If the Shoe Fits Wear It
Photo from Field Aesthetic MFG. CO. Website
The Reverend Howard Finster is perhaps the most famous religious artist alive today. Because Finster realized that his congregation did not remember his sermons even minutes after he had finished, he published religious songs and poetry in local newspapers in the 1930s and hosted a radio prayer show in the late 1930s and early 1940s. He claims God charged him to illustrate his religious visions in 1976 when "A warm feeling came over me to paint sacred art."
Finster began building his everchanging environmental sculpture, Paradise Garden, on swampy land behind his house in the early 1960s. Composed of walkways and constructions made from cast-off pieces of technology, the Garden assembles individual monuments to human inventors into an all-encompassing "Memorial to God." Much of the building material in the garden was accumulated from Finster's television and bicycle repair businesses and his twenty-one other trades.
Lynda Roscoe Hartigan Made with Passion: The Hemphill Folk Art Collection in the National Museum of American Art (Washington, D.C. and London: National Museum of American Art with the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990)
"I'd rather put one sermon out in art than fifty out of my mouth. The main thing about my art is to have a message. Preaching does very little good. But I find by doing it in art, a man will see it, and the message will be printed on his brain cells." Howard Finster, "Man of Visions," Folklife Annual, 1985
*Bio from Smithsonian Website
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