From: Shannon Stoney (shannonstoney@earthlink.net)
Date: 01/09/03-03:43:49 PM Z
Marco wrote:
> But Shannon should tell us about Houston's "Orange Show," a kind of small
> homemade theme park on the edge of that city -- the theme being "Oranges."
> I think that would qualify as Outsider art.
I'm ashamed to say I have not yet been to the Orange Show. Maybe Clay has?
But I found a little piece of Outsider Art not far from my old university.
It is a shotgun shack that has been decorated to the hilt with found
materials such as plastic dolls, christmas lights, toothbrushes, plastic
flowers, etc. It is amazing. You can't even see the original siding of the
house any more. The decorations go all the way out to the street and are
strung along a fence around the tiny yard. An old black man made it. He is
adding to it all the time; it's sort of a work in progress. He is known as
The Flower Man because he used to peddle flowers from a bicycle cart. I
think there is some effort afoot to preserve his house for posterity, like
the Orange show.
Houston for some reason is a pretty fertile ground for this sort of thing,
like New Orleans. Indeed a lot of the working class folk that came to
Houston to work in the thirties and forties came from Louisiana. We have
the ARt Car Parade, which is a sort of folk art exhibition, and there are
lots of houses decorated with beer cans and other forms of refuse. There
used to be a bottle tree in my neighborhood. Some of these ideas come from
Africa originally I think, like the bottle tree.
I heard a program on NPR once about the Museum of Visionary Art in
Baltimore. The reporter described a lot of the work and eventually
concluded, "It may seem that you have to be a resident of a mental
institution, or a rural Southerner, to make outsider art." I would say, you
don't have to be a crazy rural Southerner to make visionary outsider art,
but it helps.
One guy was brought to the museum to reconstruct one of his plywood
sculptures in the courtyard, and they wanted to pay him something, but he
kept insisting all he wanted was for them to take him to a Hooters
restaurant, which he had heard so much about.
--shannon
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