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 readingReview: The Gallery of Miracles and Madness: Insanity, Modernism, and Hitler’s War on Art
The Gallery of Miracles and Madness: Insanity, Modernism, and Hitler’s War on Art, by Charlie English. Random House, 336 pages, 16 pages of plates, 2021. ISBN: 9780525512059. Hardcover, $28 Charlie English begins his history of Nazi cultural preoccupations— – and the genocides that followed— – with the story of Franz Karl Buhler, a German blacksmith who turned painter after he was overtaken by mental illness and entered an asylum. He also was an artist collected by the pioneering psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn (who gave him the pseudonym Franz Pohl), and he was as well an early victim of Nazi genocidal policies. Prinzhorn, and his
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 readingMy Comments for The Army Corps Chicago Coastal Study
Please accept this comment for the NEPA review of the Chicago Coastal Storm Risk Management study. The historical limestone revetments and related structures at Morgan Shoal, Promontory Point and La Rabida have done more than protect the Chicago shoreline from erosion and flooding. They also have served as a canvas for thousands of mostly anonymous Chicagoans who have carved portraits and other images, names, messages and more into the rocks for almost a century. I have spent the last few decades documenting the carvings on the revetments all along the Chicago shoreline, researching their history, tracking down and interviewing carvers,
Continue readingGarage Doors of Chicagoland
In the 1990s Mark Williams and Anne Weitze conceived a project to document the garage doors of Olympia Fields, Illinois, Mark’s hometown. It was inspired in equal measure by the Dublin Doorways posters, whose quaintness was then ubiquitous, and by the industrial typologies of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Mark never completed the project, but in his memory Anne and I proceeded with the not-so-great snapshots that they took as preliminary sketches, made serviceable through Anne’s Photoshop wizardry. These doors will be instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with mid-century suburban vistas. It was Mark’s brilliance to see past the apparently tacky
Continue readingLakefront Rock Carvings This Summer – Update
If you’re interested in Chicago’s unique lakefront rock carvings, there will be a number of opportunities in the summer and early fall of 2022 to see and appreciate them. The walking tour of the carvings at Promontory Point scheduled for Sept. 11 has been rescheduled because of weather to Sunday Oct. 9. We’ll start at 11:30 a.m. near the fountain. In addition to the many historical carvings around the Point, we’ll see new ones created just in the last few months! On Sept. 24 I’ll be doing a tour of the carving-rich area around Foster Beach for Friends of the
Continue readingLakefront Carvings This Summer
If you’re interested in Chicago’s unique lakefront rock carvings, there will be a number of opportunities in the summer of 2022 to see and appreciate them. Saturday, May 28, and Sunday, May 29, the Promontory Point Conservancy will be celebrating its first annual Point Day celebration. This is your chance to show your support for preservation of this historic site, and you can also join these three carving events: On Saturday at 10 a.m. Roman Villareal, carver of the mermaid that is now at Oakwood Beach, will be at the Point talking about that famous carving and other carvings. At
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Mid-Century Modern’s Midwestern Ugly Ducklings
If not yet beautiful, at least interesting
Continue readingReview: Elijah Pierce’s America
Elijah Pierce’s America, edited by Nancy Ireson and Zoé Whitley, with contributions by Sampada Aranke, Theaster Gates and Michael D. Hall. The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, in association with Paul Holberton Publishing, London, distributed by the University of Chicago Press, 208 pages, 120 color plates, 2020. ISBN: 9781911300878. Hardcover, $50 To the long list of reasons to resent the pandemic beyond death, sickness and unemployment, of course, we can add missing the opportunity to see Elijah Pierce’s carvings in person at Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation. The retrospective ran from September 2020 to January 2021 and included more than 100 works. But pandemic
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