Wouterina de Raad, Environment Builder

Last week, a friend organized a small-group tour of the garden and art environment created by Wouterina de Raad, a Dutch-Indonesian-American artist in western Wisconsin (www.concretemosaicsculpture.com).

I wasn't entirely sure where the work would fall along the line between kitsch and folk art (a malleable boundary, I admit), but once there, I was impressed with the range of de Raad's work, and her commitment to both her place and her vision.

As with any environment builder, it's hard to show the entirety of the space with photographs, so I recommend a tour if you can arrange one (she does them June–September).


This figure welcomes visitors. The close-up at right shows the bottle caps used in his pants.


These clothes line figures serve more than just the obvious function -- each one provides nooks for nesting birds.


The figure at right is quite tall. It's located adjacent to one of the many out buildings on the site.


The most beautiful building is de Raad's studio, where she also teaches classes.


I particularly liked de Raad's bird works, especially this one of a man interacting with crows as if they were pets. Other crows popped up in unexpected places throughout the environment. Each one includes shiny metallic tiles as well as darker ones, which I appreciated for its insight into the nature of crows and their love of shiny objects.


Another wonderful bird sculpture.


This sentinel guards a wooded area along one side of de Raad's house.


This redhead graces a table near the back corner of the site.

It's challenging to think about how de Raad fits into the tradition of Wisconsin environment builders. Unlike most (or maybe all) of the environment builders, she's not completely self-taught (she studied fine art in college), and she seems well aware of art as a marketable item. She teaches others her methods (albeit in a very generous manner). And in some ways, her beautiful, handmade studio has more in common with Martha Stewart than Tom Every.

But who is to say that folk artists can't be aware that their work and their methods have value? That an art space has to be messy? That the art has to involve welding together large pieces of metal or carving wood? There may be an inherent gender bias in the definitions running around in my head, since mosaic has lately become a women's medium, just like textile arts, which also struggle for artistic recognition.

Or maybe it's just the fact that all of the other Wisconsin concrete/mosaic sculptors are dead, which lends them an air of legitimacy.

I think de Raad's work and her complete environment place her squarely within her state's folk art tradition. It was exciting to see a living artist in her prime, and in her place.

Randyland: Not to Be Missed in Pittsburgh

My final post about Pittsburgh is a big one: it’s all about Randyland.

Long-time readers already know I've got a thing for the outsider artists known as environment-builders. They don’t consider themselves artists, generally, but just feel compelled to modify their environment, usually their home or yard.

Randy Gilson fits that model. He’s just the second environment-builder I’ve met, and the only one who was still in his prime at the time. I thought I had shot a video of him explaining his reasons, but… oops, it failed to record more than a few seconds. So here’s another visitor’s interview with him that captures a bit of what he said when I was there:


You can get an idea of his bio here.

Before there was Randyland, there was the Old Allegheny Garden Society, which Randy started in 1982 by buying old whiskey barrels to plant with flowers along Taylor Avenue in the Mexican War Streets area of Pittsburgh. Over time, the Society grew to 800 gardens in a relatively small area of the city.

Randy bought his brick house on the corner at auction for $10,000 in 1995. The informational sheet at Randyland quotes Randy as saying, “I’ve always been a punk. I love it! I’m not an artist, I’m a dreamer. Randyland is an incubator—little eggs that I’ve got in my head that I keep opening up.” He has a day job (as a waiter) and supports the place through donations and his wages and tips.


And now my many, many photos. I'm splitting them into a few categories: overview, painted surfaces, found objects, and gardens/plants.

The overview:


When Randyland is open, it's open. There's no admission and the donation box and items for sale are not monitored closely. I'm not sure if Randy owns the house on the left or not.


His house, which is the original building, is the yellow one on the right.


In the interior space of the yard, there's a two-level courtyard with lots of seating.


And a port-a-potty.

As you might expect at the most painted house in America, it's hard to find a surface at Randyland that's not painted:


This stylized map of Pittsburgh is along the sidewalk side of the yellow house. A somewhat stern face looks on from the telephone pole.




The Welcome Wall at Randyland... I gather that all or most of these are painted by people who have visited from the various countries or cities noted.


The painted fence is a major feature, with many musical figures.










A close up of those drums: these words are Randy's philosophy of life.






Randy's front door.




Even the newspaper box and trash can outside the property have been painted.




There's a lot of paint, but Randy (or someone helping him) is also serious about the gardens and plants:




There's a joke on these steps: Hen and chicks are planted in these chickens.


Found objects are the core of most of the material and assemblages at Randyland (including the paint!), but a few deserved special attention:


Two pigs along the sidewalk...


...old metal lawn chairs climbing the fire escape stairway...


...and a hugging robot right at the entrance.

The house across the street has gotten in on the act, too:





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Past posts on environment builders:

Outsider artists in Sheboygan

Outsider art, 2012

Save the Wells Street Art Park

The Sculptures of Tom Every

Herman Rusch's Prairie Moon

Wouterina de Raad, environment builder

Dick and Jane's Spot, Ellensburg, Washington

The Enchanted Highway in North Dakota

Concrete Wisconsin

Outsider Artists in Sheboygan

Wow, Sheboygan is a great place to visit if you like outsider art.

Wisconsin is lousy with "environment builders" -- self-taught artists who spent decades making sculptures or modifying their houses and yards to reflect an intense personal vision. Over the years, I've visited:

• Nick Engelbert's Grandview in Hollandale (near Spring Green, home of Taliesin and House on the Rock)
• Herman Rusch's Prairie Moon Sculpture Garden (Cochrane, right on the Mississippi not far from Winona, Minnesota)
• Tom Every's Forevertron (near Baraboo)
• Mary Nohl's house in Fox Point, just north of Milwaukee (I couldn't get a good look at it, though, because it's not open to the public and you're not allowed to park anywhere nearby)
• Paul and Matilda Wegner's Glass Grotto in Cataract (halfway between Black River Falls and Sparta)

If you want to learn about all of them in one place, though, you've got to visit the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan. (Yes, that's Kohler as in Kohler sinks and fixtures, which is headquartered nearby.) I'm a little unclear on the details, but there is also a Kohler Foundation, which purchased many of these sites and works to preserve them, and coordinates its work in some way with the Center.

During this visit to the Center, I learned about two more environment builders. First is James Tellen, who lived in the Sheboygan area and created a Woodland Sculpture Garden of concrete in the mid-2oth century. Aside from a dreadfully high population of mosquitoes, the sculpture garden was a very restful and contemplative place.


Tellen cast the faces of his figures, building the bodies out around wire frameworks, and then attaching the heads.


The skunk really appealed to me.

The second new name I learned was Carl Peterson. He had lived and worked in St. James, Minnesota, up through the early 20th century. I think all of his pieces are at the Kohler Art Center, and fortunately for me, they are all outside where you are allowed to take photos of them (unlike most of the rest of the collection, which is indoors). Here are a few of Peterson's works.


Whimsical doesn't begin to cover it.


Peterson was born in Sweden, and Swedish architectural motifs reverberate in his work.


This is the greatest piece of them all, I thought (out of dozens and dozens of pieces). If you click on it, you'll the photo a bit larger.

And I have to add that the Kohler Art Center has placed all of Peterson's pieces in a beautiful perennial garden, which is contained by the walls of a former Carnegie Library building.

Over time, I plan to post more pictures from the sites I've visited. Guess that means it'll need its own category -- Environment Builders. Update: 9/3/08 -- I've decided to rename the category Art, because I keep thinking of posts that are about art, but not specifically about Environment Builders... So look for future Environment Builder posts in the Art category.

Finding Shangri-La

When I started this blog, one of the things I wanted to write about the most was outsider artists, sometimes called environment-builders. I've seen most of the examples in my usual neck of the woods, so when I visit other parts of the country I always check Roadside America to see what bit of oddness is on view. That reliable site came through once again when it told me about Shangri-La in Prospect Hill, North Carolina (though its rating was only three smiley-faced water towers out of five, which makes me wonder what gets five water towers).

Henry Warren was a tobacco farmer who retired in 1968 and began building miniature buildings out of concrete, bricks, decorative cinder blocks, and marble blasted from his own land. From the looks of it, he raided a couple of gravestones as well.

He called his village Shangri-La and worked on it for just about every waking moment until 1977, when he died at age 84 as he was finishing the village's hospital.

Shangri-La is a little hard to find, as it should be, but if you follow the directions on Roadside America and remember it's just down the side road from the volunteer fire department building, it's right where they say it should be.


I didn't get a very good overall shot. Most of the village is below the road and driveway level and the light was not in my favor that day.


Warren commonly used regular bricks, painted red, turning their open tops or bottoms into decorative details.


Another material he liked was diamond-centered cinder blocks, often painted as shown in this building.


The roof line on this building is excellent.


Here it is from the other side.


A church, I think.


Not sure what this is, maybe a Southern mansion?


This may be my favorite building. The stone is set tighter within the concrete than it is on the others; the steps and door frame are more finely detailed; and the inset metal railings are a bonus.


This is the front and other side of that building. It's hard to see in this shot, but the black metalwork porch on the right side is a square steel milk crate.

In general, the details on Warren's buildings are worth looking for:


I find this out-sized terra cotta pipe very amusing.


Half a wheel is better than no wheel. Not sure what the railing is made from.


Possibly a gravestone detail.


The little connecting roof between a larger building and an outbuilding.


That is definitely a gravestone piece. July? Julia? Who knows.


For scale, those door knobs are made for regular doors.


I thought I'd end with this bric-a-brac obelisk.

Other environment-builders I've written about in the past:

Randyland: Not to Be Missed in Pittsburgh

Outsider artists in Sheboygan

Outsider art, 2012

Save the Wells Street Art Park

The Sculptures of Tom Every

Herman Rusch's Prairie Moon

Wouterina de Raad, environment builder

Dick and Jane's Spot, Ellensburg, Washington

The Enchanted Highway in North Dakota

Concrete Wisconsin