Mary Nohl

Tucked away in the woods along Lake Michigan in well-to-do Fox Point, Wis., Mary Nohl has created an environment with no apparent purpose except to please herself. Her house is trimmed with wooden reliefs of fish and other figures and partly fenced by human profiles. Her yard is filled with concrete figures of people, animals and dinosaurs.

Apparently after suffering intrusions from neighborhood kids, who for years have known the place as "The Witch's House," Nohl surrounded her property with a barbed-wire-topped chainlink fence and put metal grates over her windows.

Her reclusiveness may be one reason the site is missing from most listings of outsider or eccentric environments. There also is a sort of definitional limbo: Because Nohl trained at the Art Institute of Chicago and has shown work, including jewelry, in the years since, she is not a straightforward outsider.

Yet even a casual look at her property makes clear an affinity with important outsider environments, including other Wisconsin masterpieces like Fred Smith's Concrete Park and the Dickeyville Grotto. Whatever education Nohl received, it certainly didn't train her to create this.

Too eccentric, perhaps, to receive recognition as a mainstream art work, and without the credentials to be received warmly into the outsider fold, where such spaces are usually treasured, Mary Nohl's environment remains testimony to the idiosyncratic, vision-fueled drive to create that proceeds apart from market recognition, expert acclaim or community approval. And the good news is that the Kohler Foundation has added her environment to its prevervationist agenda.

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