Even though Elmer’s teeming forest of bottle trees stands alongside one of those desolate stretches of old Route 66 between Barstow and San Bernadino, he says it doesn’t have much to do with the famous roadway.
In 1967, when George Glore first devised having a museum dedicated to the various treatments for the mentally ill, this was part of St. Joseph State Hospital (aka the State Lunatic Aslyum #2.)
From vehicles like the beautiful Belinda, to the Sashimi Tabernacle Choir and the Orange Barrel Mobile, the imagination and resourcefulness of Art Car builders is breathtakingly fun and funny.
Along the Cane River, south of Natchitoches, LA, sits the Melrose Plantation, home of folk art legend, Clementine Hunter. But it’s history is extends far beyond the boundaries of art.
The genius of this place is in its adaptation to the terrain. The story began back in 1905, when Forestiere Baldasare, a Sicilian immigrant, had come westward in the early 1900s with dreams of farming success.
Talk about the power of crystals! Rising out of the small town of West Bend, a part of Iowa where the landscape is seldom disturbed by anything larger than a grain silo, lies the Grotto of the Redemption.
In the mid-90s she had been running a junk and odds and ends store in rural north Florida when she suddenly turned to making art. She was suffering some severe health problems, and became even more depressed after she lost her grandmother, aunt, and uncle in a tragic house fire.
When you see one of Vollis Simpson’s whirligigs adorning the front lawn of a museum, you know it’s no ordinary place. This is indeed the mecca for those who appreciate work by self-taught, outsider or visionary artists.
Over the years, Horace embellished the graves of family members and other folks from this rural community, using metal and tin, much of it painstakingly punched out with a nail.
In 1920, when Bert Vaughn started work on his Desert View Tower, people motoring across the mountains that jut up out here near the Mexican border inevitably needed a place to stop and cool down.