Cook will give an artist talk Wednesday, Nov. 6,<\/strong> from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. in Winfisky Gallery, followed by artist reception from 1:30 to 3 p.m. in the school\u2019s Commuter Lounge. A second reception will be held on Friday, Nov. 8.<\/strong> from 6 to 7:30 pm. Gallery hours: Monday to Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission to all these events is free. The exhibition is organized by Salem State University Professor Ken Reker.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The artists featured in the photos are driven to use whatever means are available to turn their homes and yards into places full of passions and wonders: concrete sculpted into crowds of people, into dinosaurs, into angels; grottos sparkling with crystals and coral; miniature castles and cathedrals; a mosaic maze in Philadelphia; a park of giant robots in Cleveland; yards full of recycled materials transformed into monuments to civil rights in Birmingham; whirligigs as big as telephone poles spinning in the North Carolina breeze; a UFO Welcome Center in South Carolina with its marquee flying saucer cobbled together from plywood with pie plate windows. These are spaces you immerse yourself in, and rejigger your sense of the world and its possibilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n View an index of Greg Cook\u2019s photos of visionary and folk art sites: https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2023\/09\/05\/wonderlands\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n The exhibition includes:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Photos of landmark sites:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Howard Finster\u2019s Paradise Garden in Summerville, Georgia, which includes a a concrete wall decorated with relief sculptures, church and chapel, towers of bicycles and hubcaps, Finster\u2019s Cadillac, and mosaic walkways all built to help spread his Christian evangelical message. Finster gained wide notice for his folk art paintings featured on the covers of albums by Talking Heads and R.E.M., and an appearance on Johnny Carson\u2019s Tonight Show.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Eddie \u201cSt. EOM\u201d Owens Martin\u2019s mystic Pasaquan in Buena Vista, Georgia. Martin left the conservatism of his native rural Georgia and became an artist, hustler and fortune-teller in New York City for two decades, before returning to his recently deceased mother\u2019s house and farm, which he transformed over three decades with mandala murals, elaborately sculptured walls, and monumental heads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Vollis Simpson\u2019s restored and reconstituted Whirligig Park in Wilson, North Carolina. Simpson ran a machine repair and house-moving shop at his farm about 11 miles outside the town center, where he turned his mechanical abilities to constructing dozens of giant whirligigs, rising as high as five stories tall around his pond. A restoration project late in his life moved them into a town park.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Prophet Isaiah Robertson\u2019s Second Coming House in Niagara Falls, New York, which the carpenter from Jamaica turned into Christian shrine of dazzlingly kaleidoscopic symbols.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Jody Pendarvis\u2019s UFO Welcome Center in Bowman, South Carolina, about an hour\u2019s drive northwest of Charleston, was destroyed by a fire in May 2024. Pendarvais told Palmetto Scene \/ ETV in 2018 that seeing a UFO inspired him to construct a place \u201cwhere I can invite aliens from other planets to stop and talk for a minute or two.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Mexican artist Dionicio Rodriguez created the Crystal Shrine Grotto, a cave filled with Christian statuary, and gardens with concrete sculpted to resemble trees and wood, at the Memorial Park cemetery in Memphis, Tennessee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Tom \u201cDr. Evermore\u201d Every said his steampunk Forevertron in Sumpter, Wisconsin, was designed to launch himself “into the heavens on a magnetic lightning force beam” via its five-story tall towers constructed from old electric dynamos, lightning rods and other mechanical equipment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Father Paul Dobberstein, a Roman Catholic priest from Germany constructed his monumental Grotto of the Redemption at his parish in West Bend, Iowa, out of dazzling encrustations of petrified wood, malachite, azurite, agates, geodes, quartz, stalactites and stalagmites. The Grotto inspired numerous stone and mosaic artworks across the Midwest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Kenny Hill spent a decade filling a narrow bayou property in Chauvin, Louisiana, with a parade of more than 100 concrete sculptures of Jesus, numerous self-portraits, the faithful and sinners, and apocalyptic angels as a Christian \u201cstory of salvation,\u201d before the bricklayer abandoned the project and disappeared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Harvey Fite, a Bard College art professor, transformed a defunct bluestone quarry in Saugerties, New York, into Opus 40, a massive mysterious construction of stacked stone ramps and plazas inspired by ancient Maya architecture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Isaiah Zagar\u2019s Magic Gardens, a maze of mosaics, handmade tiles, bottles, bicycle wheels and folk art in Philadelphia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 <\/strong>Mary Nohl surrounded her fanciful lakeside cottage in the suburban Milwaukee community Fox Point, Wisconsin, with monumental concrete heads, fish, dogs, a 12-foot-tall dinosaur, ghostlike figures, and a fountain. Photos also provide rare views inside the house, which is being restored.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 <\/strong>Tyree Guyton\u2019s Heidelberg Project in Detroit transforms houses and fills grassy vacant lots with rambling street assemblages of old televisions, toys, piles of shopping carts, and old cars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Dmytro Szylak\u2019s Hamtramck Disneyland in Detroit is a folksy anti-Soviet backyard construction of windmills, helicopters, jets and whirligigs in the yellow and blue of his native Ukraine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 <\/strong>Fred Smith\u2019s Wisconsin Concrete Park in Phillips, Wisconsin, features a landmark parade of 237 concrete people, beer wagons, moose and deer that he sculpted to advertise his Rock Garden Tavern next to his home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Portraits of major artists:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Joe Minter at his African Village in America, which comprises several yards around his home on a deadend street in Birmingham, Alabama, that he\u2019s filled with assemblage sculptures and doors painted with broadsides illuminating Black history and the ongoing struggle for civil rights. Recently featured in The New York Times: https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2024\/09\/27\/t-magazine\/yard-art-joe-minter-tyree-guyton.html?searchResultPosition=1<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Tim Willis, who is constructing a park for his giant robot dragons, dogs, centaurs and monster trucks on the lot where his childhood home stood in Cleveland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Olayami Dabls, creator of Dabls MBAD African Bead Museum in Detroit, which features painted buildings and sculptures of wood, mirrors and rocks across two city blocks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Dr. Charles Smith at his African-American Heritage Museum and Black Veterans Archive in Hammond, Louisiana, (and previously Aurora, Illinois), a shotgun house surrounded by concrete statues honoring Black heroes, athletes and celebrities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Clarke Bedford, an art conservator has transformed his home in Hayattsville, Maryland, in suburban Washington, D.C., into a metal wonderland called Vanadu Gardens surrounded by his art cars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 <\/strong>Mark Cline at his Dinosaur Kingdom II in Natural Bridge, Virginia, an attraction where the Civil War goes on with dinosaurs joining the Confederate side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Billy Tripp, creator of the towering Mindfield Cemetery, which resembles a transformer station, but which he has assembled a memorial to his family, in Brownsville, Tennessee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Clyde Wynia, an attorney who in his retirement began welding sculptures of dragons, dinosaurs, irreverent frogs, and flying pigs at his Jurustic Park in Marshfield, Wisconsin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Jim Bowsher, who died in June 2024, created the Temple of Tolerance, a winding garden maze and monumental rock mound behind his house Wapakoneta, Ohio.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 <\/strong>Ricky Boscarino, who has turned his home in Sandyston, New Jersey, into the whimsical Luna Parc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Artists and performers Dan Van Allen and Katherine Fahey, who have transformed their Baltimore rowhouse with sculptural shrines, themed rooms, and stairways papered with paint-by-number paintings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 DeWitt \u201cOld Dog\u201d Boyd, who has been building a fairy village of miniature castles, cathedrals and colosseums along a creek behind a Seventh Day Adventist Church in Calhoun, Georgia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n New England artists: <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Peter Valentine, who died in 2022, created his landmark mystical Moose and Grizzly Bear\u2019s Ville mural fence and home in Cambridge\u2019s Central Square.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Nicholas Shaplyko and Ekaterina Sorokina\u2019s Museum of Modern Renaissance in Somerville, created by the couple who immigrated from Soviet Russia in the 1990s. They\u2019ve filed it with murals in an \u201cesoteric, mystic\u201d style with roots in Eastern Orthodox iconography and the boldly decorative folk painting of eastern Europe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Martha Friend has created her Emerald City and Sapphire City of glass sculptures and Friend Smithsonian Museum in and around her Somervile home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Philip Ligone\u2019s brick rowhouse decorated with concrete poodles, angels, and eagles in Boston\u2019s South End.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Richard M. Richardson\u2019s Three Sisters Sanctuary, an elaborate garden inhabited by fairy mannequin sculptures in Goshen, Massachusetts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Peter Schumann and his Bread and Puppet Theater have filled their Bread and Puppet Museum at their home base in Glover, Vermont, with dioramas of giant puppet gods, horses, garbagemen and demons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 John Greco created Holy Land USA in Waterbury, Connecticut, as a walk-through \u2018pictorial story of the life of Christ,\u2019 but since the park closed in 1984, its trails, shrines and miniature Jerusalem and Bethlehem have fallen into ruins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Bernard \u201cBlackie\u201d Langlais abandoned a promising career as an abstract artist in New York City and instead returned to his native Maine and filled the fields around his house in Cushing with giant wooden elephants, bears, Richard Nixon (in a swamp) and other folksy sculptures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Stephen Huneck\u2019s Dog Chapel, a small church in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, was inspired by his folksy dog paintings and has become a magnet for those grieving their pets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Jeff Wells, who has used welding skills he learned constructing submarines to build his Dinosaur Haven in the wooded hills outside his house in Uncasville, Connecticut.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Roger Babson hired unemployed quarry workers during the Great Depression to carve edifying sayings into boulders sprinkled though the Dogtowns woods in Gloucester, Massachusetts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Elis Stenman\u2019s Paper House in Rockport Massachusetts, his summer house and the furnishings within all constructed from newspapers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Ponyhenge, a mysterious circle of rocking horses in a field in Lincoln, Massachusetts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Jim Metcalf\u2019s Martini Junction, a whimsical guerrilla model railroad in Needham Town Forest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 Ruth Faris has filled the yard around her Somerville house with assemblages of toys, bird cages, and clocks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n GREG COOK BIOGRAPHY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Greg Cook is an artist, journalist and events impresario residing in Malden. He is the founder of the Wonderland blog, and previously was an arts editor, reporter and photographer at Boston public radio station WBUR, where he co-founded The Artery, and a critic for The Boston Globe, The Boston Phoenix and The Providence Phoenix. His reporting has also appeared in Juxtapoz, Art & Antiques, The Poetry Foundation, the Comics Journal, and (upcoming) Raw Vision. His previous blog, The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research, was named one of \u201cThe best of the (local) web\u201d by The Boston Globe and earned a $30,000 Arts Writers prize from The Andy Warhol Foundation and Creative Capitol. He\u2019s particularly known for his support of New England artists and for his photography documenting community festivals, parades, rituals and activism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cook created the Mermaid Promenade for the River Festival from Cambridge Arts, where he works as Director of Marketing & P.R. He\u2019s organized festivals and parades from Providence to Gloucester, including, with the Somerville Arts Council, the How To Fix The World Festival, which was supported by a $15,000 Live Arts Boston (LAB) Grant from The Boston Foundation, and the Pity Party, a sad street festival which became an international viral sensation, with the New York Post proclaiming \u201cMiserable Massholes Throw Themselves A Pity Party\u201d and Star Trek star George Takei joking about it on Twitter. Another time, Cook organized dozens of artists to stage a guerrilla exhibition in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts\u2019 bathrooms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cook has authored and illustrated two graphic novels, the first of which, \u201cCatch As Catch Can,\u201d won him an Ignatz Award, a national prize for cartooning. His comics have appeared in Publishers Weekly, The Believer, Nickelodeon Magazine and numerous other publications. He has painted temporary murals in Salem and Malden. His art has been exhibited across the United States and in Canada.<\/p>\n\n\n\n During Covid, Cook taught himself how to make nature documentary videos, a couple of which have been featured by the Boston Children\u2019s Museum. His video about pig racing has been viewed 23,784 times. In the summer of 2024, he completed an unexpectedly arduous, terrible, and thorny 3-year kayak of the Saugus River from end to end, which he\u2019s planning to tell people all about in an upcoming documentary video.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If this is the kind of coverage of arts, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, occasional newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting. (All content \u00a9Greg Cook 2024 or the respective creato<\/em>rs.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For a decade, Greg Cook has been making pilgrimages to visionary art sites, folk art environments, and \u201cyard shows\u201d from Maine to Georgia to Louisiana to Minnesota\u2014to photograph these places where people have made manifest their visions of a more wondrous world. \u201cGreg Cook: Visionary & Folk Art Sites Across the United States\u201d\u2014on view at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25529,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100,1008,582],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25527"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25527"}],"version-history":[{"count":40,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25527\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25641,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25527\/revisions\/25641"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\u201cGreg](\"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/picGreg-Cook_Salem-State241010_7832w.jpg\")
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