After Vollis Simpson died in 2013, his massive back-country whirligig garden in Lucama, North Carolina, was relocated to the center of nearby Wilson. Simpson ran a machine shop, did heavy equipment repair and was involved in moving houses. In retirement, he started tinkering with odd parts he had lying around. And he started making whirligigs. Big ones. His original whirligig park was the world’s most spectacular concentration of these wind machines. They still impress in their Wilson location, perhaps even more at night. Check out these videos. Scroll down for two photo galleries. Here are still photos of the whirligigs in
Continue readingCategory: Art environment
Q.J. Stephenson’s Earth Museum/Occoneechee Trapper’s Lodge
Q.J. Stephenson’s Earth Museum/Occoneechee Trapper’s Lodge in Garysburg, North Carolina, was on my list of places to visit for years. Finally made it early one morning in September 2025. It’s a sweet little spot whose story you can read at Spaces Archives.
Continue readingRIP Jeff Elersic, artist
I never met Jeff Elersic, who died Dec. 14, 2024, at 70 years old, but I did manage to photograph his house/tirade in Geneva, Ohio, northeast of Cleveland. In common with a number of other art environments (W.C. Rice’s, Royal Robertson’s and Jesse Howard’s among others), Elersic’s expressed an uncomfortable degree of rage. To say his language was not measured is an understatement. But it was artfully written and arranged, and he was an excellent colorist. Have a look. Images are from 2016. You can view a short obituary here and read more about him at Spaces Archives.
Continue readingReview: Singular Spaces II: From the Eccentric to the Extraordinary in Spanish Art Environments
Singular Spaces II: From the Eccentric to the Extraordinary in Spanish Art Environments, Jo Farb Hernández, 5 Continents Editions, 2 volumes of 532 pages each, 1,050 color illustrations, 2023. ISBN: 979-12-5460-018-4. Hardcover, $350 I began my review of Jo Farb Hernandez’s first study of Spanish art environments, 2013’s Singular Spaces, with the observation that is was “so epic that even a large-format volume of nearly 600 pages can’t get the job done, so a bonus CD adds thousands more thumbnail pictures and hundreds more pages of text.” Turns out it wasn’t enough. In the 10 years since that publication, she
Continue readingThe Poles of D Bill – Near Normal
When D Bill, a retired toolmaker for Caterpillar Tractor, began carving utility poles, it must have seemed natural to him to create detailed engineering drawings for each design. The carvings are whimsical and imaginative, the drawings, technical, detailed and to scale. D Bill, who preferred an initial to his full name Darwin, mostly sold his work at the annual Sugar Creek Arts Festival in the nicely named Normal, Illinois. But he also used it to decorate his spread in Danvers, a few miles west. The poles were scattered around his house and workshop and lined the long driveway up
Continue readingMartha Timm Memorial Rock Garden
The Martha Timm Rock Garden is fenced off in New Hampton, Iowa’s Mikkelson Park, making photography a challenge but visiting easy. You can just walk up any time and look. An information sign supplies what little information I can find about this modestly scaled art environment: “Martha Timm and her husband were retired to a home in New Hampton from a farm southeast of the city when she began the building of her rock garden. It includes rocks from every state of the union, collected by her and for her by relatives and friends in their travels. The shards of
Continue readingArt On The Belmont Rocks
More than 250 works of art survive on a row of blocks preserved when the limestone steps north of Diversey Harbor in Chicago were replaced with a new concrete-and-steel revetment. The other blocks — there had to be thousands ripped out — hosted a treasure trove of art that is now gone forever. Those same blocks helped form the heart of Chicago’s gay community. I’ll leave it to Owen Keehnen, historian of the Rocks, to explain more in this passage from the Facebook group he manages. Although the gay scene at the Belmont Rocks did not survive the reconstruction, about
Continue reading