This pique assiette folk-art fence in Chicago’s wonderful Bowmanville neighborhood appears to date to 1973. It fronts a nondescript house on a nondescript, low-traffic street. Very few people driving by on the nearest thoroughfare are likely to recognize that they just passed an important folk-art site.
Continue readingThe Last Stop: Vanishing Rest Stops of the American Roadside by Ryann Ford My rating: 5 of 5 stars This is a clever concept, with great photos and beautiful landscapes for a wonderful book. Highway rest areas are, for the later part of the 20th Century, what diners and motels were for the middle of it. They are (and were) easy to take for granted until they start disappearing — which is what Ryann Ford noticed and led her to this project. Getting nostalgic about rest areas takes some getting used to, but the ways she frames them in the
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A second installment from my backlog of interestingly named businesses. More bizarre bazaars to come soon. And 500 other greats names at the main Bizarre Bazaars hall of fame. Go to Bizarre Bazaars main page for 500-plus great names.
Continue readingHere’s the first installment from my backlog of interestingly named businesses. More to come soon. Go to Bizarre Bazaars main page.
Continue readingFrom Art Brut to Art without Boundaries: A Century of Fascination through the Eyes of Hans Prinzhorn, Jean Dubuffet and Harald Szeemann, by Carine Fol. Skira, Milan, 192 pages, 80 color illustrations, 2015. ISBN: 978-8-8572-2748-1. Paperback, $45 Art Brut in America: The Incursion of Jean Dubuffet, by Valérie Rousseau with a foreword by Anne-Imelda Radice and contributions from Jean Dubuffet, Sarah Lombardi, Kent Minturn and Jill Shaw. American Folk Art Museum, New York, 248 pages, 142 illustrations, 2016. ISBN: 978-0-9121-6126-6. Paperback, $45 Jean Dubuffet – inventor of art brut, important painter, master collector and connoisseur, exploiter, radical, crank. For obvious reasons
Continue readingTen years of lakeshore projects in Chicago have destroyed scores of vernacular stone carvings, but the most recent project has uncovered some fantastic examples. These are installed on the stretch of new lakeshore at Fullerton Avenue. (See my collection of more than a hundred other lakeshore carvings here.) For those who follow such things, a closer look at this “Easter Island” carving revealed a signature and date: RS -05- (see the bottom of the photo). It is very cool that someone was making carvings of this complexity in 2005 — certainly the most recent I’ve seen. Where this rock originally
Continue readingA brief swing through Milwaukee is enough to turn up some fine examples of roadside art.
Continue reading“Providing solutions for your specialty needs” It’s a medical equipment rental company, by the way.
Continue readingRay Yoshida’s Museum Of Extraordinary Values by Karen Patterson My rating: 5 of 5 stars I’ve had the privilege of seeing Ray Yoshida’s art collection only twice, the first time in 1994 when I was co-curating a show of bottle-cap art for Chicago’s Intuit. Ray was gracious and loaned some pieces. His collection was spectacular, but tellingly, it did not seem out of the ordinary. If it was finer than many I had seen (my own included), it was not fundamentally different in style and approach. The mix of Maxwell Street flea-market finds with masterpieces is a hallmark of the
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The Family Circus: Daily and Sunday Comics, 1962-63 by Bil Keane My rating: 5 of 5 stars I liked Peanuts as a kid but I loved Family Circus. Where Charles Schulz used his kids to make universal points, Bil Keane tried to be about real kids and real parents. It was a chronicle of post-war suburban life, and I could relate. It also was probably the greatest source of insight I had into the parental point of view (well, along with Dave Berg’s The Lighter Side comics in Mad Magazine, with had some similarities to Circus in style and point
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