INTRODUCTION:

This exhibition of 54 photographs, taken over the past twelve years, honors 25 American visionaries and their often idiosyncratic, highly personal worlds.

Trying to fit these individual artists into a convenient pigeonhole tends to be a fool’s errand. Cultural historians tend to define them as folk, outsider, naive, or eccentric. The term “visionary,'' however, comes closest to conveying their ethos.

While there is no overarching term to adequately describe the collective characteristics of these visionaries, as a group they share at least three traits.

• Each of them has resisted the formidable pressures of mainstream American culture to pursue their own path and craft their own personal worlds of wonder.

• Not satisfied with visions alone, through force of will they have managed to transform their remarkable ideas into something tangible and substantial, usually with found and scavenged materials.

• They are largely self-taught, with little or no formal training.

The conceptual and stylistic scope of their work is as vast as the variety of materials and techniques they employ. Many have built impressive physical structures – including castles, museums, places of worship, miniature amusement parks, or extraordinary homes. Two – Ed Galloway’s Totem Park and Frank VanZant’s Thunder Mountain – commemorate the struggles of indigenous Americans.

Another – Joe Minter’s African Village in America – memorializes the trials endured by African Americans. Billy Tripp’s immense Mindfield has a more personal focus – honoring his beloved parents.

M.T. Liggett’s work offers blistering political commentary. Juanita Leonard and Jimmy Morrow are devoted messengers who deliver the gospel of Jesus through their art and their Sunday services. Butch Anthony and Jim Phillips display spectacular collections of exotic artifacts in their own museums. Hand-crafted masterpieces by Ernie Adams, Clarke Bedford, Harrod Blank, Churchill Winston Hill, Kurt Hughes, Tud Krohn, and Tim Willis comprise yet another category – vehicle-based art.

These visionaries inhabit every corner of the country. They come from all walks of life– mechanics, electronic engineers, art museum conservators, teachers, veterans, preachers, farm laborers, welders, deputy sheriffs, and a hobo turned cowboy. They do not operate in a vacuum. While they are surrounded by American consumer culture – dominated as it is by conformity, homogeneity and standardization – each of them has gone against the grain of larger societal forces to shape lyrical one-of-a-kind worlds of their own..

Through their persistence of vision, these often marginalized souls have each built hand-crafted kingdoms  – places and objects rich in meaning and full of unintended beauty. Their works reflect their personal visions and express a broad array of social, political, and spiritual themes and messages. In the words of author James Baldwin, pursuing their own paths on the margins of American society, they “...make the kingdom new [and] make it honorable and worthy of life.”

May these strangers in our strange land persist and live on.

–Steve Plattner, Cincinnati, Ohio