Ronald Mann is a self-taught Vietnam veteran artist. His wife Ricki was an amateur painter, and after returning from the war with un-diganosed PTSD, Ron started to make paintings using her leftover materials. The fist slide, When Johnny Comes Home, shows physically and emotionally wounded soldiers returning from Vietnam – they beat their own drums […]
Ronald Mann is a self-taught Vietnam veteran artist. His wife Ricki was an amateur painter, and after returning from the war with un-diganosed PTSD, Ron started to make paintings using her leftover materials. The fist slide shows their only collaboration The Other Side. It was exhibited with the caption “Ricki trying to charge into the […]
Norbert Kox welded together and painted his “Demon Hunter” motorcycle while a member of the Waterloo (Iowa) Outlaws biker gang in the mid-1970’s. A few years earlier, one particularly bad hallucinogenic ‘trip’ caused a series of flashbacks, as well as a persistent feeling that God was directing him to quit the gang and live like […]
“A child can paint better than that,” Ronald Mann’s ex-wife would say. “I do agree with you, but I’m just going to paint anyway. It [makes] no difference to me whether it’s childish or not.” Outside a tavern near Flint, Michigan about forty years earlier, he’d been caught-up in an altercation: “the judge told me, […]
Website for the Shrine of the Grotto of the Redemption
Health problems have prevented Tom Every – AKA Dr. Evermor – form working for many years, but his wife Lady Eleanor opens the well-maintained park five days a week. Dr. Evermor’s website
Often self-taught ‘artists’ don’t think of themselves as, or like to be called ‘artists’. They may not produce any ‘for sale’ art objects, their work may be too personal, or it may be intended to carry religious messages from God (for which they accept no personal credit). Many think of themselves as being too unskilled […]
Silvio Barile recalled hiding as a young boy from Allied bombing with his parents and siblings in the mountains around their south central Italian village of Ausonia. They “lost everything,” and in the mid-1950’s, came to America as WWII refugees. Hardly a prototypical ‘outsider’ artist, Barile went on to live the American Dream: he married, […]
His house was a short walk from the restaurant and he filled the approximately one acre wooded area between with concrete, stone, and found object sculptures, mostly from mythology and Italian history: art is a “guide for life,” and is “too important to sell.”
A retired grade school and part-time art teacher, Lindsey Alexander has turned sections of her home and backyard into modern-day “grottos” memorializing personal family histories. She uses blue Estée Lauder bottles from her mother’s personal collection, diary and hand-written letter transfers onto ceramic tile, shards of fine china, collected mementos, jewels, sequins, beads, eggshells, handmade […]
In 1988 Charles Wince purchased a 2 ½-story “fixer-upper” house in a then rundown Columbus neighborhood. In retrospect, it was lucky that there were no fine interior architectural details to preserve, and Wince’s distinctly personal transformation of his home (whose surroundings have evolved into a much more fashionable and expensive neighborhood) continues to the present […]
During my 2010 visit, MT Liggett made a ‘Sir Frederick’ totem. He must of realized by then that was never getting rid of me, so he planted my likeness near the corner of the gravel road to his studio and said he would think about me “for a millisecond” every time he drove by! He […]
As part of the Kohler Foundation’s 2021 restoration of MT Liggett’s art environment, his studio, which housed his mug collection, was demolished and replaced by a new visitors center.
MT Liggett returned to his hometown of Mullinville, Kansas and built numerous provocative sculptures and signs satirizing local and national politicians, the government, the mainstream media, hypocrites, and former wives
Jeff Elersic has covered his house and van with grievances about law enforcement, the justice system, and lawyers.
Jeff Elersic has covered his house and van with grievances about law enforcement, the justice system, and lawyers.
Ronald Mann was a self-taught Vietnam veteran artist. His wife was an amateur painter, and after returning from the war with un-diganosed PTSD, Ron started to make paintings using her leftover materials. He had no background or training in art, and remains uninterested in art history or the contemporary artworld. A form of self-therapy, every […]
Portraits of artists creators, and performers.
Art environments are typically made by by artists working outside the mainstream of contemporary art. Exposed to the weather and free for public viewing, the environments have little or no connection to the monetized art-object-based realm of galleries and museums. Often the ‘artists’ don’t think of themselves as, or like to be called ‘artists’, their […]