The revetment and jetty at the south end of Rainbow Beach and adjacent to the northeast corner of the Sawyer Water Plant host more than 700 rock carvings, many made by lifeguards in the 1950s and 60s. These carvings represent a rich record of summer life at the beach as well as including a number of significant individual works of art. It’s also the location with the largest number of identifiable carvers. These galleries feature highlights from the Rainbow Beach carvings. Read the Chicago Lakeshore Art Story
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The Morgan Shoal And La Rabida Rock Carvings
Many of Chicago’s oldest lakefront carvings are on the badly deteriorated revetments along Morgan Shoal in Hyde Park. The more than 1,000 carvings there, between 45th and 50th Streets in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, are in imminent danger of being lost. This section of lakefront is in terrible condition, with many of the old rocks topsy turvy and falling into the lake. The condition of the revetments is such that they cannot be rehabilitated, but that does not mean the rocks and their carvings must be abandoned. The city is proceeding with a project to rebuild and expand the shoreline here,
Continue readingA Joe “40,000” Murphy Update
I believe the first content I posted to this Web site was a piece about Joe “40,000” Murphy, the Chicago usher who created an art environment inside his South Side house and nearby five-car garage. That was in 1994, not long after I had acquired more than 700 pieces of art previously salvaged from Murphy’s property in anticipation of its sale. Murphy had died in 1979. Bits and pieces of the work have been exhibited in the years since then, most notably at Randolph Street Gallery in 1994, Aron Packer Gallery in 1997 (both Chicago) and in a traveling show
Continue readingReview: The Tom Patterson Years
The Tom Patterson Years: Cultural Adventures of a Fledgling Scribe, by Tom Patterson. Hiding Press/Jargon, 208 pages, 10 pages of photographs, 2021. ISBN 9781733709897. Paperback, $18 If you follow the literature of the folk/outsider/self-taught art field, then you know the name of Tom Patterson. He wrote the definitive book about Eddie Owens Martin/St. EOM and Pasaquan, and, with John Turner, the first major book about Howard Finster, among other achievements. Now he’s written a memoir that includes numerous interesting anecdotes from his encounters with Martin, Finster and other figures from the world of folk and outsider art, including the folklore professor
Continue readingJack Barker’s Metal Art Fantasyland
I don’t typically love junk metal art, but every so often a maker brings enough imagination and creativity to bear that the work transcends its lawn-ornament origins. Tom Every and his Wisconsin Forevertron is one of the more famous examples of this. Jack Barker, whose metal art filled his Essex, Illinois, yard, did not work on Every’s monumental scale — physically or conceptually — but his creations were if anything weirder than Dr. Evermore’s. Barker’s use of materials could be disconcerting, as could his imagery. The scrap metal he used was more or less conventional, but the metal scraps he
Continue readingWorld’s Largest Small-Town Collection of Big Things
Little Casey, Illinois, is in possession of a number of world’s largest things as certified by Guinness, which requires largest things to be at least theoretically functional. Accordingly, in addition to its largest things, the town also boasts quite a few just large things, which are at least as cool as the largest things even if not putatively functional. Why all the big things? A brilliant idea, it seems, to draw tourists to a small town of no particular distinction in the middle of downstate Illinois. And it works. We were there on an October Tuesday afternoon and there were
Continue readingHyde Park Lakefront Stone Carvings Under Threat
Chicago’s lakefront is lined with thousands of stone carvings, created by mostly anonymous makers over the course of the 20th century. One of its most carving-rich areas is also its most endangered. Hundreds, probably thousands, of carvings have been lost over the last 20 years as the city, in cooperation with the Army Corps of Engineers, has reconstructed its shoreline to prevent erosion and flooding. This has meant removal of limestone blocks once used to armor the shore — and thus also the carvings made on many of those same blocks. Now the city is moving ahead with plans to
Continue readingMorgan Shoal Stone Carvings: Imminent Danger
The hundreds of stone carvings at Morgan Shoal, between 45th and 50th Street in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, are in imminent danger of being lost. This section of lakefront is in terrible condition, with the many of the old rocks topsy turvy and falling into the lake. The city is following up emergency measures to reduce flooding with an initiative to fund its framework plan for complete reconstruction. The plan has appealing elements, including creation of additional parkland. However, it makes no reference to the carvings or their preservation, which is no surprise considering that public awareness of this artwork
Continue readingPromontory Point Stone Carvings Again Threatened
In the early 2000s the Hyde Park community succeeded (with then-Senator Obama’s help) in blocking a government plan to strip away the quarried step stones around Chicago’s Promontory Point and replace them with a new concrete-and-steel revetment. That important act of preservation incidentally saved the many stone carvings that reside on those blocks — several dozen of the thousands of the carvings that line Chicago’s waterfront. The concrete-and-steel approach to shoreline reconstruction was nonetheless applied from just north of Promontory Point up to Montrose Harbor. The “shoreline protection project” demolished several miles worth of the old step stones along with
Continue readingThe Cross Garden
W.C. Rice’s cross garden art environment in Prattville, Alabama, near Montgomery, was one of the nation’s fiercest roadside views. The drift of his message was crystal clear, although the specifics were sometimes arcane. Rice, whose cross fixation extended to the large wooden one he wore around his neck, was said to be quite friendly to visitors. His signs and crosses stretched along two sides of the road. On one side was a shed that served as a chapel. On the other the signs and crosses filled a large vacant lot below a hillside trailer park that Rice owned. The messages
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