Things have been happening so fast for the last week that we have barely had a second to sleep until yesterday, when we arrived in Santa Fe after a complete 16 hours in the car and crashed (us, not the car). Let me do a recap.

Though this seems like a million years ago now, I’ll start in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where we taught a successful all-day bookmaking workshop at the Hub-Bub organization’s showroom on the 17^th. We learned a lot from the teaching experience, and the people at Hub-Bub were wonderful and generous with us. (Photostream from the workshop here !)

We drove down towards Charleston on the 18^th, with a stop at Pearl Fryar’s topiary gardens. The gardens were lovely. When we arrived, it was raining, and the sound of the water dripping in the garden, along with the smell of the wet pines, made his garden seem lush, exotic and strange.

View of some of the trees in the topiary garden

In Charleston, we ate dinner at Sermet’s Corner, a restaurant owned by visionary artist Sermet Aslan. Rebecca Hoffberger at AVAM had recommended we eat there. We camped at a great campsite on Sullivan’s Island, and in the morning we made a quick trip to the Halsey Institute, where Mark Sloan’s assistant (Mark Sloan co-wrote the visionary art “bible” with Roger Manley), Rebecca Silberman, was nice enough to show us around and talk about the place. We managed to get an hour on the beach before we hit the road again—I’m still sunburned.

On July 20, we arrived in Knoxville, TN, where Elena’s family friend, Krishna Adams, gave us a great tour of the Knoxville Museum of Art. Here we saw a fantastic photography show with work by Walker Evans, Eudora Welty, and Baldwin Lee. We spent the afternoon checking out Knoxville—we went to the old general store and bought buckets of candy, then crossed the street to the well-known Yee-Haw industries old-fashioned letter press company. One of Yee-Haw’s employees showed us around the back of the shop, an amazing conglomeration of prints they have done over the past several years, many old presses, and thousands and thousands of pieces of moveable type and images cut into wood and etched into metal. We all sort of had an epiphany about the possibility of setting up a similar shop, especially in a city like Knoxville where the rent/overhead would be so low.

Yee-Haw Press

Yee-Haw's thousands of moveable type

From Knoxville we drove two hours to McMinnville, Tennessee, where we stayed at Elena’s sister’s house with her wonderful family: husband Steve Corn, and kids Hana, Elijah, and Levi. We had a great time with them despite the fact that we were trying to catch up on work in their living room, and Steve showed his work–he makes miniature figures for collectors around the world. I’ll talk about him in my next entry.

Elena working in the living room with nephew Levi

After a night in McMinnville, we drove South. We stopped at the Appalachian Center for Craft, where Steve had gone to school for blacksmithing. The college has about 85 students total in the fields of ceramics, metal, glass, woodworking, and textiles. The three of us were incredibly jealous of the facilities there—especially since Bard, the school where we just graduated, has very few facilities for art practices that could be deemed utilitarian (like ceramics).

Beautiful ceramics studios at the Appalachian Center for craft

Our next stop was the Minister’s Horace Burgess’ treehouse in Crossville , Tennessee. The treehouse itself is incredible, defying description. According to Horace, it’s the largest treehouse in the world. Personally, I found the experience of exploring the treehouse quite psychologically harrowing—the seven-story structure is a maze of rooms built according to no visible logic. There are pieces of old furniture and strange structures in several of the eighteen enclosed rooms, and though the building is actually quite stable, it feels pretty rickety. While wandering around, you loop back on yourself and get lost again and again—ending up a full three stories above where you started, or at a total dead-end hallway.

View from the treehouse (complete with swing!)

The treehouse

After spending an hour or so in the treehouse and another half hour speaking to Horace himself, who was very sweet and non-evangelically spiritual, we were invited by Horace’s best friend/accomplice Jerry to camp on the lake behind the tree house. In addition to being a visionary and artist, Horace is a landscape architect by profession, and he has spent his free time over the last two years landscaping the lake behind his treehouse. The setting sun reflecting on the water was blinding, and across the lake there were six horses grazing on the far shore. We pitched our tent on a floating dock that Horace built (along with a platform and diving board), and spent the evening hanging out with Jerry and two teenage guys who Horace lets sleep at the lake or in the tree house in exchange for keeping watch over the place.

Horace Burgess, the treehouse's creator

The wonderful Jerry by the lake

The lake in the morning. Our tent on the floating dock.

In the morning, we woke up at seven to the smell of urine—one of the Minister’s dogs had apparently peed on the tent. This got us up and out pretty fast. We drove straight to Summerville, right on the Northwestern tip of Georgia, where Howard Finster’s Paradise Gardens has been languishing since his death in 2004. We had heard rumors that the place has become pretty defunct, since much of Finster’s work has been removed from its original site and the place has become overgrown, but we decided to check it out anyway since it was on our route and since we are fans of Finster. We did not regret the choice. Finster’s masterwork, the environment he built on the property behind his house, is in an amazing state of decay and disrepair at this point, but we found it all the more beautiful and profound because of this. The intervention of time on Finster’s Paradise made the experience there feel archaeological, like we were discovering a bygone utopia. The objects themselves have taken on the quality of relics, and the overgrowth of plants and trees—which in some cases have completely taken over Finster’s structures—forces one to think about the futility of human creation and the smallness of human activity, no matter how ambitious. The decay made me imagine what the place looked like through Finster’s eyes, which I assume is what Finster wanted to make every visitor do: to imagine paradise. My favorite part of the sprawling gardens was a mirrored treehouse on the back of the property that the trees have begun to grow through. Beautiful.

Howard Finster's mirrored house in the trees

We drove Southwest to Alabama that night, and visited the Ave Maria Grotto site in Cullman. We were pretty unimpressed by the site, mostly because of the creepy gift shop full of Jesus figurines and anti-abortion literature at the entrance and the $5.00 entrance fee. The work of the artist, Brother Joseph Zoettl has been relocated and arranged in the side of a hill. He made miniatures of buildings around the world, including the Basilica in Mexico City, landmarks from his hometown in Bavaria, and his vision of Hansel and Gretel’s fairy castle. Brother Joseph never seemed to have settled on a scale to use, so the overall effect is pretty random and bizarre.

View from the grotto

We camped just outside of Prattville, the home of the Reverend W.C. Rice’s Cross Garden. In the morning we got to the cross garden early. The sun was beating down so heavily that I could almost feel my back blistering. The heat felt that much hotter as we walked around looking at Rice’s paintings of the words HELL IS HOT HOT HOT on old dryers, washing machines, and stoves in the various vacant lots around his house.

Hell (and Alabama) is Hot Hot Hot

In the driveway to the house, we ran into Rice’s grandson-in-law, who was getting married that afternoon. After a few minutes of intensely religious small-talk, he beckoned his father-in-law to come speak to us. The hour that followed, in the driveway, in the boiling Alabama heat, was one of the more disturbing hours I’ve had. We got proselytized like I have never been proselytized before. I have written at length about the experience; perhaps an anecdote or two would explain best and most quickly. After about an hour of angel/devil role play, denouncing our President/gays/Jews/infidels-in-general, Rice’s son-in-law took it upon himself to prophesize Elena and my futures. Elena is going to have a big family. And if I start singing in my church choir, he promised, I would have a record deal within the year. He did not seem to want us to leave…but we said thank you profusely, and made our escape.

In Montgomery, AL, we spent the early afternoon at Marcia Weber’s Art Objects. Marcia has been a folk art collector for many years and has personal relationships with most of the artists she represents. We talked about a lot of interesting and relevant things with Marcia—the term “contemporary folk,” as opposed to “traditional folk,” the relationship of visionary art to evangelism (especially relevant given where we had just come from), and the situation of women folk artists. Fascinatingly, she told us, W.C. Rice’s wife had actually painted all of the words (SEX PIT! NO ICE WATER IN HELL) on the objects for him! Reverend Rice had only a third-grade education, and was illiterate. He would “hear” the Lord’s word, and relay them to his wife, who did all the actual painting for him. Marcia told us of other folk artists she knew whose wives did similar work for them. This adds greatly to our theory about the lack of female visionaries—there are actually plenty of women artists working who are just not getting any credit for it. This of course seems to undermine the idea of “visionary” art to me—Rice may have had the vision, but his wife’s hand produced all the material work, work which I happen to think is quite beautiful–despite, or in addition to, its message. One would think that in outsider art, as opposed to contemporary art where the question has become somewhat irrelevant, the presence of the artist’s hand should be the ultimate criteria. However, many successful folk artists (I am using many of these terms interchangeably at this point—not technically correct, but I am happy to disambiguate if anyone wants to know), who are responding to demand for their work, do indeed have other people working for them.

Marcia Weber holding Fish Train!

I was touched by Marcia’s concern for the artists she worked with and her desire to help them support themselves. This appears to be in stark contrast to many other folk art dealers she mentioned. She told us horror stories about dealers who have outright stolen work from unsuspecting artists living in dire conditions and sold it at extremely deflated prices, thus robbing the artist of income and, worse, destroying the market for the artist’s work in the future.

We stayed in a Super 8 Motel in Covington, Louisiana, that night, which felt like an extreme luxury. In the morning, we went to the Abita Mystery House, also known as the UCM (you-see-em) Museum, also known as the life work of the amazing John Preble. John was inspired to create the museum after a visit to Tinker Town (in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which we plan to visit tomorrow). The place features a huge collection of old pinball machines, videogames–even a wind-up organ. There are thousands of John’s hand-painted signs (”YOU CAN HAVE A PARTY HERE”), jokes, taxidermied animals attached to each other (a bird with an alligator head), and motorized dioramas that move at the push of a button.

Alisa & Elena in front of the Mystery House entrance

Playing the wind-up organ in the Mystery House

We spent a long time chatting with John, who has wonderful energy, and who was excited to hear about our trip and swap stories with us. One anecdote we thought particularly interesting was a story he told us about the time that Raw Vision Magazine (leading publication about outsider/visionary art) paid him a visit and spent hours photographing his place in the hopes of doing a feature on him. After the whole shoot was done, the journalist asked John if he had perhaps had any education, and upon hearing that John indeed had gone to graduate school for art, said, “oh, sorry, we can’t use you at all.” John was interested in knowing how we would categorize him and his environment—I have no idea. But this reminded us once again that as much as we would like to deconstruct the categories that have been distinguish the genre we are focusing on, this categorization is necessary. In John’s case, for example, he needs a word to describe his creation in order to draw people to it.

John Preble

We were sad to have to leave John and the museum, but left in the early afternoon and zoomed to Hammond, Louisiana, only about a half hour away. We visited the house of Charles Smith, whose work we had seen on display at AVAM in Baltimore and greatly enjoyed. We didn’t get to meet Charles, but we left a note for him—and he’s since gotten in touch with us.

Some of Charles Smith's figures in his front yard

We got back in the car and drove down to the Chauvin site in southern Louisiana, to see the work of Kenny Hill. This was the sweetest, most touching work I had seen and I was profoundly moved by several of his sculptures. His was some of the first auto-biographical or even narrative work we had seen, and this, combined with the fact that the materials used were consistent, made it seem accessible to me, despite the fact that there was no one there for us to talk to.

Kenny Hill's self-portrait

We spent the night in New Orleans with our friend Zach Maddox (thanks!!), who took us to an amazing puppet/music show by Quintron and Miss Pussycat in the French Quarter and made sure we got to eat crawfish, oysters, and alligator sausages before we left. We arrived in Austin on the afternoon of July 25, where we lucked out and met the most wonderful crew of people. Our adventures in Austin were fantastic and will have to wait until a later entry to get into…I’ll just put this picture in as a teaser:

A little bit of Texas...

As always, check out our Flickr photostream to see tons and tons more pictures from each of these places. There are many, many amazing things we haven’t been able to write about.

Next entry, with some deeper thoughts about the last week, forthcoming…

This was originally written on Tuesday, July 20. (By Elvia)

An obvious result of the laptop loss is that I am able to write a lot less than I had thought I would. But in a certain sense, and as Bob Snead pointed out to me on the phone today, I’ve also been somewhat freed from the responsibility of constant reflection. The truth is that we have had barely a free moment to do the recording and synthesizing work we had planned on, besides of course, from the sweaty back seat, and often I feel frustrated by the inability to get something down right after it happens. But when traveling, there is always a balance between doing stuff and telling the story of doing stuff before it’s done—the danger of the tourist who sees the entire city through a camera lens.

But trips like this can’t help but create their own mythologies. Especially as we encounter such mythic, larger-than-life personalities on our way, the whole thing begins to seem like an epic of some sort. The weirdness of our agenda, which only we seem to understand (and even sometimes we are just pretending we understand it), allows us to go only exactly where we want to go, and I’ve realized that we are going places that we think are going to make good stories.

As for the “new mode of production and distribution” that I have been constantly referring to and talking about – Clyde Jones and Vollis Simpson led me to some ideas on the topic. For instance, Clyde gave us his critter (Alisa tells the story in the previous entry), and he wouldn’t accept a penny for it. In fact, he won’t sell any of his critters; he makes a living by doing odd jobs around town. If he needs to go any farther than the general store around the corner (which he can get to on his lawnmower), he hitches a ride with a neighbor. The whole town supports him, and rightly so, as he seems to have single-handedly kept Bynum alive. The woman in the General Store told us that after the mill shut down, pretty much all the businesses in town closed, and that Clyde is pretty much the only attraction it’s got left. In this sense, both Clyde and Vollis operate outside of formal economic systems and function as community builders. By creating regional attractions and refusing to sell, catalog, or even protect much of the work, they reveal an idea about creating stuff that seems practically ancient and unbelievably sweet. And no wonder people like Roger Manley, who we spoke to in Raleigh the next day, are hooked on “discovering” them—they are lovely people who find joy in creating art objects and connecting with people. Not to say that contemporary artists who are part of the “conversation” (as I recently heard it called), do not make things out of genuine impulse—and come on, who’s to say what’s genuine, what’s conscious, what’s intrinsic and what’s influenced…however, it is easy to prove, if one wants to, that Clyde Jones, for example, is producing from this supposed authentic place. Positive reaction to the work only perpetuates its production, as opposed to being its original impetus. In a time in America when there is so much skepticism about the art and academia, people (me) like to be reassured that art-making is a “natural” activity, and that, as Rebecca Hoffberger told us while we were at AVAM, living a beautiful life is, and can still be thought of as, a work of art.

View of Clyde's Critter Crossing

Some beautiful critters

This brings me to something we talked about at length with Roger, who was kind enough to welcome us into his office at the Gregg Museum and take us to a lovely Vietnamese restaurant in Raleigh. Roger has had many years to formulate theories about why people like Clyde and Vollis began and continued making work. As Alisa talked about, many of these people’s histories of art-making are linked to a traumatic life event. Normally, I am skeptical of the (post-Freudian) impulse to designate a psychological root from which every life action stems, and this impulse’s connection to the tendency in art history to directly link an artist’s biographical information to work produced at the time.  This has always seemed a reductive and uninteresting way of deriving meaning from art to me. However, the fact of a physical trauma causing a possibility or necessity for expression in this way makes a lot of sense to me—particularly in the way that Roger explained it to us, which makes a connection between art-making and physical activity. As he said, if you’re someone who is used to seeing the results of your manual labor at the end of the day (as in, you picked 1000 tomatoes today, or you fixed three lawnmowers today that work now), a physical trauma often renders you unable to do this kind of work and thus deprives you of a visible affirmation of success or self-satisfaction. This creates a real need to create a physical response in the world around you, which seems like a real basic fact about human existence to me. (This need is reflected so poetically is the impulse for many self-taught artists to make whirligigs at first…simple but entirely futile machines that do nothing but spin in the wind. Roger told us that in the Middle Ages, the sign for craziness was a little whirligig.) It is true that the only way I have ever successfully worked myself out of my own small-scale personal traumas has been through physically building things.

Which brings me to another question Roger helped us with—why are there so few women making outsider environments? Of course, the first artist Roger encountered was a woman—an old lady named Annie Hooper who lived in a house on North Carolina’s outer banks. The house was stuffed with cement and driftwood sculptures she had been making for years, and Roger met her spontaneously while hitchhiking around as a seventeen-year old college student. But besides that amazing story, which was fantastic to hear from his mouth, there aren’t a huge amount of other self-taught women artists that he’s come upon, or that we’ve heard of. He said that the prevalent theory used to explain this fact is that women have enough of a creative outlet in their traditional work of child-rearing. It’s true that quilting, cooking, gardening, and teaching are creative activities…but doesn’t quite explain the lack of another outlet. Roger suggested that the real deterrent for women is the fact that men’s work-life ends at retirement age, and that they aren’t expected to keep producing after this time, but that women whose work is at home never get to retire, and so they never get those years of free time in the second half of their lives. This sounds plausible to me, combined with the fact that women’s realm of manual labor is indeed much less permanent than men’s. Fabric doesn’t last as long as metal.

Roger, Alisa, and Elena in the Gregg Museum offices

Roger in the car with Fish Train

Actually, is anyone still making “outsider” art? As we talked about with Roger, the guys we’ve met so far are not just old but ooooold. Vollis is definitely pushing 100. Maybe the new generation just hasn’t been discovered yet…but the truth is, folk festivals today showcase a surprising amount of crap, crap that has more to do with the crafting industry or even the art world than with Clyde’s back yard. Not to say that all of this nouveau folk art is bad, or “fake,” but that it doesn’t hold the same power as work like Clyde’s, and, more importantly to me, does not propose an alternate function for art in life as do these visionaries we’ve met so far. Folk art is art that sells itself as such, rather than work made to confirm one’s identity, one’s place in the world, or to create beauty and forge human connections in an otherwise dying little mill town in North Carolina.

I would like to introduce the newest member of Insiders/out, Fish Train!

She’s just under 10 pounds, covered in sparkles, and has eyes made of synthetic peonies. Sure, she might accidentally stab us at any sudden sharp turn, or cover everything she touches in dirt and sparkles, but we love her beyond words and are so glad she’s in our lives!

So now let me explain the adventure that led us to her. We were heading to Bynum, North Carolina in pursuit of an alleged man named Clyde Jones who creates “critters” with a chainsaw and recycled materials. So after camping at Jordan Lake, we asked a park ranger if she had heard of Mr. Jones, and of course she had. By telling us to take a right at the Lowe’s and McDonald’s and then another right at the BBQ place, we decided he couldn’t be far. At the mercy of an iPhone going in and out of service, we stopped at a decrepit old general store where we thought Bynum was.  Only to find that the general store was now a dimly lit community center offering a few bags of chips, the one lady in there told us that Clyde Jones not only lived just a few blocks away, but that he was heading right for us on his lawn mower! Gallantly riding his yellow and blue machine and wearing a baseball cap that read, “Clyde Jones: the Critter Man” he entered his daily hang out to find three girls gawking and smiling at him like tweens at a twilight premier. His country swagger and unintelligible southern drawl whisked us away in a blissful stupor as he told us to go have fun and check out his yard. So we headed out, unsuccessfully following directions that went something like this, “ga up, dawn, and ten rhight – ya cant miss it”, we were noticing that just about every yard in town was sporting a marvelous critter. But finally, we saw a kaleidoscopic vision of color and shapes in the distance, and we knew that had to be it. The site was overwhelmingly amazing. It was impossible to notice every detail amidst the smorgasbord of glitter, random objects, elks, alligators, elephants, a santa clause in a canoe, and faded photographs of Clyde’s critters all around the world. My personal favorite was a porcupine that had bathtub faucets for quills. All of the love and energy that Clyde put into those critters with his nine fingers and chainsaw put me in a frenzy.

After returning to the community center to talk with Clyde, we attempted to ask him questions about his process, material choice, and artistic intention, and tried even harder to understand his replies. Our academic background (or shall I say brainwashing?) certainly deterred our connection to Clyde and understanding of how to approach such a reality. But with Clyde’s amazing heart and sweet demeanor alongside our enthusiasm and desire to become friends, we had a grand ol’ time in the backwoods of North Carolina. Clyde decided we needed us a critter, so we followed him back to his house behind his lawnmower, making us even more thrilled than before. He thoughtfully picked out a beautiful white bird that could fit in our already packed car and had eyes like mine (Clyde’s words, not mine). After trying to guess what kind of bird it was, he finally told us that it was a “fish train”. “Fish train?” we asked, to which he replied, “ya”. So, the name stuck and we couldn’t help but give our beautiful critter a name that would honor its creator and our new friend. After many a hug and group hug, we carried Fish Train to its new home and waved goodbye to the man that surprised us with love and creativity never known to us before.

Clyde wasn’t the only awesome old man we hung out with that day. We headed east to Lucama in pursuit of Vollis Simpson’s monumental Whirligigs. Arriving with some cold Pepsis in hand, we approached Vollis’ mountainous clutter of machinery to find him dozing in front of his studio. Well over 90 years of age, Vollis greeted us with true southern hospitality and offered us places to sit amongst the rubble. Even harder to understand than Clyde amidst the blaring radio and fans, we were able to gather that he started building the whirligigs when he bought himself a welder after fighting in WWII. Although I couldn’t gather any real rhyme or reason as to why exactly he started building 40-foot tall contraptions that spin, it seems that he does it for his inherent desire to make something with his own hands and of his own imagination. His natural knack for constructing extremely tall structures and unyielding energy to keep creating is completely personal, yet extremely selfless and welcoming to visitors and the local community. After walking under the enormous wind-powered contraptions that spun in all directions and made chime-like noises, we left feeling overwhelmed with the amazing amount of human potential displayed through the feats of man-made imagination.

Some of Vollis' whirligigs

The next morning, we woke up early, packed up the tent, and headed into Raleigh to speak with Roger Manley, the man(ley) on outsider art. His insight into the field and understanding of the nature of such art was reassuring to our concerns, curiosities, and conflicts with outsider art as a practice, category, and reality. His advice on approaching “outsider” artists let us know that we weren’t doing anything wrong when we weren’t able to get a straight answer out of these extremely talented individuals.  He suggested that we ask individuals like Clyde and Vollis to talk a little bit about what they did before they began to create art, not why or how they started. From this method of questioning, Roger has deduced that what you can discover from this line of questioning is that you will almost always find a history of trauma, and the time after is when the need to create begins. From my knowledge of outsider/visionary/many a great artist, this theory holds true. Clyde and Vollis are both living testaments to this theory: Clyde suffered a terrible fire accident, losing a finger, while Vollis fought in Saipan during WWII and was later severely injured by a cable that snapped and hit him in the chest. Without these traumatic events, these men would have probably never completed these lifelong accomplishments, nor would we have been so inspired by the capacity for creation and imagination.

Never before have I thought of trauma as such a positive thing; in fact, I’ve never wanted to be traumatized more. I suppose our Baltimore debacle might be as traumatic as I wish to get during this trip, and I’m afraid it has made me paranoid to leave my new laptop out of sight and mistrusting of the unknown. As for the benefits of getting our laptops stolen and window smashed in, I suppose we’ve learned our lesson to never leave our laptops in the car, but I’m still waiting to reap the benefits. Sure, almost anything after an extremely traumatic event can seem better that it would have before, but what I’m perplexed by is the necessity of disaster, the inevitable occurrences that make us feel like shit in order to evolve, accept, and be grateful. Can trauma be a good thing? Is it the only way to really have a clear picture of what you want and desire most? Indeed, what we have been trained to think is a bad thing can ultimately be the best thing that ever happened to us.  And without the struggles that Clyde and Vollis both had to overcome, there would be no “Critter Man”, no ingenious invention of the whirligig, and most importantly no Fish Train.

So without further ado, I can now appreciate the traumatic experiences in my life and look forward to the ones in the future, knowing that true trauma can sometimes be the best way to change for the better and begin to live like you could have only imagined.