AP News, October 20th, 2007
As a child, Ruth DeYoung Kohler loved taking family road trips across Wisconsin, her parents stopping wherever the mood struck.
"Sometimes, we would end up at a personal museum in somebody's home or looking at a community of scarecrows in a field, or seeing a wide variety of things — elaborate bathtub shrines, and things like that — and they always intrigued me," she said.
That inspired Kohler — for more than 30 years — to help preserve and collect nearly 10,000 pieces across the nation from 22 people who transformed their homes, yards and other spaces into works of art. The 16,000-square-foot exhibit called "Sublime Spaces & Visionary Worlds" runs through Jan. 6 at John Michael Kohler Arts Center, about 60 miles north of Milwaukee.
The center says the 2,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings and photographs are the world's largest display of artist-environment builder work. Five intact sites around Wisconsin are also part of the show.
Cleo Wilson, executive director of the Chicago-based Intuit, The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, said the exhibit showcases so-called outsider and self-taught artists' ability to create art with found objects and appeals to the average person.
"A lot of times you go to contemporary art museum and you don't know what's going on there," she said. "You go in into a room full of feathers or rocks on the floor and people walk out and scratch their heads and wonder, 'Is this art?' When you see the work of 'self-taughts,' you know it's art and you appreciate it."
The exhibit should give attention to artists who may never have received it, she said. That's what Kohler hopes.
Kohler said a piece never is removed from its original site unless the site can't be saved. The museum's first effort to preserve work was in 1976 when Fred Smith died. The retired lumberjack, farmer and bar owner in northern Wisconsin made more than 200 life-size and giant concrete sculptures embedded with glass shards.
For 15 years, he sculpted teams of horses, woodland animals, farmers and American Indians. He also created an Abraham Lincoln, Sacajawea and Paul Bunyan.
In 1983, the museum acquired its first pieces after Kohler visited the dilapidated, small Milwaukee house of Eugene Von Bruenchenhein. It was filled with books of his poetry, hundreds of photos of his wife, ceramic sculptures and painted towers, and chairs made out of chicken bones. He also painted on canvas and on the wall and ceiling.
Von Bruenchenhein got chicken bones and tubs from Kentucky Fried Chicken's garbage for his creations. He and his wife couldn't afford to eat there. Kohler visited Von Bruenchenhein's house two weeks after he died, and said it was the most moving experience she's had in the arts.
"Just to see the breadth of this man's vision that night and see the amount of work that he did," Kohler said.
Nineteen of the artists have died, but one of the three living is Dr. Charles Smith. He turned his Aurora, Ill., home into a museum dedicated to the history of Africans and blacks. Concrete sculptures and signs fill his house and yard. He also started another site in Hammond, La. He estimates he has made more than 2,500 pieces, creating around 10 a week.
The center has more than 200 of Smith's sculptures, with 22 on display: busts of inventor and agricultural innovator George Washington Carver, slain activist Malcolm X, an unknown slave, and sculptures of jazz great Louis Armstrong and singer Natalie Cole. Smith said the exhibit shares a piece of history.
"It's the most wonderful project ever presented to create a dialogue bridge for a cultural understanding — specifically regarding race," he said.
Emery Blagdon's 400 hanging creations with wire, tape, foil, wood and light bulbs fill much of one room. He felt it could channel the earth's electrical current to heal and would rearrange them according to his perceived flow of energy.
It was originally crammed into a shed in Nebraska in the rural sandhills of the Town of Stapleton, until his death in 1986.
Although he said his work was scientific, he called his creations his "pretties," said senior curator Leslie Umberger.
"The idea of discovery and newness and the thrill that really ignites the artist and the scientist in every walk of life kind of found a perfect unity in Emery," Umberger said.
Penny Dresden, 62, was inspired by the intricacies of Blagdon's work on a recent visit. Dresden paints murals of checkerboards, life-size spoonbills and palm trees on her bungalow in Lakeland, Fla.
"I'm going to have to go home and start collecting oddities and bits and see what I can do," she said. "So I'm thinking this has gotten me into an awful lot of trouble, probably for the rest of my life."
One of the visitors' favorites is the large glass- and ceramic-inlaid concrete figures by Nek Chan, known for his "Rock Garden of Chandigarh" in India. The 82-year-old has donated more than 100 pieces to the center — the biggest collection of his work outside of India. He donated extra or damaged pieces that the center refurbished.
There's also Loy Bowlin's "Beautiful Holy Jewel Home," which was originally in McComb, Miss. A replica of the house features most of the original walls covered in multicolored jewels and his sparkly paintings. Bowlin, who calls himself Rhinestone Cowboy, hung Christmas ornaments from the ceiling and bejeweled his television and dressers. His hand-crafted, colorful cowboy outfit and boots are also on display.
Kohler said she hopes some of the pieces will become part of the museum's first traveling show. She has talked with various national institutions about it.
"There's a kind of accessibility and yet there is such power to these works that I think it just captivates people," she said.
