged future of "Split Pavilion." Philip Pregill teaches at California State Polytechnic UniversityPomona and writes about historical and contemporary landscape issues.

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A brief critical history of "outsider art" environments B

Samuel Perry Dinsmoor created his "Garden of Eden " in Lucas, Kan., around the turn of the century. In addition to building his fake "log cabin " home and the limestone mausoleum where he and his wife are now buried, Dinsmoor fashioned a maze of cement trees and poles on which he mounted allegorical figures illustrating his vehement social, political, and religious views. From 1920 to 1954, an Italian immigrant named Simon Rodia, who lived in the Watts district of Los Angeles, worked to build a garden of concrete mosaic of broken crockery and shells. Rising far above the scalloped walls, fountains, birdbaths, gazebo, miniature ship, and ornate pathways that came to occupy his yard, Rodia constructed a number of magnificent spiraling towers several stories tall. During the 1950s and early 1960s, Fred Smith, a retired lumberjack of the North Woods, filled three acres surrounding his homestead farm and tavern in Philips, Wis., with a gathering of over 200 life-size concrete figures encrusted with thousands of beer bottle fragments and other glittering glass shards. He arranged his human and animal characters into tableaux depicting events from popular history, local myth, and frontier legend.

ver the last two decades, there has been an increasing interest in the unusual, large-scale creations of independent and seemingly idiosyncratic makers like those described above. In fact, the environmental works of such "self-taught artists" have come to occupy their own genre, a category of expression that includes fantastic outdoor sculpture and enigmatic monuments; elaborate found-object assemblages and self-made museums; strange architectural creations and whimsical gardens; religious parks, shrines, and grottoes built by self-proclaimed mystics, fundamentalist preachers, and Catholic priests; and finally any ambitiously decorated house or yard that in some way seems to transcend the ordinary. Although they are well known to local communities and frequent subjects of "believe-it-or-not" feature stories in the popular press, it is the art world that often claims the "discovery" of these sites and generates much of the official discussion surrounding them. Not coincidentally, the quoted history of such creations is usually an account of their art world reception. While the Surrealists are known to have admired the mysterious and exotic architecture of the "Palais Ideal" built by the French postman Ferdinand Cheval, the standard history of such environments typically begins by referencing the photographic essay by painter Gregg Blasdel on "The Grass-Roots Artist" which appeared in the September/October issue of Art in America in 1968. Although some artists before him were attracted to the monumental works of self-taught creators, Blasdel's brief commentary and intriguing pictures introduced these sites to a large national art audience. In 1974, Walker Art

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Center in Minneapolis organized the exhibition Naives and Visionaries and produced an accompanying publication that featured documentation on nine major environments. Finally, in 1978, Seymour Rosen founded the organization SPACES, Inc. in California, which, along with the Kansas Grassroots Art Association and the Kohler Foundation in Wisconsin, has been instrumental in disseminating information about the sites and in advocating their conservation. These seminal efforts initiated what have now become the increasingly frequent pilgrimages from the art world to the best known of these environments and to the urban corners and rural backroads where such creations are normally found. But this appreciation was not so simply achieved, for in many ways the large-scale works of self-taught builders defy the mechanisms of art world recognition. "Living environments," which are constantly expanded, periodically refashioned, and often inhabited by their makers, they resist ready categorization by critics and scholars. Unlike discrete art objects, they usually refuse transportation into museums. And unless they are destroyed by disassembly for the art marketplace, they resist commodification by galleries and collectors as well. In recent years, the interest in unusual environment creations has intensified, fueled by a larger contemporary fascination with the works of self-taught artists in general. Frequently, self-taught artists are also referred to as "outsiders," in reference to their separation from more recognized currents of artmaking and, as it is still sometimes imagined, from significant cultural influence of any kind. Although the term "outsider art" was originally coined by British scholar Roger Cardinal in the early 1970s, his writing and much of the subsequent commentary in the field have drawn inspiration from the beliefs and impassioned polemics of French artist Jean Dubuffet. It was in the early 1940s that Dubuffet began to champion "Art Brut" (or "raw art"), his term for the expressive gestures of the untutored, particularly the creations of spiritual mediums, eccentric visionaries, and the mentally ill. He believed that these isolated individuals were somehow immune to the stifling influences of "high" culture and therefore able to produce a more "authentic" art, an art responsive only to the needs of inner expression and the forces of the individual imagination. Often credited with an indomitable will to create, so-called "outsider artists" have come to serve as a romantic paradigm for the artistic persona itself, for the heroic aspiring individual who transcends the mundane concerns and realities of the everyday world to pursue his or her own obscure dreams and fantastic visions. But despite such paeans, the art world's interest in the work of self-taught art makers might also be viewed as a form of self-interest. Dubuffet's early invention of Art Brut and the continual advocacy of that genre by the many European artists, critics, and collectors who followed him was born of a desire to extend the agenda of the avant-garde, to find in the "raw" gestures of the untutored "an art without precedence or tradition" which, unbeknownst to its makers, would serve to protest the tyranny of official High Culture. A comparable motive prompted much of the

revitalized interest in self-taught art that began in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States. Stirred up by '60s social activism and its call for democratization of culture and driven by a belief in its own manifest destiny, a part of the art world increasingly began to seek out the creations of unschooled painters, sculptors, and environment builders as well as a variety of other marginalized expressions that included traditional folk art, popular art, roadside architecture and countless other forms of vernacular culture with which outsider art is still often associated. Believed to be utterly unique and therefore more truly original than its mainstream counterparts, "outsider art" came to be positioned as a grassroots rebuttal to the pretentious claims of high modernism and as a subversive challenge to the representational systems of "fine" art. Of course, the notion that any expression could be immune to the influence of all other artistic traditions and practices, which often make their way into the larger cultural system of signs and ideas, was naive. In addition, much of the work by self-taught artists that has been embraced and heroicized for its artistic invention or novelty displays a strong visual resemblance to the already established formal directions and current aesthetic values of its discoverers. It is no accident, for example, that the contemporary interest in the phenomenon of outsider art environments originated during the 1960s when assemblage and environmental art were being produced by so many art world "insiders." In his 1968 article, Blasdel noted: "Obvious but purely coincidental relationships drawn between grass-roots art and some current directions of professional art make its existence that much more poignant...The choice of objects and materials as well as the attitude of total involvement is comparable to that of contemporary artists concerned with assemblage, environments, happenings, and light art." It's also significant that two years before Blasdel's essay, Allen Kaprow included in his well-known book Assemblage, Environments and Happenings an entire section on the outsider Clarence Schmidt from Woodstock, N. Y., who from 1948 to 1971 built a rambling seven-story house with variously shaped windows and labyrinth passageways filled with tinsel-covered shrines and assemblages. Today, much of the discourse surrounding self-taught artists continues to portray them as Romantic outsiders, artistic rebels, isolated eccentrics, obsessive visionaries, social misfits, or unwitting iconoclasts unbounded by the usual rules, norms, or conventions. The lives and works of some of these individuals may appear for many to be unconventional, but in arguing the importance of "outsider" art as an incarnation of these Romantic ideals that place artists outside of society, the defenders of such work have often obscured its real-life context and stripped it of its broader social and cultural meaning. At the same time, a slowly growing body of commentary in the field is beginning to demonstrate how the creations of self-taught artists contradict the imposed "explanations" of the art world, especially those interpretive schemes inspired by Romantic outsider ideology. There are many '"outsiders" whose individual expres-

" tMHfiLd A

sions are inspired by a strong desire for social discourse. Their works participate in strident politicizing, social satire, or shared religious belief. Many examples draw inspiration from the life occupations of their makers, while others emerge from a strong sense of relationship with local history and community. Finally, despite their seemingly non-traditional forms and appearances, the works of self-taught artists are also not without important inflections from ethnic or regional influences and traditions. The large-scale environments commonly built by self-taught artists offer a particular challenge to the Romantic outsider fantasies that have governed the meaning of outsider art, as well as much art in general. Given their physical size and frequent public visibility, many of these works possess an inherently social nature. And while the ambitious scale of such creations is usually attributed to the private compulsions and creative obsessiveness of their makers, a large number of environments are more often prompted by the conscious desire to fashion a spectacle that attracts some form of public attention. In attempting to draw others into the worlds built by their imagination, many self-taught artists have even engaged the strategies of tourism, luring travelers with bright signage, charging small admissions, offering postcard souvenirs, and asking visitors to sign guest logs. Some have also modeled their environments after theme or amusement parks. The dramatic social nature of the "outsider art" environments is also demonstrated by the public controversy that frequently surrounds them. While some of these sites have been appreciated and even adopted as a local attraction by the communities in which they are situated, other environments have been greeted with irritation, derision, or outright antagonism for their unusual expressive forms and commentary. In more than a few instances, this controversy has resulted in battles with the local establishment and ultimately in the destruction of the site itself. The larger-than-life spectacles created by certain inventive individuals find their real significance not in their mere idiosyncrasies but in the larger social, political, ideological, and cultural contexts that frame the meaning of such expressions. The Romantic art world ideology that has dominated the discussion of "outsider art" environments is one such contextual framework, but finally this discourse reveals more about the art world and its own beliefs and practices than about the sites themselves. To better tell these largely untold stories, the idealizing and sensationalizing tendencies of art world rhetoric might better be replaced with a deeper and more meaningful interpretation of both the specific social and cultural realities that give rise to this complex and compelling work. J o a n n e Cubbs is a writer and curator who now serves as director of special projects for the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wis. The above essay is excerpted from her soon-to-be completed book, addressing the critical issues surrounding "outsider art" and documenting over a dozen major environments by self-taught artists throughout Wisconsin. The book will be published in 1993 by JMKAC with support from the Kohler Foundation, Inc.

Seeking the

C/rassroots Artist O n e intrepid observer looks back on his o w n 30-year odyssey

G r e g g

B I a s d e I

rowing up in a small Kansas town, I knew everybody in my community and consequently was aware of all the eccentric behavior that is the spice of such a place. I can't say that eccentric behavior was exactly celebrated, but it was accepted as part of the social balance. I knew Mr. Foster was making a chain from bailing wire that was reported to be over a mile long. When he appeared in town with his pliers always in his overall pocket, my first thought was to see the great chain. One block from my house, David Rousseau spent many hours building a concrete village populated with small figures, toy automobiles, and found objects. The buildings and spaces he created intrigued me with their reference to a kind of primitive future that seemed shaped by Flash Gordon's set designer. Then in the fall of 1962 I met Ray Wilber, a fellow art student at the University of Kansas. In that same year Ray made a trip to Hays, Kan., to visit his brother and in the course of his visit heard stories of a "crazy" concrete garden in the nearby town of Lucas. The following spring we set out on a 200-mile journey to see this strange garden environment, with noclear idea of what to expect or how to approach this unknown creation. Lucas was (and is) a small rural farming community in western Kansas with a population of approximately 400 souls. Lucas has never experienced any significant economic development and depends primarily on farming and ranching. In an area with an abundance of yellow limestone outcroppings and occasional clusters of trees, the most distinguishing feature in the landscape is the rough quarried limestone fence posts which define the perimeter of many pastures and fields. Upon arriving in Lucas we asked where we could find S.P. Dinsmoor's "Garden of Eden," and eventually located it on the edge of town. I knew we had discovered something truly remarkable, something which could not be easily named and categorized. There have been many definitions which only begin to give Dinsmoor's brand of work a context. Roger Cardinal's term, "outsider art" seems to be the most encompassing, acknowledging the creation of a body of work split off from recognized academic and cultural concerns. Like the unusual stone fence posts, Dinsmoor's house and mausoleum were constructed from the indigenous yellow limestone in the style of a notched log house, with the largest stone 21 feet long. After years of neglect it was at first hard to distinguish nature

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Top: An exterior detail of Hans Jorgensen's house near Lucas, Kan. Above: Clarence Schmidt outside his house in Woodstock, N.Y. (Photos by Gregg Blasdel) from artifice â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Dinsmoor had planted woodbine vine at the base of the 29 concrete trees that surrounded the house and the untended vines had obscured not only the trees but the figures inhabiting them. Slowly and with increased excitement we began to discover Dinsmoor's unusual history and the story of the creation of his garden. He had been a soldier in the Civil War, a farmer, a school teacher, and had married twice; once at 27 (on horseback) and again at 81, to a woman 60 years his junior. Dinsmoor began work on the garden in 1905. By 1927 he had used 113 tons of concrete and 2,273 bags of cement. He completed the work in 1932. I was moved by this testament to obscurity with no consideration of worldly gain. In 1962, I also saw the work of Harry Ponder, a wandering street person in Lawrence, Kan., as well as a book called Insania Pingens which had been given to me by Robert Sudlow, an art professor at the University of Kansas. Harry Ponder constructed densely wrapped fetish-like canes and staffs with string, wire, bits and pieces of chrome, and virtually anything he could wrap onto a wood staff. Insania Pingens profiled the work of three European mentally ill naive artists. I was at a loss to define this work which utilized materials that I had heretofore not considered to be

1992

artmaking materials and, in fact, did not conform in any way to a category but presented itself fresh and alive and free from the dictates of style. The work sparkled; it had an odor of age, it was grimy and awkward yet perfect and without mistakes. I knew of no model that prepared me to view it but I knew that I was looking at completely uncompromised art which was not any less sophisticated than the work of schooled artists. All of these individuals possessed the ability to organize their medium to create works of unusual beauty, yet they did not derive from a linear history as we know it in Western cultural art. I returned to Lucas many times over the years. Although I had initially regarded Dinsmoor's garden as a singular, unique environment, during my visits to Lucas I discovered other artists living in western Kansas who were also working outside the boundaries of culturally sanctioned art. Within walking distance of Dinsmoor's house, Roy and Clara Miller created a rock garden of conical mountains and a small concrete village. Sixteen miles south of Lucas was Wilson where Joe Doughbeck built a house out of junk. Its ingenious features included a window installed on the side of the house that was itself still set in the car door from which it came. The window still could be rolled up and down. Isolated in the nearby countryside, Ed Root had quietly built hundreds of concrete monuments and plaques generously embedded with shards of pottery, broken glass, toys, and tin flowers cut from cans. The interior of Root's house was a dense environment of paper and foil flowers. Twenty miles east of Lucas, Hans Jorgensen had collaged animal skulls, bones, fragments of farm equipment, and various found objects on the outside of his house and fence. Further north, in Portis, Inez Marshall carved figures, animals, furniture, and musical instruments and had started work carving a Harley Davidson motorcycle, a project which was interrupted by her death. Marshall housed her work in "The Continental Sculpture Hall" in downtown Portis. I left Kansas in 1965 to attend graduate school at Cornell University where I prepared a thesis on grassroots art. During the first five years of my research I frequently predicted the demise of this art as the country became more and more a technological society beleaguered by media encroachment and stricter zoning laws which threatened isolation and independence. With the help of several small awards and eventually an NEA grant, I was able to travel throughout the United States and complete a more thorough body of research. It became clear through this research that outsider art has always existed, unnoticed except

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Eddie W i l l i a m s o n , Tyree Q u y t o n and the c o s m o g o n i c crossroads

(Inter) Cultural (Inter) Connections T

J u d i t h

M .

I Ii

later harvested and distributed free to patrons of the adjacent shopping center. he intersection of the Southern Railroad The yard show itself was another kind of cultivated and Highland Avenue in the Normaltown oasis â&#x20AC;&#x201D; a cosmogonic axis whose design honored the district of Memphis, Tenn., is a busy ur- horizontal sweep of the railroad tracks and resonated ban crossroads that divides the fashion- with the patchwork grids of rural subsistence gardens. able suburbs of the city's east side from Williamson sometimes camped in a tent-like, pyrathe racially segregated neighborhoods of the Orange mid-shaped shelter in the center; later he moved to a Mound district to the southwest. From the late 1960s used car parked next to a meat market. until shortly before his death in 1990, Eddie Williamson Farther afield, he collected broken pots, vases, and offered himself as a bridge across these boundaries. other ceramic vessels from dumpsters and installed Living as a "squatter" on a narrow grass embankment them in the shallow alcoves that spontaneously deflanking the south side of the railroad tracks, velop in the facades of shopworn buildings. These Williamson created a huge yard show that local shop wall shrines were complemented by bundles of careowners and residents described as "Parking Lot Eddie's fully selected found objects that he mounted in alleybottle garden." 1 ways and median strips. Together with his gardens and The focus of Williamson's life, as well as his plantings, Williamson's art ritually inverted the idencontributions to the neighborhood, revolved around tity of an arid commercial district. this 100-foot by 25-foot work. Assembled from disFor all their range and longevity, however, Africarded bottles, sprouting stalks and seedlings, carpet can-American yard shows such as Eddie Williamson's and fabric remnants, mattresses and bedsprings, oil remain the least sanctioned form of public art, not only lamps, shopping carts, chrome hubcaps and other in the precincts of academia where they are now being found objects, it was a sprawling testament to the investigated and documented, but sometimes in the artist's strength and tenacity. Glass bottles set in cities that host them, as well. Their religious origins troughs next to the curb marked its parameters. Other are rarely understood, while their political effects bottles were planted in rows, marking discrete zones remain even more obscure. However, surveys in both within the site itself. While transporting found objects urban and rural settings (by Robert Farris Thompson to the site, Williamson often filled discarded jars and and Grey Gundaker of Yale University, and by this buckets with cuttings from plants that had somehow author) reveal a strikingly consistent pattern of culmanaged to break through the neighborhood's veneer tural invention operating on a scale that transcends the of concrete and asphalt. Likewise, within a two-block local folklore attached to them. radius of the central installation, he cultivated virtuPerhaps the most famous contemporary yard shows ally every patch of exposed earth, pulling weeds from were created in the late 1980s by 37-year-old Tyree the crumbling edges of parking lots where they inter- Guyton and his family in Detroit's Heidelberg Street sected the bases of buildings, exposing enough raw neighborhood. Like Eddie Williamson, Guyton voraground to plant zucchini and watermelon. These he ciously collected cast-off consumer objects and resurrected them in a visionary context. He A view of Eddie Williamson's yard show which evolved over more than 20 years at used the neighbora busy urban crossroads in the Normaltown district of Memphis, Tenn. (Photos by hood's condemned Judith M. McWillie) and abandoned houses as armatures, covering them with so many objects that the superstructures beneath were barely exposed. The disorientation of familiar items, the sheer density and mass of their cumulative effect,

Eddie Williamson

seemed to defy gravity. Almost immediately, the carnivalesque spectacle of Guyton's work attracted tourists and discouraged the crack cocaine dealers who had moved into the abandoned houses. Guyton reversed the neglect of his neighborhood and correspondingly focused attention on the community's needs, an achievement that made him an instant celebrity. He was featured on the NBC Nightly News and in an unusually broad spectrum of publications ranging from The National Star (a crown jewel of the pulp press similar to The National Enquirer), to People and Connoisseur magazines. In 1990, the Detroit Institute of the Arts sponsored a solo exhibition of Guyton's work in which he arrived daily and dressed the walls and floors with still more newly rescued objects. This exhibition marked the first occasion in which AfricanAmerican yard dressing was consciously imported into a fine arts context.2

While there are obvious precedents for the use of found objects in 20th-century Western art, both the origins and purposes of yard shows such as Guyton's and Williamson's predate modernism and continue to transmit African cultural signatures no less than in the past. Robert Farris Thompson suggests that "minkisi," sacred medicines from the Kongo region of West Africa (Angola and Zaire), the ancestral homeland of many African-Americans, establish an appropriate paradigm for understanding the symbology and social values encoded within them.' "Minkisi" are charms made from ritual configurations of objects and substances said to affect spiritual power in those who honor them. Although in West Africa "minkisi" were primarily composed of natural substances and carvings, in the New World the tradition was expanded to include all manner of commercially manufactured items from the West as well ,4 This was a "cloaking" device employed by slaves as they encountered the suppression of African traditional religion and material culture. The use of ordinary objects for ritual purposes thus became a crucial strategy of spiritual continuity and cultural resistance. As vessels of coded communication, these objects were easily recognized by the initiated; as the ordinary props of everyday existence, uninformed slave owners simply overlooked them. In The Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds, Thompson quotes the 18th-century historian L'Abbe Proyart's reaction to the dressed houses and fields he encountered along the coast of northern Kongo. "The most determined thief would not dare cross their threshold when he sees it thus protected by

these mysterious signs."5 While in Africa, as well as in the United States, the yard was the center of family life, Eugene Genovese points out that in the West Indies, "it was much more than a social center and a means of additional food. The slaves buried their dead there; the yard took on a religious significance .. .One did not walk into another's yard without permission." 6 In North America, where the yard and the cemetery were most often separate, the long-standing custom of using found objects as voti ves on graves reinforced the connection of these two spaces. The idiom of foundobject grave decoration radiated across the United States from the southeastern Atlantic coast, generating a lexicon of material signs, directly related to Kongo religion, that later became the basis of yard show iconography. 7 The late anthropologist Robert Plant Armstrong used the term "syndedic" to describe these processes and to signify modes of development in which "linear, evolutionary growth tends less to dominate than does ardent proliferation." 8 Shells, clocks, tires, automobile wheel casings, wagon wheels and other signs of circular or spiral time involve the Kongo life cycle of spiritual return in which the soul travels counter-clockwise around the "four moments of the sun": i.e., birth, ascendency, death, and triumphant return as an ancestor. Diamondshaped ideograms inscribed on graves and used as bricolage houses further add to the material extensions of this tradition. Circles indicating little suns occasionally appear at the nodes of the diamond in African-American vernacular painting, sculpture, and textiles.9 In Kongo cosmology, the passage beyond life also includes a journey across "kalunga," a watery region where everything is upside-down and reversed as a reflection. Metal and terra cotta pipes signal this journey, both as water bearers and as "bridges between worlds" capable of transmitting messages from the beyond. Ceramic shards and broken pots, as well as inverted porcelain bowls and basins represent "the reversing power of death." 10 Mirrors, glass, mica, tinfoil, chrome objects — all carriers of mystic flash — hold the spirit at an appropriate distance from the living while allowing those remaining to see into the next world." Lamps light the way of the deceased along their spiritual journey. The last used objects of family and loved ones seal covenants of communication between the living and the dead. Trees planted directly on graves evoke "immortality and perdurance."1- Bottle trees, one of the first idioms to translate the dialogic powers of the cemetery into the context of yards, summon spirits that guard the land against intruders while also capturing and containing malevolent forces. 13 Today, some African-American grave sites are beginning to assume the volume and complexity of yard shows. A grave in New Orleans, photographed in April 1991, serves as an example of how the use of found-object votives is continuously updated, refreshing a tradition that has always stressed authenticity over orthodoxy. Here, the idiomatic water-bearing pipe is juxtaposed with its contemporary counterpart, a child's circular plastic swimming pool. This grave, along with another in Holly Hill, S.C., is literally wired together with the personal effects of the deceased. Deep within the enclosure of the South Carolina grave is a small "headstone" where the wheel of a child's bicycle is cemented onto a wooden slab. However, the transition from the modestly dressed graves and yards of rural Southern communities to the explosive shaping and elaboration of the idiom by those we call artists involves a quantum leap through politics as well as tradition. In spite of Tyree Guyton's national visibility and renown, for example, a court order allowed the city of Detroit to disassemble his houses in 1991 on the grounds that they violated local zones and ordinances. One of the witnesses at Guyton's court hearing was Robert Farris Thompson, who tried in vain to convince the city of the historical and spiritual significance of the artist's work. Likewise, during the 20 years Eddie Williamson lived at the Highland and Southern crossroads in Memphis, legal machinations chronically threatened his work. The neighborhood's merchants and restaurateurs championed Williamson, but transient motorists complained of the "junk yard" adjoining the railroad tracks.14 Houston Brown, owner of the Southern Meat Market across the street from the site, and a close friend of Williamson's, marshalled support from

a local television station and hired a lawyer to represent his friend in court battles with the city health department. Brown remains inspired by Williamson's legend, maintaining an archive on him and pointing out the peach trees he planted, now fully grown, along the tracks where he built the bottle garden. "As long as it was at least 25 feet from the center of the tracks, the railroad allowed it," said Brown. "The city health department got onto him, but all three cases against him were dismissed. This was back in the 1970s when, unlike today, it was illegal to live on the street. At one point they tried to prove him mentally incompetent, so Channel 13 got a psychiatrist who declared him sane. Another time, when he was living in the car. they said he had to store his belongings at least 18 inches above the ground. That was when we got the shopping carts — in order to be in compliance with that law. Eddie refused Social Security and his service pension, not wanting to take any money from the government. He earned what money he had from cleaning up the alleys and parking lots. It's the way he wanted to live and he deserves credit for doing what he wanted to do. He was just different, and he was going to do what he wanted to do regardless."15

South. New York: INTAR Hispanic American Gallery, 1991, pp. 38-41. 4. Wyatt MacGaffey, Art and Healing of the Bakongo Commented by Themselves. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1991. 5. Robert Farris Thompson and Joseph Cornet, The Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds. Washington: The National Gallery of Art, 1981, p. 179. 6. Eugene D. Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Random House Vintage Books, 1972, p. 537. 7. For a full development of this idea, see Robert Farris Thompson, "The Song that Named the Land: The Visionary Presence of African-American Art," in Black Art: Ancestral Legacy: The African Impulse in African-American Art. Dallas: The Dallas Museum of Art, 1989, pp. 97-141. 8. Robert Plant Armstrong, The Powers of Presence. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981, p. 67.

Four years before his death, Williamson permitted the city to strip the site of his yard show since ill health prevented him from further maintaining it."' He continued to live in the car next to Brown's meat market, however, developing his wall shrines and found-object votives until his death at the age of 68. The assaults on Eddie Williamson and Tyree Guyton's works are local manifestations of a more persuasive cultural contrast in which the myth of the "hard-edged autonomous individualist,"17 a myth at the core of 20th-century Western art, gives way to a more community-oriented connective impulse in the larger context of Afro-Atlantic tradition. That Eddie Williamson and Tyree Guyton would galvanize their local communities, using as their only tools the waste and refuse of consumer culture, is wholly compatible with an African spiritual system based on interconnected-ness, empathy, and the sanctity of personal relationships. Their works can thus be understood as nodes of power activated by still more yard shows in hundreds of "private" spaces across the United States. Yard shows challenge our social and aesthetic presumptions in ways "yet to be fully estimated." "I suggest," says Thompson, "that the coming of the artistic traditions of Despite their national visibility, Tyree Guyton's houses were West Africa to the New World disassembled by the city of Detroit in 1991. (Photo courtesy The provided life insurance on a hemiDetroit Institute of Arts) spheric scale and that the full range of possibility embodied in this history helps us to 9. For a survey of this symbol in African-American understand some of the central issues of our time."18 vernacular art see Judith McWillie, "Another Face of the Diamond" in The Clarion. New York: The MuJudith M. McWillie is a painter and professor of seum of American Folk Art, 1987, pp 42-53. studio art at the University of Georgia in Athens. 10. Thompson, The Four Moments of the Sun, p. 187. 11. Ibid., p. 198. 12. Ibid., pp. 186-187. Notes: 13. Ibid., pp. 178-180. 1. William Thomas, "Eddie's Luck Turns Worse," 14. Telephone conversation between Houston Brown The Commercial Appeal, Memphis, Tenn., Dec. 1, and the author, July 8, 1992. 1978, p. 50. This source ascribes the nickname to 15. Ibid. Williamson. I recall the term "bottle garden" being 16. Ibid. used by art students at Memphis State University in the 17. Suzi Gablick, "Connective Aesthetics" in Amerilate 1960s to describe Williamson's work. can Art, published by The National Museum of Ameri2. Marion E. Jackson, Harvey Ovshinsky and John can Art of the Smithsonian Institution. Spring 1992, Sinclair, Tyree Guyton. Detroit: The Detroit Institute pp. 2-7. of Arts, 1990. 18. Robert Farris Thompson, "From Africa" in Yale 3. Robert Farris Thompson, "The Circle and the Branch: Alumni Magazine, November 1970, pp. 16-21 Renascent Kongo-American Art," Another Face of the Diamond: Pathways Through the Black Atlantic

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Detail of Howard Finster's"Paradise Garden." (Photos by Roger Manley)

Live Wires and Yard Shows N o t e s on h o m e g r o w n public art environments in the A m e r i c a n South B y

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ix years ago, when I was working with photographer Roger Manley on a book about the visionary artist Howard Finster, I got word of another "local character" in the same corner of northwest Georgia who reportedly decorated his house and yard in an eccentric style vaguely similar to that of Finster's famous "Paradise Garden." Roger and I decided to investigate, and thus it was that we found ourselves on a steaming-hot summer morning in the unusually distinctive front yard of one James B. Lemming. Lemming lived in a run-down little log cabin at the end of a dirt driveway, just off a desolate stretch of blacktop about five miles outside the small town of Trion. As we'd been told, you couldn't miss the place. The cabin itself had been painted in alternating red, white, and blue stripes, dots and diamond shapes, and was festooned with a variety of found objects and dozens of crudely made wood panel targets, most of them also painted red, white, and/or blue. This decorative scheme extended beyond the house into the spacious surrounding yard, and even into the woods out back, where the trunks of a dozen or more tall pine trees had been painted a bright, fresh-blood red as high up as Lemming could reach from the top of a ladder. Although the yard and house were anything but tidy, the arrangements of found objects and geometric shapes were obsessively symmetrical. A target on the cabin'sexteriorwall to the left of the central frontdoor was balanced by an identically painted target to the door's right. A pile of cinder blocks topped by a plastic gallon milk jug on the left side of the porch was mirrored by a plastic milk jug on top of an equal number of cinder blocks stacked on the right side of the porch. A red-painted barbecue grill rack was nailed to a tree trunk on one side of the front yard; another redpainted barbecue grill rack was nailed to a tree trunk on the yard's opposite side. And so on and so on, dozens of pairs of similarly ordinary objects so displayed and arranged. Three or four sickly looking brown dogs peered at us and growled from under the house as we stood at the edge of the property, sweating in the 98-degree heat and marveling at this strangely decorated rustic hideaway. It was really quite different from what Finster had done with his three-acre backyard swamp in nearby Pennville, and as it turned out, the two local characters didn't know each other. But Lemming's place was like Finster's in at least one respect: It immediately captured your attention and provoked your curiosity. You couldn't help wondering who would create such and environment and why.

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Within a few minutes we were greeted on the porch by the living, breathing answer to those questions, as James B. Lemming emerged from his front door — a short, thickly built, tough-looking older man with a few days growth of white stubble, tobacco juice dribbling down his chin, barefoot and wearing only jockey shorts, a soiled white T-shirt, and a filthy red baseball cap. He seemed reasonably friendly in a distracted sort of way, mumbled through his chewing tobacco that we could shoot all the pictures we wanted and, after a few minutes of chit-chat, invited us in.

The home of James B. Lemming. Sure enough, the cabin's interior was decorated with colors, objects, patterns, and arrangements much like those outside. A red-and-blue target was painted around the bare light bulb in the center of the li vingroom ceiling. The front of the refrigerator was covered with a huge red dot. I surveyed the place while Lemming showed off the homemade weights — a couple of cinder blocks with steel-chain handles — that he lifted every day to keep his arms in shape, and demonstrated his pugilistic skills on the black punching bag in one corner of the living room. On the wall over the living room fireplace were three nearly identical generic landscape paintings. Darkened by accumulated dust and soot, they looked like they'd been hanging there untouched for about 25 years. But a big, fire engine-red dot had been freshly painted smack dab in the center of each of these landscapes, and a white plastic picnic fork glued horizontally across the center of each dot. After closely inspecting these curious backwoods Dada objects, I noticed more forks on a low table across the small room—a pair of them, made of metal, not plastic. Then I noticed the outlet on the adjacent wall and the electrical cord that was plugged into it. But the other end of this four-foot-long cord wasn't attached to an appliance of any kind. A few inches of

1992

the rubber insulation had been stripped off to expose the two interior copper wires, which were loosely hung over two small nails in the wall at about chest height. This looked dangerous, so I asked about it. Lemming explained matter-of-factly that this was a little device he had rigged together to "charge myself up," as he put it. Then, without missing a beat, he proceeded to give us a demonstration. Dusting his hands with flour he kept in a nearby can, he faced the wall, picked up one of the metal forks in each hand and, thumbs on the tines, pressed them down on the two bare electrical wires and held them there. Vibrating ever so slightly with the 115 volts coursing through his body, he looked at me over his right shoulder and continued jawing his plug of tobacco as he talked. The power in "them wires," he told us, was good for charging up his bloodstream. He liked to get a good jolt of electricity at least two or three times a day, and it made more sense to do it himself than to pay some doctor 25 or 30 dollars for the same treatment in a hospital. I tried coaxing him to expound further on the procedure's benefits, but all he would say was "It makes ya stouter and everything." I declined his offer to try out this simple little gizmo. After a few minutes he apparently felt sufficiently charged up, and he put the forks back on the table. We spent about an hour with James B. Lemming that day, but I wasn't able to get much coherent information out of him. Of course I wondered about his past and how he had come to be living in this metapsychedelic shack out in the middle of nowhere, spending his days painting geometric designs, lifting cinder blocks, beating on a punching bag and selfadministering electroshock therapy every few hours. But he ignored many of my questions as if he hadn't heard them, and only mumbled brief, semi-intelligible responses to others. I did find out that he was 59 years old and that he had once been married but he said his wife "went crazy" and had been incarcerated in the state mental hospital in Milledgeville for years. A few years later I found out that he had made up the story about his wife's insanity, and I also managed to learn some interesting facts about Lemming's background. It turns out that in his younger days he was a fast-living moonshiner, but a near-deadly auto accident in the early 1960s had left him partially braindamaged and unable toearn a living. That information, though, came by way of Jodi Wille, a young filmmaker who has interviewed Lemming's family and is working on a documentary about him. I never saw Lemming again after that sweltering dog-day afternoon in 1986. About two years later, he was found dead in his cabin, reportedly of natural causes. I haven't been back to that neck of the woods

since, but I doubt there's much left of the funky little homemade world of bold-colored designs and slapdash symmetries that Lemming created on that lonesome road in Chattooga County, Georgia. Unique as he was, James B. Lemming was only one of many creative rural and urban eccentrics and "outsiders" whose wildly decorated yards and houses have been discovered by the art world and the media over the past three or four decades. Hundreds of these sites have been documented in print and on film, and they' ve been the focal point for dozens of museum and gallery exhibitions. Seymour Rosen calls them "folk art environments." As the director of SPACES, a Los Angeles-based, non-profit organization devoted to preserving such sites, Rosen has spent a quarter-century researching and documenting them, and he has come up with perhaps the most useful definition of this unofficial genre of public art and vernacular architecture. These environments, he says, "are handmade personal places containing large-scale sculptural and/or architectural structures built by self-taught artists generally during their later years. [They] usually contain a component of accumulated objects, often those discarded by the larger society, which have been transformed and juxtaposed in unorthodox ways. The spaces are almost always associated with the creator's home or business, and have been developed without formal plans. Owing less allegiance to popular art traditions than to personal and cultural experiences and availability of materials, the artists are motivated by a need for personal satisfaction rather than a desire to produce anything marketable or to gain notoriety. Most such sites in this country have been developed by people who are in middle age to old age, and represent a substantial and sustained commitment of time and energy." SPACES has identified some 400 folk art environments in the United States and dozens of others in Europe, South America, Canada, India, Australia, South Africa, and the former U.S.S.R. Although they can be found in virtually all parts of the country, from Seattle to upstate New York, no other region contains such an amazing wealth of them as the South. At any rate, this has certainly appeared to be the case over the past decade, as an explosion of popular interest in these sites has led to the publicized discovery of dozens of them in every Southern state. With increasing numbers of exhibitions featuring work by those self-taught environment-builders who also create paintings and other freestanding art, many such individuals have become known and admired within an everwidening network of collectors, documentary photographers, and other aficionados. Some of the more prominent Southerners among this group are Howard Finster, R.A. Miller, St. EOM, E.M. Bailey, Dilmus Hall, John D. Ruth, David Butler, "Prophet" Royal Robertson, Vollis Simpson, Clyde Jones, Q.J. Stephenson, James Harold Jennings, Henry Warren, Sam Doyle, Lonnie Holley, W.C. Rice and "Creek Charlie" Fields. (Not incidentally, about one-third of the artists in this abbreviated list have died in recent years.) What is it about the American South that has made this region such a hotbed for this kind of artistic activity? Why have so many people in this part of the

country been inspired to embark on such ambitious creative endeavors despite their lack of formal training or encouragement? I don't know that there are complete and definitive answers to those questions, but the search for them yields some insight into the relationship between the individual and the larger culture as it presently exists in the South. The Protestant work ethic is still taken seriously by most traditional Southerners, and this fact has at least something to do with the prevalence of "folk art environments" in the region. Many of the creators of these environments are retired or disabled, as was James B. Lemming, and they took up this activity as a means of staying busy and productive in their later years, in the spirit of self-sufficiency that rural Southerners tend to share. The region's climate is also a likely factor, since warm weather throughout most of the year lends itself to the ongoing labors required to create and maintain these sites. Even more important, the South has had a longstanding preoccupation with the supernatural. In many places the kinds of obsessive, spontaneous creativity

The South has had a longstanding preoccupation with the supernatural. In many places the kinds of obsessive, spontaneous creativity demonstrated by these "yard artists" would be seen as symptoms of madness. But in the South, and particularly its rural areas, they're more apt to be regarded as demonstrations of intense religious faith or evidence that the artist/builders have been touched by Qod or possessed by the Devil. demonstrated by these "yard artists" would be seen as symptoms of madness. But in the South, and particularly its rural areas, they're more apt to be regarded as demonstrations of intense religious faith or evidence that the artist/builders have been touched by God or possessed by the Devil. The region's spiritual heritage embraces belief in faith healing, divine miracles, glossolalia and prophetic powers; in that sense it encourages idiosyncratic attempts to communicate with the spirit world. When those attempts take forms like those seen in many Southern yard-art environments, they're generally respected, despite occasional jokes about "the crazy man down the road." In situations such as Lemming's, where there was no apparent

A portion of St. EOM's architectural environment, "Pasaquan," in Marion County, Ga.

religious motivation, the places get left alone maybe just in case the local character has some mysterious secret spirit-connection. Howard Finster's neighbors knew him as an evangelist and inspirational newspaper columnist long before they knew him as an artist, and they maintained an air of amused tolerance when he turned his immense energies to creating his "garden for the end of the world." And St. EOM (a.k.a. Eddie Owens Martin) â&#x20AC;&#x201D; a much more reclusive and obstreperous figure than Finsterâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;was looked on by his neighbors as a man not to be crossed or trifled with. In Marion County, Georgia, it was commonly believed that EOM had deadly hexing powers and kept a herd of pet rattlesnakes that he could summon from the bamboo patch at a moment's notice to attack anyone who dared give him any trouble. A related and equally important element in the cultural mix that nourishes so much innovative yard art is the pervasive influence that African and AfricanAmerican ritual and decorative traditions have had on the region. In his landmark book Flash of the Spirit, art historian Robert Farris Thompson has cogently demonstrated how these ancient traditions continue to manifest themselves within the South's black cultures, and discusses several examples of African-American "yard shows" and related works. It's important to recognize, too, that the African heritage has had something of acrossover influence on white culture in the South. This helps account for the large numbers of rural Southern WASPs who have created yard shows, and for the similarities among the works of both black and white artists in this Southern public/folk art arena. The dots, targets and diamond shapes that James B. Lemming painted on and around his Georgia cabin fit right in with Farris Thompson's theories on Afro-Atlantic cultural transmission â&#x20AC;&#x201D; except that Lemming was a white man. But he was a white man who had lived all his life in the rural South and no doubt had a least a passing familiarity with the region's black yard-art tradition. Or maybe not. Maybe Lemming's symmetrically ordered geometric design represented what he saw swirling and floating all around him when he pressed those forks onto the live wires suspended from his living-room wall, when he felt himself surging with the electric current that charged up his bloodstream. Either way, Lemming represents one amazing example of a phenomenon that has deep and somewhat mysterious roots in the South, for all the reasons discussed above and perhaps others that are more obscure. Fifty years ago, H.L. Mencken lampooned the South as "the Sahara of the Bozarts." Thanks to unofficial, "marginal," "outsider" artists like Lemming, the region is nowadays more commonly known as an oasis of Art Brut. Tom Patterson is a writer and critic who has been looking at yard shows in the South for 30 years. He is the author of books about Howard Finster and St. EOM.

Fred Smith, like Grandma Moses, started his artmaking late in life. He began his Wisconsin Concrete Park during the 1950s at the age of 64. after retiring from a career working the land and running a tavern. Throughout the next 15 years Smith created over 250 sculptures representing men and women, deer, moose, owls. cows. elk. horses, a 20-foot-long muskie and a 10-foot towering angel. I first saw the sculptures on a fishing trip to Wisconsin in 1960. It was a gray, coldish spring day: this was before color film was in general use. so I immediately began shooting fast Tri-X black-and-white film. In a while, a weathered, bent man appeared and I asked if this was his work. Yes it was. he said, and he didn't mind my taking pictures. In fact, he seemed pleased with my single-mindednessand remarked. "You're going to put me on the map." Later, when I asked him what got him started, he responded. "Nobody knows why I made them. Not even me." In 1964. he suffered a stroke and spent the remaining years of his life in a rest home only a few blocks away from his concrete park. —Robert Amft Robert Amft is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago whose artwork has been widely exhibited. His photography and design have won over 50 awards and have been reproduced in magazines around the world.

Although not the first monumental environmental art site in America built by someone "untutored in the arts." Simon Rodia's Towers in the Watts district of Los Angeles was the first site to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the only site to bedeclared a national monument, and without question thef irst site to describe a newly "discovered" genre of American public art. An attempt by the city of Los Angeles in 1959 to tear down the Towers — the brilliant engineering of which had excited the likes of R. Buckminster Fuller — generated international publicity and an awareness of and appreciation for the over 600 other American sites eventually identified. This masterwork changed and influenced the directions of many lives, mine especially. What I still find most exciting about it is the devotion it 's inspired and the vast amount of time and energy put in by thedifferent people working for the site — including the city that first tried to tear the Towers down, and is now responsible for their preservation. — Seymour Rosen Seymour Rosen is director of SPACES (Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments), a Los Angeles-based organization concerned with documenting and preserving contemporary art environments and gaining proper recognition forthe artists who produce them.

God has recruited me to make this kingdom. I am not an artist; I am a worker like my father. The materials give me the ideas. There is life in every rock." — NekChand Nek Chand is. in his own words, a "very Indian" sculptor and landscape architect who has created a 60-acre rock garden in Chandigarh, the capital of the Punjab. Born in December 1924. Chand began work on the garden when he was in his mid-30s. envisioning it as a celebration to a kind, benevolent God. The starting point was a plot of wooded government land on which Chand. who had always made and fixed things, built figures from his beloved river stones collected in the nearby Himalayan foothills. The result is now some 20.000 stone sculptures which "people" Chandigarh, the stark city planned by Le Corbusier in 1948. The environment's sculpted spaces are a monument to discarded debris with broken bangles, crockery, tiles, colored glass, cloth, hair, electrical fixtures, fluorescent tubing, and fossil rocks. The area is divided into a number of enclosures which contain buildings, waterfalls, and stone creatures representing people, gods, and animals. Over 2.500 Indians of all beliefs — children and adults alike — visit the whimsical garden every day. treading the walkways of this peaceful haven, despite its location at the geographical center of current political strife in northern India. — Jan Schoonover Jan Schoonover is a New York City artist originally from Kansas City.

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Edward Leedskalnin did not consider himself an artist. An immigrant from Latvia. Leedskalnin (1887-1951) came to the United States after a 16-yearold woman jilted him on the eve of their wedding. Leedskalnin wandered for several years until he settled on the edge of the Everglades near Homestead. Fla.. in 1910. For 28 years he sculpted an extraordinary environment out of coral rock, an oolithic limestone, which he quarried with simple tools—block tackle and winches—for his lost love. "Sweet Sixteen. " Leedskalnin's environment includes a stone castle complete with moon fountain, chair, tables, beds, a 25-foot-tall telescope, an extremely accurate sundial, and a 5.000-pound heart. A nine-ton gate in the wall surrounding the area is a marvel of engineering: resting on an automobile gear, the huge door can be moved with a push of a child's finger. — Karen Valdes Karen Valdes is director of the University Galleries and associate professor of art at the University of Florida. Gainesville.

Built single-handedly during a 30-year period by postman Ferdinand Cheval. the Palais Ideal remains one of the world's most astounding visionary structures, it contains a wealth of architectural references, sculptural forms of figures and beasts, encrusted and twisting vine roots, concrete palm trees, columns, steps, balustrades, turrets and a winding crypt. Cheval has become the ancestor to the many visionary builders of France and the famed Palais received much attention from the Surrealists, who admired his ability to realize his dream in this incredible environment. At the age of 80. after being refused permission to use the Palais Ideal as his own mausoleum. Cheval began work on an incredible tomb in the local churchyard. He was interred there upon his death in 1924. 4 — John Maizels John Maizels is an artist and publisher/editor of Raw Vision, a London-based magazine devoted to visionary art.

The path of Jeff D. McKissack led through Wall Street, the Atlanta Farmers Market and the midcentury back roads of the American South to Houston. Over 25 years that coincided with Houston's explosive growth, this native son of Fort Gaines, Ga., created a monument that stood as the sum-total of his philosophy and experience. He called it "The Orange Show" and thought of it as the eighth wonder of the world. Using objects found on his downtown postal route, along with those gathered over miles and years on the road, he constructed an environment with a multi-level architectural maze and performance areas to teach visitors about the nutritional value of his favorite fruit. Upon his death in 1980 (two days before his 78th birthday), a foundation was formed to preserve the structure; in September, the organization celebrates its tenth anniversary of public operation. Through an energetic program and its library, the foundation promotes public awareness about environments like "The Orange Show," as well as the many folk traditions of our diverse population, and encourages the artist in everyone. —

Susanne Theis

Susanne Theis. director of The Orange Show Foundation, has been part of the team effort to save Jeff McKissack's monumental environment for 10 years.

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show

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he Proverbs-derived phrase, "Where there is no vision the people perish," figured prominently in the acceptance speech of presidential candidate Bill Clinton at the 1992 Democratic National Convention. Some 40 years earlier James Hampton — a federally employed janitor in Washington, D.C. — had inscribed that same phrase on his visionary, sculptural ensemble, "The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millenium General Assembly" [sic]. The politician spoke in an arena of international media coverage; the artist worked in solitude in a back-alley garage. The distance between the public and private circumstances of this biblical exhortation is not only vast but poignant. So too is the distance between the storefront ministry Hampton planned in the garage and the international audience — from connoisseur to tourist — that his work has posthumously attracted in a museum setting. Like many Southern African-Americans during the early 20th century, South Carolinian James Hampton (1909-1964) migrated north in 1928. He was a shy, uneducated man who served during World War II and settled into a menial but steady job after 1946. The immanence of spiritual redemption promised by the Second Coming was his greater preoccupation, and his mission of approximately 15 years became the creation of "a monument to Jesus," which was lacking, in his opinion, in the nation's capital of monuments. Unlike the "official" time-honored materials of bronze and stone, the 180 components of Hampton's "Throne of the Third Heaven" grew from scavenged wood furniture, cardboard, glass, paper, and plastic, all wrapped in silver or gold aluminum foil, to gleaming, transforming effect. An aura of privacy surrounds Hampton's work. His preference for seclusion, which curtailed knowledge of his project even among his family and few friends, parallels the still undeciphered script he developed and inscribed on many of his objects. His rented construction site in a run-down black neighborhood was distanced both culturally and economically from Washington's mall of pristine monuments. And at first glance, his efforts seem to swing toward some unfathomable extreme of evangelical faith. Hampton's orientation toward the public, however, is equally evident. The altar-like arrangement and objects that resemble pulpits, offertory tables, and bishop's chairs suggest a religious sanctuary. His pursuit

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of salvation extended beyond his own to assume the in its galleries and in other settings — the museum has boards flanked the entrance. Especially when seen dimension of outreach and conversion. He believed steadily explored questions of context, atmosphere, through the door, the densely frontal, shimmering that God had given him a second set of command- interpretation, integrity, and showmanship, questions assemblage inspired the awe often felt when approachments, a "Nations Readjustment Plan" and "Millenium that have prompted exasperation, experimentation, ing an altar or sanctuary from a distance. The plaques Laws for Peace on Earth," to share with those who no and exhilaration over the years. and larger decorative boards, arranged like so many longer obeyed the original ten. Inscribed on various Unlike most of the projects commonly referred to Stations of the Cross, subtly brought Hampton's deobjects are phrases such as "St. James Dispensation of as folk art environments, "The Throne" was neither sign and the viewer's spatial experience full circle. Counseling" and "Director, Special Projects for the physically site-bound nor the maker's living space in In 1971 "The Throne" made its artistic debut in the State of Eternity," which allude to the roles of minis- its original state. Hampton installed casters on most of exhibition Hidden Aspects of the National Collection ter, prophet, and counselor. A segment of the work's the large objects to facilitate moving them as he of Fine Arts; the variety of challenges its preparations title, "Nations Millenium General Assembly," evokes prepared and arranged them in the garage, and all of raised have recurred in its subsequent installations in a grandly orchestrated convention of man and God. the components can be transported and handled de- the museum, even in 1992. Deeper investigation has revealed the extent to which spite their fragility and bulk. This mobility accounts Despite the museum's grand scale, space equal to Hampton drew upon the demonstrative evangelism of for the status of "The Throne" as the only American the garage has been out of the question, and locations his Southern African-American heritage. folk art environment housed as an entity by an off-site, that afford a similarly long view have been at a As breathtaking as its architectural scale, baroque public institution. This distinction was made evident premium. The work's monumentality, spirituality, complexity, and glistening surfaces may be, "The in 1974 by its sheer physical prominence in Naivesand and individuality demand that it be set off from paintThrone of the Third Heaven" never went public during Visionaries, Walker Art Center's historic exhibition ings and sculptures which it not only resists but overHampton's lifetime. Serendipity rather than faith that relied heavily on photographic documentation to powers. Tempting thoughts of recreating the garage's brought the abandoned work to the attention of the present American folk art environments in a museum key physical features, like the narrow entry, rough Washington art community shortly after his death in setting. Over the years the belief has grown that brick walls, and naked lightbulbs, have been set aside. 1964. Private patrons acquired the project in its en- Hampton's garage was of secondary importance — an Drily accurate historical dioramas or evocatively fussy tirety, arranged for its storage at the National Museum in-the-rough backdrop and handy shelter rather than period rooms — running the risks of the trite and of American Art (then the Natheatrical as they do — have tional Collection of Fine Arts), hardly seemed appropriate and anonymously donated "The models. Considered equally Throne" to the museum in 1970. inadvisable has been the opposite extreme — the spotlit Some ironies are poetic, for white walls favored for modthe museum is the country's em art — because of the "art oldest federal art collection, for art's sake" elitism it inevihoused in a neoclassical temple tably invokes. of invention, the original Patent Office Building. It is also part Practical concerns were of the Smithsonian Institution, initially daunting because no the world's largest museum systematic diagram, labeling, complex. Although the museum or photographic documentais not located on the mall that tion had been done before the much of the Smithsonian shares work was moved from the gawith the city's monuments, it is rage. In the first installation in sited just eight blocks from 1971, for example, Hampton's Hampton's now-razed garage. very deliberate system of placing objects related to the New Since 1971 "The Throne" Testament to the viewer's left, has been featured in eight major and objects related to the Old exhibitions across the country, Testament to the viewer's right four long-term installations at was unintentionally reversed the National Museum of Ameribecause the jigsaw puzzle had can Art (NMAA), as well as in Previous page: The reclusive James Hampton with his "Throne of the Third Heaven of the not yet been solved. an impressive roster of publicaNations Millenium General Assembly'' in a rented garage site, early 1950s (photographer tions related primarily to folk The dynamic between unknown). art, African-American art, modaccess and security has rouAbove: "The Throne" as displayed from 1984-1991 in the lobby of the National Museum of ern sculpture, religion, and psytinely raised a series of quesAmerican Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. chiatry. In 1976, the bicententions. Should visitors be able nial year, Time art critic Robert to enter the display space to Hughes declared that "The facilitate contemplation or Throne" "may well be the finest would the element of inacceswork of visionary religious art sibility heighten the mystery produced by an American," and while promoting security? visual artists, writers, theatrical How can the work's inviting producers, and musicians have surfaces and small parts be been moved to pay it homage in protected without totally distheir work. tancing the public? Can the literal need to illuminate the Clearly, "The Throne of the work's many facets be balThird Heaven" has entered the public domain on popular, artistic, and intellectual absolute armature. Inevitably, however, the garage anced against the desire to create atmosphere through levels, converting an audience much larger and more has been the point of reference for every installation of professional lighting techniques? The issue of balance has regularly been factored into providing written and diverse than any Hampton could have reached, yet not "The Throne." out of keeping with the scale of his aspirations and Deep and narrow, the building was originally a photographic documentation in the gallery, where the mission. Yet the words "garage ministry" and "art 19th-century stable. It featured a tall, six-foot sliding work begs for explanation but invites private reverie. museum" immediately evoke a sense of collision wood door and worn cobbled floor, brick construction The museum has walked the fine line between between the two very different worlds that this work inside and out, a blacked-out window, and a post- reflecting artistic integrity and providing evocative has navigated, as well as questions about what has supported, stair-accessed hayloft across the entrance atmosphere. Spatial constraints have prevented showhappened to it conceptually and visually in its new end of the building. Hampton sometimes slept in the ing "The Throne" in its entirety and dictated creating environment. loft but confined his construction to the street level. A spaces slightly narrower and much shallower than the Over the past 22 years Hampton's objects have handful of light bulbs suspended from the ceiling garage. Selecting a cross section of objects—approximately 110 of the 180 — has usually accurately and received the respect typically afforded works in an art provided limited illumination. On a floor plan roughly 27 feet wide and 33 feet amply conveyed the project's overall configuration, museum's permanent collection — physical documentation, photography, research, conservation, and deep, Hampton located the project against the wall monumental scale, and spectacular magnetism while accessibility through display and published reproduc- directly opposite the entrance. His only structural staying feasibly within the gallery's reduced space. tions. Long a crown jewel lonesomely set in a classic addition to the space was a wood platform, three feet These factors have required a discrete, frontally open fine arts collection, it acquired a compatible and illu- high, 27 feet wide, and nine feet deep, with three steps room in which a visitor can stand in intimate proximity minating family when the National Museum of Ameri- on the right side. On the platform, the central throne to the work and experience a contemplative sense of can Art accessioned the largely 20th-century folk art chair, three massive pulpits, and 12 flanking chairs enclosure and wonder. collection of Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr., in 1986. dominated the objects, which were packed into paralVarious measures have facilitated this visual acToday, it is the centerpiece of a five-gallery installa- lel front and rear rows. Heavy, decorated cardboard cessibility while striving for security. The museum panels covered the platform's face. tion devoted to the museum's folk art holdings. has closely followed Hampton's own concept of stagThe remaining objects were disposed on the floor ing provided by a platform as well as the visual There was a time, however, when "The Throne" sat in darkness, not just behind the closed doors of in front of the platform and immediately to its right and relationships that the height and depth of his platform Hampton's garage, but during the earliest years of its left. Small, tablet-shaped plaques ran the length of new stewardship. Through the dynamics of display — either side wall, and decorated bulletin and chalk Continued on page 26

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The words "garage ministry'' and "art museum'' immediately evoke a sense of collision between the t w o very different worlds that T h e Throne" has navigated as well as questions about what has happened to it conceptually and visually in its n e w environment.

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1992

of the Broken Covenant H o w the city of N e w a r k sunk Kea Tawana's dreams

H o l l y

M e t z

The June 1986 move did not stop her opponents. The n early 1987, reporters befollowing March, the city gan to flock to Newark. They acted upon unspecified "comwere headed for the central plaints." It condemned the ark, ward, an area devastated by along with Tawana's house riots in 1967, and never reand outbuildings, ingeniously stored. Rising from a church built on trucks. Newark's Deparking lot in that desolate partment of Engineering lalandscape was Kea's Ark, a beled the ark "unsafe," althree-story, 80-foot-long though it could not be proved wooden vessel.1 Its sole archistructurally unsound, and city tect was a powerful woman, representatives were unclear Kea Tawana, who had studiwhether it was a building (no ously planned and executed foundation), a vehicle (it was the ship's construction for almovable), or a vessel.4 They most two decades. Now the called for immediate demolicity wanted it demolished, Above: Kea Tawana inside her hand-built house during a confrontation with police in 1988 tion. Built out of discards on claiming zoning and building (Photos by Robert Foster) the c i t y ' s highest point, code violations. T a w a n a ' s creation made Newark's calculated neglect of the Central Ward tanOver the years Tawana salvaged materials for her finally settled in Newark. She recalled: "I was a throwark from abandoned buildings. Neighbors recall her away, thrown away by both sides of the family, and gible to its residents. City fathers sought to render pushing a cart through the city streets, then stockpiling raised by even a third race. I've learned and I've invisible what they had done. her collection on an empty lot on Camden Street. Her applied what I've learned from all of them." Tawana solicited help from her neighbors. If the recycling process was limited to "dead" buildings â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Tawana is a lifelong learner and a natural educator. city could topple the ark, their homes might be next, those deserted by their owners and left unlocked. She has skillfully assimilated knowledge from various she suggested. She painted the ship with messages, Stained glass, brass fixtures, and a pipe organ were apprenticeships, and from technical manuals and books asking people to call the mayor, the Chamber of retrieved from a crumbling church; slate and timbers found in deserted attics and cellars. She can readily Commerce, and the local newspaper with complaints. came from a collapsed block of apartments. Tawana explain the 19th-century techniques she used to build She leafleted the Central Ward. One showed hands razed 54 structures herself, using crowbars, sledge- the ark, gleaned from master builders and their plans. grabbing for the ark while a wrecking ball was lowered hammers, ropes, and hooks. "Other people saw eye- Although her formal education ended with grade school, over it. "The Criminals of City Hall are Coming!" sores. I saw timbers, planking, boards, and antique she acquired a foundation in structural engineering announced another. Ghoulish figures were depicted tiles," she said.2 Along with structural materials, she through construction work and theater lighting jobs. stabbing the bleeding ark. collected artifacts, including thousands of glass bottles Tawana lived and worked in Newark most of her Community response varied. For years, area resifrom Newark's vanished breweries and bits of orna- adult life; she arrived in the city in 1953, when she dents had watched Tawana hauling materials and mental plaster from the Loew's Theater. climbed out from under a box car after a train ride from building her giant ship. Many marveled at her tenacity Early blueprints for the ark were drawn in 1973, Georgia. Two brief forays to Harlem and Brooklyn and resourcefulness. "It's amazing, it really is. I can't when Tawana began running "sea tests" on different ended in disaster; her apartments in both places were believe one person did this," local schoolteacher models. 1 Actual construction began nine years later. destroyed by fire. Although she sometimes envisioned Rolanda LeBron told reporters. A few families named But the builder believes her inspiration came much the ark as a museum, she also considered it an escape children after the ark builder. Others saw her ship as a earlier. In an interview in the New York Daily News, vessel because of the ever-present threat of danger. reminder of the area's decline. A tenant association Tawana described a childhood journey from Japan to "There's no place safe on land," she told reporters in leader, Orelia Stevens, bluntly remarked: "I am tired the United States. The daughter of an American civil early 1987, when they asked whether the ark was of looking at this piece of garbage. We need to build up engineer and his Japanese wife, Tawana was permit- biblically inspired. By then the ship had been moved to this community." But Tawana said she was also lookted passage from postwar Asia on an overcrowded the Humanity Baptist Church parking lot from an ing out for local interests. She warned her neighbors: boat. During the two-week journey, passengers were adjacent property acquired by New Community Cor- "Pretty soon they'll have to call Newark 'New crowded into the cargo hold. "When they let us up out poration, a government-sponsored development com- Communityville.'" She predicted a sterilecity, stripped of that stinking hole, I made myself a promise: No one pany. New Community was erecting pre-fabricated of history and diversity.5 would ever lock me below the hatches again." She condominiums across the street from the ark, and Fred Zemel, a Newark real estate lawyer, volunTawana had openly criticized their workmanship â&#x20AC;&#x201D; teered his services to Tawana, and the battle to save the would be the captain of her own ship. According to Tawana, her mother was killed in delaying final installation. She believes the developers ark was brought to state superior court. He argued Japan during wartime bombing. When her father died retaliated by ousting her from her first site. Using jacks Kea's Ark was a privately sponsored work of public in an internment camp near San Diego, she became an and rollers, Tawana moved the 80-ton ark several feet art, "an artistic, sculptural manifestation" of Tawana's orphan. She found shelter and acceptance in black to church property. The congregation welcomed her self-expression, protected by the First Amendment. Appended to Zemel's brief were certified statements communities, a tradition that continued when she and she became church caretaker.

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Kea Tawana's "Ark" rising from the parking lot of the Humanity Baptist Church in Newark, N.J. (Photo by Robert Foster) from scholars, attesting to the ark's value as a unique creative work. A curator from the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American Art praised the use of salvaged materials, reflecting the city's cyclical history of opulence, decay, and renewal. Architect Phillip Danzig recalled a visit to the ark with fellow New Jersey Institute of Technology instructors. Tawana had lectured to students on construction techniques. Wooden connections used in the vessel represented "a veritable museum of the joiners' art," Danzig wrote.6 Zemel's brief concluded the ark could be preserved as an educational device and a museum, filled with Tawana's rescued artifacts. In May 1987, Judge Harry A. Margolis granted a temporary restraining order, barring demolition while alternatives were investigated. "To my knowledge, this is only the second ark in history," he said. A winter trial was tentatively scheduled. Press coverage from Japanese television, Newsweek, "Good Morning America," and The Washington Post brought hundreds of support letters. Mail arrived from across the United States, from Canada, Australia, Japan, and West Germany. Envelopes were simply addressed "To The Ark Lady." But the city was unmoved by public response to the monumental work. They offered her welfare if she would abandon her project. "They think $130 a month in welfare is a rightful exchange for a lifetime of work. They just don't understand," Tawana said.7 Friends of Kea's Ark, a group of sympathizers, unsuccessfully attempted to engage Newark policymakers in dialogue. Tawana suggested the creation of "Ark Park" â&#x20AC;&#x201D; two public, tree-lined lots with gym sets and a ball field, the ark at its center. No response came from the city. The builder contemplated several alternate plans. In "Operation High Jump," the completed ark would have been tandem rigged to Chinook helicopters, then airlifted to Staten Island docks. Sketches appeared on a nearby fence, which Tawana also used to post city council agendas. She charged representatives with planning to blight whole parcels of the Central Ward, clearing the way for condominiums. 8 Newark officials did not yield. Although the pastor of Humanity Baptist Church, Reverend J.W. Brown, supported Tawana, he was forced to begin eviction proceedings when the city threatened daily fines for non-compliance.' Policymakers adamantly refused to allow the ark to stay in the city it celebrated and mourned. In September 1987, Tawana signed a consent agreement. She would relocate or dismantle her creation. The consolidation process took months, with numerous court appearances to ask for extensions. Tawana

dismissed her attorney and began representing herself in court. She hoped to save some of her ship by reducing its height. Shaped like a freighter, it could be transported through Newark's streets, to a site near the Passaic river. Ordinary carpenter's tools had fashioned the ark over the years, but in the spring of 1988, Tawana bought an electric chainsaw to demolish the upper deck and wheelhouse. As always, she worked alone. The tongue-and-groove planking and vaulted ceiling admired by architects were detached, then sold as firewood or packed into dumpsters.10 A rigger had agreed to haul the modified vessel, but a riverfront location could not be found. No offers came for land sites outside the city. Judge Margolis, who had long protected the ark and its satellite structures with restraining orders, could no longer do so.

Kea Tawana returns to the city these days to repair houses. She has no plans for future environmental artworks, and no longer wants to talk about the ark. During one of the hottest summers in recent memory, Kea Tawana herself destroyed the remainder of the ark, thereby denying her opponents a final opportunity for humiliation. Unfortunately, the demise of Kea's Ark did not end Tawana's battle with city bureaucrats. Demolition orders also referred to her handmade houses. City representatives arrived on Dec. 8, 1988 to destroy her home, but Kea refused to leave. She barricaded herself inside, and speaking from a window, explained she would torch the buildings rather than allow herself to be removed. "I would rather die defending my home, than to be robbed of all I have left, and freeze to death sleeping in someone's doorway this winter," she declared." The eviction attempt was well-publicized. Dozens of neighbors gathered with reporters behind police lines, voicing support for Tawana. After several hours, city authorities withdrew. And just before Christmas, members of the Orchard Street Block Association towed Tawana's houses downtown, to a lot adjoining their recycling center. But threats from the demolition department continued. Several months later, the city removed Tawana's houses. Forced to leave Newark,

she moved into a friend's home in a nearby suburb. Kea Tawana returns to the city these days to repair houses. She has no plans for future environmental artworks, and no longer wants to talk about the ark. Holly Metz is a freelance writer. Most of this text appeared appeared previously in The Arks, A Palace, Some Robots and Mr. Freedom's Fabulous Fifty Acres: Grassroots Art in Twelve New Jersey Communities, a catalog accompanying the traveling exhibition of the same title, curated by Metz and photographer Robert Foster. Notes: 1. Structural analysis by architect Phillip I. Danzig, in May 4, 1987 letter to Tawana's temporary volunteer attorney, Fred Zemel. 2. Linda Yglesias, "A Tall Ship, and a Star to Steer Her By," Daily News Magazine, Dec. 6, 1987. This is the Daily News article referred to elsewhere. Unless otherwise noted, all Kea Tawana quotes and biographical details are from conversations with Holly Metz and Robert Foster, February through August 1988. 3. Daniel C. Prince, "Environments in Crisis," The Clarion, Winter, 1988, p. 48 4. Letter from Tawana to the city of Newark, Sept. 14, 1986, outlining the city's inability to define the ark. 5. Alfonso A. Narvaes, "A Battle Over Newark Ark's Future," New York Times, March 28, 1987, and Frederick W. Byrd, "Unfinished Newark 'ark' continues to line up supporters..."Newark Star-Ledger, April 7, 1987. 6. From Kea Tawana v. City of Newark and the Humanity Baptist Church, submitted to the Superior Court of New Jersey, Chancery Division, Essex County, Docket No. 3460-87E. 7. Albert J. Parisi, "Newark Ark Faces Need to Move Again," New York Times, Oct. 18, 1987. 8. From material submitted to Judge Margolis by Tawana, Pro Se, Oct. 22, 1988. 9. Albert J. Parisi, "Newark Ark Faces Need to Move Again." 10. John Zeaman, "Dismantling a dream: Newark's lost ark," The Hackensack Record, April 11, 1988. 11. From a letter, "Good-bye to My Friends," written by Tawana, July 17, 1988. Also see December newspaper accounts with similar statements: Thomas Moran, "Newark woman holds off eviction," The Hackensack Record, Dec. 9, 1988.

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1992

A view of Charles Billy's environment in the French countryside: a private Disneyland in limestone. (Photos by Willem Volkersz)

Private Spaces, Public Places T h o u g h t s on outsider environments in Europe and N o r t h A m e r i c a By

W i l l e m

V o l k e r s z

hether towering above us with structures of mosaic and steel or enveloping us in grottos of concrete and stone, outsider artists'1 environments are fabulous spaces which allow us to enter, physically and spiritually, the private realm of their builders. As if to counter their mortality with something more lasting, these more-or-less permanent structures are envisioned and constructed by individuals who, after a lifetime of anonymous labor, want to leave their mark. By selecting materials that exude permanence, these aging builders often work for 30 years or more to construct their monuments, "investing that environment with [a] particular imprint...a way of signing yourself into the space that you inhabit."2 It is often a traumatic experience, such as the death of spouse or the termination of employment, which creates a void which needs to be filled; other artists may have voluntarily withdrawn from an active role in society. In either case, the artist-to-be finds himself without a useful purpose in life, and an extensive amount of time on his hands (most of these builders are men). A small-scale project (in one case, a simple garden planter) often results in a sense of personal fulfillment, providing the impetus to continue or to elaborate. The scale of these large outdoor creations quickly draws the attention of neighbors and passersby and through their acknowledgement, the artist's self-esteem grows. Before long, a grander vision develops. Not all the builders of environments are so public;

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1992

the work of some represents an alternative reality which is built as a safe haven from a life full of mishap and misadventure. Indeed, frequently the more private work is filled with concrete figures, dolls, or mannequins which become the artist's mute, understanding friends. When we walk into such gardens or structures, it is as if we are wandering through the right side of the artist's brain, full of mysterious nooks and crannies. (It is interesting to note that artists like Martin Ramirez, who choose drawing or painting as their medium, also construct visionary, architectural worlds into which they can withdraw.) Some artists like James Hampton, whose "Throne" is now in the National Museum of American Art, work secretly only to have their work discovered after death. Although there are some obvious (largely iconographic) differences between the constructions built in the United States and Europe, it is more the capacities and workings of the human mind which inform their scale and format rather than any cultural differences. The creative impulse which ignites these builders, and the conditions which cause these artists to take trowel or hammer in hand, appear to be the same on both sides of the Atlantic: the urge to make a personal imprint on one's immediate environment, the need to leave a testament to otherwise anonymous lives, and the desire to create a space which can be controlled and where the artist can be safe with his dreams and fantasies. If these qualities are indeed inherent in all of us, why do outsider environments flourish more in one culture than another? In the U.S., lax or even nonexistent zoning regulations (especially in the rural areas where we most commonly find this genre),

coupled with a typically American entrepreneurial spirit, create fertile soil for these highly personal expressions. In Europe, zoning in countries like England, Holland, Germany, and Switzerland is so highly controlled that the few who do initiate such eccentric projects are quickly reported to authorities. On a recent research trip to Western Europe, it quickly became apparent that France had a much higher number of environments than any other European nation.3 Christopher Pinet, associate professor of French at Montana State University, suggests that France's 19thcentury Utopian experiments, its tradition of artists' colonies, its agrarian economy, Parisians flocking to second homes in the country, and the country's longstanding interest in the relationship between man and nature may begin to account for this culture's tolerance of, interest in, and support of this phenomenon. A powerful sense of walking into someone's private world of fantasy overtakes us when we enter Ferdinand ChevaPs "Palais Ideal" in Hauteri ves. Like Rodia's Watts Towers, the work testifies to man's need to leave his mark. As a postman who did his rounds on foot, Cheval found a stone one day and decided that if nature could produce something so wonderful, he would create the architecture to feature it. (It is typical of these builders to use simple, practical explanations for their work, often to avoid uncomfortable comparisons to "real" art.) Dreaming of exotic, foreign lands found in the illustrated magazines of the day, Cheval built a palace where he could rule. The visitor roams through galleries, peeks into niches, climbs steps, and oversees the creation from porches and platforms as though he is meandering through Cheval's fertile brain. This labyrinthine quality is also

found in the front yard of Bodan Litnanski's house in Chauny: For over 10 years, the artist has collected discarded objects on daily trips to the dump and arranged them in distinct rows and towers, which he refers to as "trees." The narrow passages resemble a maze and the visitor becomes lost in Litnanski's dream world. Several of the French environments are visionary and mystical in nature. One of the most intriguing is the Village of Preludial Art by an artist simply known as Chomo, who, like Clarence Schmidt, isolated himself from society — moving into the woods near Fontainebleau in the 1940s. During the ensuing four decades, he has produced some 60,000 works which range from black-and-silver wooden constructions to artificial stone sculptures with bronze-like patinas; many are anthropomorphic and look like creatures from another planet. Still active at 85, the intense artist personally guided me through several acres of assemblages and hand-built bottle houses (each filled with hundreds of sculptures and drawings), all the while alluding to his connections with other worlds. Much quieter, peaceful, and spiritual are the petroglyphs and wooden totems carved by Rene Raoult in the Breton village of Plehedel. Referring to his fouryear creation as the Green Church, the semi-abstract totems represent universal themes of father and mother, sun and moon, and the universe. In 1988, Raoultcompleted the work by engraving 18 "inhabitants" in blocks of granite. Like the work of Cheval, Chomo, and Litnanski, there is a strong sense of being inside the artist's spiritual domain, with the artist in control. Indeed, becoming master over a space is an intrinsic quality of most environments: Walter Flax was the self-appointed admiral of his fleet of ship models in Yorktown, Va., while S. P. Dinsmoor keeps an eye on his visitors from his mausoleum on the edge of his "Garden of Eden" in Lucas, Kan. Almost without exception, these artists visibly sign their work and each, in one way or another, demand that you pay homage to the creator. Some even control how one views the work: Charles Billy in Fiance becomes the tour guide and interpreter of his private Disneyland of stone creations, telling tales of trips the retired corset designer and his wife made to far-off lands, where he found the progenitors for his hand-carved, limestone structures. Having the visitor see the creations their way through highly controlled tours is a way for the outsider to tell his side of the story. Personal narratives, frequently of misadventures, are common in the work of outsiders. One needs only a brief look at the vituperative messages of Jesse Howard's signs on Hell's Eight Acres in Fulton, Mo., (now largely dispersed since the artist's death in 1983) to see that this man had a bone to pick with his neighbors, the police, and the government. In the front and side yards of winegrower Martial Besse (whose work I discovered near Villereal in France) are painted concrete sculptures which reflect his misogyny. In one sculpture we find a winged, smiling woman who stands digging rock; nearby undulates a snake with a female head. (During our interview, I learned that Besse's wife had left him many years earlier, and he had never remarried.) The sculpture garden built by Lucien Favreau (in Lavaure, Charente) began with a tomb for his dog Zappy. As a plasterer who moved from town to town in search of work, he found in a film image of a wandering Charlie Chaplin a metaphor for his own life. Portraits of Chaplin and fellow artist Cheval are part of a large wall of bas-reliefs; in a nearby field we find Favreau's tomb: three tall, gaunt concrete figures.

rales tackles the moral issues of war, apartheid, and racism. Many environments start out with a decorative quality: "Creek Charlie" Fields of Lebanon, Va., filled his house—inside and out—with daubs and squiggles of paint. The Arabic tradition of mosaic tilework was brought into Europe by the Moors (note its influence on the architecture of Gaudi, for example), and Mediterranean artists like Simon Rodia (who was born in northern Italy) introduced this genre into American environments. Raymond Isidore, working in the shadows of the famous cathedral in Chartres, began in 1923 to decorate his small house with fragments of broken pottery and glass, "transforming that house in effect into a kind of magical 'super machine' for traveling in space and time into the world of dreams." J By the time of his death in 1964, he had covered every surface — even the kitchen table. Robert Vasseur has been covering his house with mosaics since 1952, and is still at work at the age of 85. While Isidore's work has narrative elements and Vasseur sticks largely to geometric design, both of these environments are examples of the artists' needs to have total control over their personal space.

Many outsider sculptors chronicle the stories of their lives and the historical events of their era. S. P. Dinsmoor rails against the monopolies which controlled American industry in the 1920s; Fred Smith, in his Wisconsin Concrete Park in Phillips, tells the story of the local logger and fisherman; and Ed Galloway celebrates the American Indian in his Totem Pole Park near Foyil, Okla. In France, Albert Gabriel filled his large garden with hundreds of life-sized concrete figures. A large group consists of the famous, such as DeGaulle, Nixon, and Chaplin, while other figures represent types — soldiers, farmers, and bathing beauties — each with their features convincingly carved and painted. Raymond Morales (in Port-de-Bouc, near Marseilles), displays a darker view of our time in a park filled with steel sculptures, many 10 feet to 15 feet high. Clearly the work of a tormented soul, Mo-

2. Roger Cardinal, in a lecture "Dream Spaces," Montana State University, Bozeman, April 1992.

Clearly many builders of environments wish to open their private spaces to the public, sometimes even creating a "roadside attraction" which can serve as the destination for a family' s day trip (Ed Galloway, Fred Smith, and S.P. Dinsmoor all provided picnic facilities for their visitors). Although now in a deteriorating state, it is evident that French artist Fernand Chatelain meant to make a gesture to the passersby on the busy highway which ran by his home. Among the 60-some whimsical concrete creatures greeting the traveler, we find a group which proclaims WELCOME TO ENGLAND while a Britisher, umbrella in hand and the Times under his arm, tips his black bowler hat; seemingly speeding along with the traffic is a concrete car and driver, a dog in the back seat. Emile Taugourdeau built a playful zoo of painted concrete animals after his pet duck died in 1974. That this Jardin Zoologique developed into a roadside attraction is confirmed by a display facing the road which is filled with scores of animals and a table with a group of men inviting the passerby with a sign reading "bonjour." Visiting the private world of the outsider artist can be a bit like being a trespasser or a voyeur. But however uncomfortable one may be at the onset, fascination with the builders' vision and their unique formats and materials quickly erases any unease. These artists tell fascinating stories through powerful visual forms; they seem able to plumb the depths of human experience through an almost primal directness which speaks to us all. Willem Volkersz is a professor of art at Montana State University, Bozeman. In 1991, he researched outsider environments in Europe with the support of a Fulbright award. Notes: 1. The term "outsider art" was introduced by Roger Cardinal in his book Outsider Art, N. Y., Praeger, 1972, and is defined therein as "perhaps the only art which can truly be described as inventive, the art engendered outside the influence of society..." While the debate of distinctions between "folk" and "outsider" art continue, it is my experience that the builders of environments, by the very nature of their non-traditional activity, most often fall in the outsider category and I have thus chosen to use this term throughout the article.

3. For those interested in brief descriptions and locations of French environments, consult Claude Arz, Guide de la France lnsolite. Paris: Guides Hachette, 1990. 4. Roger Cardinal, in a lecture "Dream Spaces," Montana State University, Bozeman, April, 1992.

Bodan Litnanski at home in Chauny with his pillars of refuse. (Photos by Willem Volkersz)

25 PUBLIC ART REVIEW SUMMER/FALL

1992

Duffin from page 5

Blasdel from page 12

thought it made no difference. "I just want to get seen quickly and get out of here," said one. But there are still obvious benefits, which, of course, extend to the artists involved in commissions. All felt the experience had been valuable. Annie Sherburne is working on designs for three tuftings (a cross between embroidery and carpets) to be installed at Whipps Cross Hospital Day Care Centre. She says the commission is a "major opportunity for her work." She will certainly have a far larger audience than any artists would expect in a gallery. The positive aspects of the local connection seem evident here as well. Sherburne is highly committed to the projectâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;having visited the Centre, she is keen to create works of art which will aid the recovery of seriously ill patients.

by tolerant neighbors and occasional visitors, and that it is an art which will continue although it is presently being drawn closer to commercial respectability and acceptance. In recent years I have been encouraged by the discovery of new artists throughout the country who continue to build and express their visions. It has been 24 years since I wrote my first article "The Grass-Roots Artist" for Art in America, and the field of study has grown significantly. What at first attracted the art community has now drawn in the academic community as well and although it has become more easily identified, the work itself remains untamed and immune to popular trends: As Dubuffet noted, "We have here a 'chemically pure' operation. . .This, therefore, is art springing from pure invention and in no way based, as cultural art constantly is, on chameleon- or parrot-like processes." Environments that were once routinely razed upon the demise of the artist are now preserved when possible and restored and sheltered from further decay. Support has been available on state and national levels for maintaining threatened environments and regional organizations such as The Kansas Grassroots Art Association, SPACES in Los Angeles, and the Kohler Foundation in Wisconsin have sprung up. Numerous publications have given the work of the outsider artist a visibility which 30 years ago was only dreamed of, and the field of research and documentation shows no sign of fading. As outsider art becomes more visible to a growing audience, it has also become a marketable commodity to collectors and dealers.

The artists c o m m i s s i o n e d by Peterborough Hospital were involved in extended negotiations with the selection committee, as their ideas and designs were modified and transformed over months. Many artists are used to working independently so I wondered how a tight brief and extended negotiations might affect them. Penny Berry Paterson, another artist commissioned by Peterborough, found the process extremely helpful. She had never undertaken such a large commission, and the scale of the work demanded new techniques. Her large lino cuts are ingeniously made up of numerous smaller blocks printed side-by-side in a kind of collage effect, which creates an exciting and absorbing array of images. I was impressed with the good relations built up over time. Sherburne describes her relationship with the management of both BHCA and Whipps Cross Hospital as one of friendship. She admitted she was rather nervous to begin with, but felt she had received a great deal of support and encouragement. Paterson came to an arrangement with the hospital to create an edition from a section of a larger lino cut, for which orders could be taken; the idea of including artworks in the refurbishment had encouraged some staff members themselves to make work for some of the less public hospital rooms. The huge gulf between the "general public" and the seasoned art viewer is widely commented on in Britain. Galleries and artists alike constantly address the issue in relation to the work they show; the response generated in their audience must play a part in decisions made. In the case of public art it is even more crucial and far more complex. Unlike the specialized audience of most galleries, which can be controlled by targeted publicity and promotion, the audience for public art is unpredictable, and yet the very essence of art in a public place is its relationship to the people. The issue of quality versus accessibility is hotly debated, and in the end, most public art projects appear to have come down on one side or the other. Few manage to maintain a balance between the two. It is exactly these kinds of issues which are central to the work of the BHCA, making the incorporation of art in hospitals one of the most difficult public art tasks to undertake â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the bravery with which the organization has approached these projects is most impressive.

It now seems naive to think that 30 years ago we could have imagined that we could protect the work from vandals and those who sought to dismantle and disrupt a work for profit. Many large

Hartigan from page 21 established among the objects. Whenever a raised floor has been used as a security measure, the platform height has required upward adjustment to maintain the visual alignments Hampton intended. Craning at the work has subsequently increased uncomfortably in some settings. The absence of a platform, as in a gallery used to prepare for the Walker Art Center's presentation, brings the work down to earth in more ways than one. In the mid-1980s, the museum installed "The Throne" in a bay of its lobby, where it experimented with dividing the platform into two tiers above the raised floor in hopes of making works more visible as individual entities. Although that goal was accomplished, visitors accustomed to private worshipful moments in earlier installations often did not react favorably to the openness of the lobby presentation. Yet only this installation afforded the opportunity to observe "The Throne" at a distance and at close range in its parent institution. A decade earlier, the logic of the two views had been demon-

Debbie Duffin is an artist and writer living in London.

26 PUBLIC ART REVIEW SUMMER/FALL

1992

outdoor works are ephemeral in nature and could not be saved in their entirety, such as Clarence Schmidt's "House of Mirrors" in Woodstock, N.Y. A few have been dismantled and sold piece by piece or as a lot, as is the case with the Possum Trot, Calif., environment of Calvin and Ruby Black. Other sites such as Fred Smith's concrete garden in Phillips, Wis., have been brilliantly preserved with support from private foundations and the dedication of concerned individuals. Dinsmoor's "Garden of Eden," which at one time was purchased by the local plumber, is now owned by a group of shareholders, one of which is my friend Ray Wilber. The site has been accurately preserved and is still open to the public. The citizens of Lucas, who at one time watched the garden fall into disrepair, are now planning to establish a grassroots art center as a means of economic development for the town. However, few of the original sites that I first viewed 30 years ago remain in their original state. Inez Marshall's limestone sculpture was moved from Portis to become a roadside attraction in Abilene, Kan., and eventually sold to a Florida collector. It was retrieved by a doctor in Kansas and is now once again for sale. Ed Root's concrete sculptures, which were relocated by his sons to save them from being destroyed by a reservoir project, are now owned by the Kansas Grassroots Art Association. Through gallery and museum exhibitions and the publication of research material on outsider artists, the work has been given a validation and respectability for an ever-growing audience. Recognition for some artists has been accompanied by f a m e . Reverend Howard Finster from Summerville, Ga., now enjoys international representation in galleries and museums and is solicited for numerous speaking engagements and TV appearances including "The Tonight Show." Finster has an exhibi-

strated by the presentation at Walker Art Center, in the Whitney Museum's recessed, street-level gallery, and at the Montgomery (Ala.) Museum of Fine Arts. To the latter must go the distinction of showing the work in its entirety, but the bright spaciousness imposed by the building's facilities points to the risk of dispersing or even flattening the ensemble's effect. Its density has often frustrated viewers eager to see details, facets, or individual objects among those massed on the platform, especially the central throne chair virtually concealed by Hampton's own plan. NMAA's current installation remedies the dilemma by providing views from the sides through the doors of its two flanking galleries. In the search for a persuasive sense of sanctuary, more paint colors and lighting schemes have been reviewed than curatorial and design staff might care to recall. "Less is more" has proven to be the key to successful lighting, since bright, even illumination creates a leveling effect while strong contrasts of light and dark make the eye jump rather than linger. Deep, warm colors, cued to Hampton's materials, have been the most

tion that opened in July at the World Financial Center in New York City â&#x20AC;&#x201D; a complete irony for a man who worked for so many years in obscurity in the rural South, totally unfamiliar with the business channels of the New York art world. I just returned from a trip to North Carolina where I met James Harold Jennings, "American Folk Artist," as his card reads. Jennings' busstudio is filled with commissions in various states of completion and he is back ordered for months. In 1988 I participated in a symposium at Bard College held in conjunction with an exhibition, Lo & Behold: Visionary Art in the Post Modern Era. The exhibition included many wellknown outsider artists, as well as several academically trained artists who had appropriated the look of the outsider, thus blurring the distinction of authenticity. By stating this I do not seek to imply that the work of an outsider is any more or less valid as a point of departure for other artists, but only to illustrate the ongoing absorption into cultural art. In spite of the recent attention given to many grassroots artists, I have yet to view a radical stylistic change in any of the works produced. The work remains as pure and uncompromised as when it was first viewed. Finster's production has increased but his integrity and vision remains, as does Jennings'. Many questions arise about the future of outsider artists, not the least of which is how we ensure and protect the genuine nature of outsider art. As Roger Cardinal wrote in his 1979 book Outsiders, "Too much publicity can only jeopardize the natural spontaneity of outsiders still at work and falsify our perspective on Art Brut at large." Gregg Blasdel is assistant professor of art at St. Michael's College in Colchester, Vt.

effective, especially reddish browns reminiscent of old brick, and grays, from mole to charcoal, that enhance the aluminum foil's silvery effect. The current installation's ecclesiastical purple color is an experiment inspired by the purple Kraft paper (now faded to tan) applied to many of the objects, completing Hampton's regal triumvirate of colors. What remains to be tried or resolved? The prospect of a space scaled to the garage and properly sited in the museum is the curatorial carrot at the end of the stick, to be sure, and physical conservation will always be an issue. As it has since 1970, the true challenge lies in sustaining "The Throne" in a public setting that enriches its unexpectedly diverse audience without sacrificing the integrity of its spirit, a spirit that would announce it in any circumstance as a monument worthy of a mecca. Lynda Roscoe Hartigan is a curator at the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., where her specialties in folk and African-American art began with "The Throne" in 1973.

Public Art Affects Everyone

Public Art Review Coming in Issue 8: Winter/Spring 1993

It is both a repository of our cultural heritage and a commentary on our present ideals and concerns. Today, public art is a hybrid of the artist's vision and the community's values. Public Art Review is the only journal devoted exclusively to providing important information and critical discussion of issues that clearly and directly assess the role and direction of public art today.

The New Public Art

Public Art Review is a publication of FORECAST Public Artworks. Since its founding in 1978, FORECAST has been at the forefront of the public art movement, both regionally and nationally. Serving the needs of artists and communities as they work together to explore the many dimensions of contemporary public art, FORECAST has helped to create an atmosphere for the mutual exchange of ideas.

PRESSURE ON THE PUBLIC

In attempting to meet the challenges of the new decade and continue to offer a centralized resource for all people interested in public art, FORECAST needs to seek support from a variety of sources. It's no surprise that the current economic situation dictates our publishing limitations. If you like what you read in Public Art Review, and want to see more, please consider making a donation to FORECAST Public Artworks. Your support definitely makes a difference.

A TWO PART SYMPOSIUM ON PUBLIC ART AND ITS FUTURE co-sponsored by the Hirsch Foundation and Gallery 400, the University of Illinois October 14. 7 PM, Gallery 400, University of Illinois, Chicago Margaret Burroughs, arts administrator; Mary Jane Jacob, curator; Craig Adcock, art Historian: Roberta Feldman. architect

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