Don't miss the Garden of Eden -- the one in Lucas, Kansas.
Concrete
sculptures of people, animals and trees, in a tableau that rises heavenward,
festoon an otherwise ordinary street corner. Here is the story of humanity,
beginning with Adam and Eve and concluding with the figure of a laboring
man hanging on a cross, crucified by the rich and powerful.
Garden creator Samuel Dinsmoor was a Kansas populist,
his work an editorial in concrete. He also built a cabin of limestone
on the site, with slabs of rock notched to fit together like logs. His
remains are interred in a concrete coffin outfitted with a glass lid
so the curious can take a look.
Till you get to Lucas, explore this Portland cement
paradise in pictures in a book by the University Press of Kansas, Backyard
Visionaries: Grassroots Art in the Midwest. Edited by Lawrence residents
Barbara Brackman and Cathy Dwigans, it also provides pictures and essays
related to the works and lives of other regional visionaries.
Though none was trained in art, the book defends them
as artists. Using materials at hand and often working in old age, they
created startling and intricate pieces that appear to have little artistic
precedent.
Dwigans, who works for the Self Graduate Fellowship
Program at the University of Kansas, says that many of the visionaries
led ordinary lives.
Dave Woods, of Humboldt, had worked at a brick factory.
In retirement, he found time to decorate his fence with Phillips' Milk
of Magnesia bottles, painted lightbulbs and other throwaways. In his
yard, he tipped a table so its top was perpendicular to the ground,
then drilled holes in it so he could insert multiple legs. "I take something
old and make something new," Woods would say, and then pause. "No, not
something new, something different."
Over in Kearney, Missouri, Claude Melton's workday didn't
end when he came home from his job as an electrical lineman. After he'd
hand-dug a basement under his house and filled it with creations, outbuildings
sprouted in the yard.
Essayist Jim McCrary writes of Melton, "Imagine a whole
house taken over by a train set, running through a land of religious
obsession and into the modern world. Imagine that all is brightly painted,
illuminated with Christmas lights, and populated with figures of people
and animals, with no attention to scale." The creative impulse ran in
Melton's family. His grandfather made a man's suit, vest and shoes from
cornhusks.
Meanwhile, out between Lucas and Wilson, Ed Root was
casting concrete forms and then, before the concrete dried, pushing
into them shards of glass and pottery, buttons and small plastic toys.
Emery Blagdon, in a shed outside North Platte, Nebraska, fashioned wire
sculptures and mobiles of tin cans, foil, TV antennae tubing, ribbon,
Christmas tree lights and packets of curative minerals.
He called his creations "healing machines" and asked
visitors to sense the power of their energy fields.
The Lawrence-based Kansas Grassroots Art Association
has done much to rescue and preserve this work, Dwigans says. The group's
motto, translated from Latin, reads, "Don't know much about art, but
we know what we like."
The same with the visionary artists.
Someone writes of Blagdon, "I admired his lack of self-consciousness
in the face of being a peculiar fellow and was inspired by the example
that someone (anyone!) could do whatever he felt was right without the
fear of wasting his life."
Beyond the startling work itself, that is the legacy
of these artists.
