Every once in a while those of us who don’t often make it to Africa have an opportunity to glimpse the continent’s extraordinary commercial visual culture. As recently as this summer vibrant examples of hand-painted movie posters from the 1980s and ‘90s were on view at the Chicago Cultural Center, which also mounted a show in 1996 of elaborate decorated coffins from Ghana. Both genres have books devoted to the,

African hair salon and barber shop signs, meanwhile, were featured in an Intuit show in 1994 and have become what might be the most widely collected hand-made trade signs since those of 18th and 19th Century American came into vogue. These signs are popular enough that many of the examples that end up for sale abroad are apparently made specifically for export.

African Signs is a broad survey of Africa’s commercially inflected vernacular art. It collects hand-painted signs, mostly photographed in situ, across a number of categories, including food, clothing, health, electronics and the ubiquitous hair. Among other things, the book shows off a scale of work that can’t be grasped from the individual signs collected in the U.S. That scale includes many mural-size images, but also remarkable photo that shows more than a dozen individual signs displayed outside a pharmacy in Togo. And these being health signs, the explicit representation of ailments – some obvious and some obscure but many just gross — is easily as disturbing as the kitschy violence seen in the low-budget movie posters featured in the Extreme Canvas book and the Chicago Cultural Center show.

There is certainly a kitsch element contributing to the appeal of some of these signs, but only some. The degree of talent evident in them also varies, reflecting apparently low barriers to entry for the signs’ producers. As the introduction notes, the continent is generally too poor to produce the art school graduates who might otherwise populate a commercial art industry. But the need for commercial art in the continent’s thriving local markets has produced a demand for creativity that is ripe to be filled in interesting and creative ways.

Paul Faber, the museum curator who wrote the book’s introduction, tracked down one of these artists, who goes by the interesting name of “Middle Art.” Faber notes that Middle Art is one “of the hundreds of professional painters in Africa who don’t see themselves as ‘artists’ in the romantic sense … but as craftsman who make a living with paint and brushes. This modesty can also be found in the name ‘Middle Art.’ … He doesn’t consider himself very bad but also not very good, just Middle Art.”

However accurate Middle Art’s judgment of his own ability may, the talent displayed in this book is impressive if unpredictable. Some artists can’t manage much more than caricature, other produce nuanced portraits. Some show flights of imagination, others lavish loving attention on the most mundane (or sometimes bizarre) subjects.

This review originally appeared in The Outsider, magazine of Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art.

Jacksonville, Florida, like many southern cities, is a treasure trove of roadside art

If early lovers of what some were then calling “contemporary American folk art” felt no love from an art establishment that had little use for the work of self- artists, how much worse the estrangement of those claiming to value the epitome of American ugliness? Not only were they going up against the modernist revulsion expressed so well in architect Peter Blake’s influential book “God’s Own Junkyard,” they also were taking on a decade of highway beautification launched by the former first lady of the United States, Lady Bird Johnson.

Yet Venturi’s early dissent gained increasing support into the 1980s with an outpouring of work that brought attention and appreciation to roadside architecture. There was urgency from the realization that this landscape was in the act of vanishing, victim to the elements as much as to changing fashion and economics. Generational change was also at work as post-modernism emerged to contest modernist views of what constituted embarrassing junk.

As Phil Patton’s introduction to “John Margolies, Roadside America” points out, love of this stuff was not entirely new, most notably anticipated in Walker Evans’ many photos of mundane signs and commercial buildings. It took decades before Evans’ taste was vindicated, though, a process that started in earnest with John Baeder’s photorealistic diner paintings (published in 1978 as “Diners”) as well as Charles Jencks’ tribute to eccentric tract homes, also 1978, “Daydream Houses of Los Angeles.” That was only a year after Venturi’s book and a year after Jane and Michael Stern’s “Roadfood” began their long-term tribute to the vernacular food those diners served. Meanwhile, fast food architecture got its due the next year with “White Towers,” by Paul Hirshorn and Steven Izenour (turning up again) and 1979’s “American Diner” by Richard J.S. Gutman and Elliott Kaufman.

1981 brought “California Crazy” by Jim Heimann — and the ground-breaking survey by perhaps the greatest exponent of roadside art, John Margolies, with “The End of the Road: Vanishing Highway Architecture in America.”

The books by Heimann and Margolies were both modest paperbacks, their formats too small to do justice to their photographic content. Margolies’ was a mere 94 pages, but there were many more volumes to come from this prolific hunter and gatherer of roadside images. The new “John Margolies, Roadside America” is a fantastic summing up of 30 years of labor.

His aesthetic clarity contrasts with the thread of roadside mania that most fully entered mainstream culture — a nostalgia-fueled appreciation of Route 66 and other tourist highways that resonate with the childhood memories of Baby Boomers. The old highways movement is possessed of its own charm and has helped turn up lots of great places. But it tends to be more about recapturing a feeling than about art or artists.

Margolies can also be distinguished from the post-modernist fascination with decoding a world of signs and symbols formerly treated as opaque cultural noise. A scholarly work like Karal Ann Marling’s 1984 “The Colossus of Roads: Myth and Symbol along the America Highway” has, like many of the old-highway books, its own virtues. Margolies tends to focus on what the material can say for itself, with neither nostalgia nor academic overlay.

What comes through powerfully in every image is an intelligent, sensitive appreciation for the creativity of ordinary people and a passion that connects to the concurrent resurgence of interest in vernacular art, whether defined as “contemporary American folk” or “outsider.” In both cases you see a fanatical search for artistic expression rarely recognized (even by its makers) as artistic or even expressive. And if appreciation of self-taught art uncovers the creativity of thousands of talents whose efforts would otherwise be invisible, recognition of the art in America’s roadside vernacular can transform the commercial landscape from a dreary vista of self-serving signage into something that is endlessly fascinating in its aesthetic and cultural dimensions.

Margolies traveled the country from at least 1975 collecting images of roadside art the way others trolled flea markets and back roads looking for folk artists. His eye for the unusual and interesting is fantastic, whether it be hand-built mini golf courses, pig-shaped barbeque stands, giant fish or storefronts saturated with hand-lettered slogans.

His photography always favors the subject, taking great pains to exclude distraction. You will not see a person or a car in his work (unless, that is, it’s a picture of the lamented spindle of cars from Berwyn, Illinois, or similar subjects). That’s not to say he excludes context. Adjacent landscape, be it natural or commercial, typically has a strong presence.

Sentimentality does not. Aware as he is that his material is fast disappearing, his photographic approach is never overwrought. He favors straight-on views, letting the native richness in his subjects’ colors and content tell their own story.

The latest edition of Margolies’ work, from art publisher Taschen, does justice to his photos while offering an informative introduction by Patton, himself a contributor to the old highway renaissance with his 1986 book “Open Road: Celebration of the American Highway.” Patton traces interest in the commercial landscape back from the 1970s to Evans and other photographers of the Depression era. It’s interesting to see that this kind of material appealed not only to Evans but also to Edward Weston and Dorothea Lange, although even Evans’ enthusiasm pales in comparison with Margolies’ all-consuming commitment.

This review originally appeared in The Outsider, magazine of Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art.

In the United States, writing on the environments of self-taught artists tends to place them within the outsider art context or, sometimes, within a specifically American tradition of individual expression.

Follies of Europe demonstrates a very different way of looking at these sites. Not only is their individualistic exuberance not distinctly American, but they belong to a tradition of highly personal outdoor extravaganzas going back at least to the 17th Century. Indeed, the book opens with reference to Roman gardens decorated with miniature temples and palaces, which are folly structures par excellence.

The book is built around Nic Barlow’s fine photography, but it also presents fact-filled histories of each site that situates them within the relevant artistic/architectural setting. It moves from neoclassical and baroque folly gardens of great order and grandeur that spread through Europe in the 1600s and 1700s to wilder and wilder fantasies, some of well-known art brut status (France’s Le Palais Ideal, for example) and others of more contemporary vintage and artistic professional creation, but no less weird for it.

Of course, as any neighbor can tell you, not everyone loves these things. Holmes, who contributed the text, shares a wonderful quote from Goethe on the 600-statue Villa Palagonia in Italy: This “Villa of Monsters” was in “bad taste and [the] folly of an eccentric mind,” the poet said.

But the Villa Palagonia is, needless to say, one of the more compelling sites documented here, with its profusion of grotesque statues. Others of special interest include Ireland’s Larchill, with its shell-decorated tower and generally primitive construction; the sham ruins of Belvedere House, also in Ireland; and the fairy tale undulating roofs of the Sheep’s Barn in England, one of the most stunning of the recent constructions.

The book covers just a handful of brut sites — La Maison Picassiette in Chartres, as well as the lesser-known John Fairnington cement menagerie in Britain. A number of the follies are very famous, including Antonio Gaudi’s early-20th Century Parc Guell in Barcelona; the mid-20th Century Portmerion in Wales, which was used for the filming of the TV series The Prisoner in the late 1960s; and the 18th Century Stourhead in England.

All in all the collections of garden temples, isolated towers, excessively decorated fountains and oddly sculpted buildings demonstrate a long history of aggressively expressive eccentricity that isn’t unique to the self-taught or to any single country or social class. This particular collection only covers a fraction of these places, but it is still a great introduction to that broader tradition of artistic environments.