Sculpted muffler figures represent one of the great roadside folk arts, but 2D representations of exhaust pipes and related auto parts are often just as imaginative. The ominous figure from the former E&T Mufflers in Chicago is the greatest example of art on a shop sign I’ve even seen in the wild. Here’s that one again, another image from the same location, and a bunch of other delightful renderings from the underside. Back to Muffler People: The Last American Folk Art.
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Walks to the Paradise Garden: A Lowdown Southern Odyssey, by Jonathan Williams, photos by Roger Manley & Guy Mendes. Institute 193, Lexington Kentucky and New York, 352 pages, 100 color images and 80 black and white , 2019. ISBN: 978-1732848207. Hardcover, $45. It’s a shame this book wasn’t published as intended in the 1990s. Not only would its author have still been alive, but so would most of the artists he encountered on his travels across the back roads of the South. Inspired by William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, Jonathan Williams, poet, publisher and lover of the vernacular, undertook a series of
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Calling muffler people “the last American folk art” may be a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. If you accept a fairly rigorous definition of folk art, much of what is called folk — whether art, music, or craft — isn’t. That is, it’s not made by artists working from within a communal creative context, artists whose roots are in local or regional traditions more than in mass culture or eccentric visions. To say that Bob Dylan was never an actual folk singer or Howard Finster a folk artist does not diminish their talent or even their authenticity
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You’re not too likely to stumble upon this art environment in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood. It’s on an out-of-the-way dead-end street. But it’s worth the hunt. Alex Rico turned his home into a literal castle to honor his late wife Gisela, who died at 34. “I told my kids I want to do something so I could remember your mom. Not in the cemetery. This is something I see every day,” Rico told the news site Block Club Chicago. You can read the full story and see pictures here and below. See more art environments here.
Continue readingFred Smith’s Wisconsin Concrete Park, the fabulous art environment in Phillips, Wisconsin, circa 1997 and 2007. There is plenty to be said about Smith and his creations. For more information, visit its Spaces archive page or the Friends of Fred Smith site. Back to Wisconsin: The Roadside Genius State.
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A look past Chicago’s outsider art canon to anonymous & lesser-known artists, the collectors who found their work, and Maxwell Street, where many learned how
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Frank’s West Side Auto Parts, at Kedzie Avenue and 30th Street, is an art gallery unto itself. Plus, there are other great signs in its vicinity, including more auto parts art and other examples of vernacular creativity.
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Jim Shaw: The Hidden World, edited by Marc-Olivier Wahler. Koenig Books, London, 512 pages, 2014. ISBN: 978-3863355845. Hardcover. Jim Shaw’s collection of religious, political and cultural ephemera, published in 2014 as an exhibition catalog, makes for a great book, especially if your collecting interests align with Shaw’s, as mine not coincidentally do.
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Denver streets were lined with some real beauties when these pictures of roadside art were taken earlier in the decade. Also two nice places from Colorado Springs. Whether in muffler men or murals, vernacular creativity abounds.
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The Mukwa Motel/Farmers Retirement Home is a vernacular art environment on Wisconsin Highway 54 west of New London. It’s on the northern edge of the Mukwa State Wildlife Area and was photographed before 1995. An artful bit of rural humor built by farmer John Kraske shortly before his retirement. According to the Post-Crescent newspaper, he assembled the site in 1991, two years before he retired from farming. Kraske, who died at 96 in 2016, told the paper in 2001, “It’s just something some crazy farmer did who didn’t have anything better to do with his time.” “Every year or so
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