EVENT
Finster Fest 2013
10 a.m.-5 p.m. June 8 and noon-5 p.m. June 9 at Dowdy Park, intersection of U.S. 27 and University Street, Summerville. More than 40 artists, many self-taught, will show and sell their work. Music includes the Kernel, the Bohannans and Soul Gravy. Free. Shuttles will run to Paradise Garden in Pennville for free tours. www.finsterfest.com.
Man of Vision Concert
5-11 p.m. June 8 outside the historic Summerville Train Depot on East Washington Street. Topping the bill: Norman and Nancy Blake with James Bryan, Col. Bruce Hampton, Ret., von Grey and Saint Francis. $10; VIP section including dinner, $25 advance; $35 door. www.finsterfest.com.
Paradise Garden
Open for self-guided tours 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays and 1-4 p.m. Sundays. Donations encouraged. Group tours available with advance reservation. 200 N. Lewis St., Pennville. 706-808-0800, www.paradisegardenfoundation.org.
PENNVILLE — Something unanticipated happened again and again last summer at a place that is all about delivering the unexpected, Howard Finster’s wild-and-woolly art environment Paradise Garden.
First-time visitors, especially school children, turned up at this Noah’s Ark of stuff celebrating the inventions of mankind and did not have a fix on who the late Georgia outsider artist was. Or what to make exactly of the 2.5-acre site considered to be the purest expression of his peculiar genius.
But starting next weekend, just in time for the annual Finster Fest art and music celebration that attracts thousands to this quiet corner of northwest Georgia, the curious should no longer be confused about this curious place.
A new structure has sprouted behind Finster's old studio-gallery at the attraction's entrance, a visitor center that will give guests a crash course in one of Georgia's true characters and the folk Eden he tended on a swath of swampy land for more than four decades.
It is a key aspect, but hardly the only one, of Paradise Garden’s unlikely resurrection.
In decline even before Finster’s death at age 84 in 2001, the property was purchased by Chattooga County from a nonprofit organization that had struggled to maintain and keep it open.
Then last June, Paradise Garden Foundation Inc., which signed a 50-year lease with the county to restore and manage the site, hit the art equivalent of a Powerball jackpot. The nonprofit group scored a $445,000 grant from ArtPlace America, a new public-private partnership that funds "creative placemaking" projects.
Finster could have accurately listed “creative placemaker” on his business card. A sign he hand-lettered that once greeted Paradise Garden visitors made his mission clear: “I took the pieces you threw away — put them togather (sic) night and day. Washed by rain, dried by sun, a million pieces all in one.”
Worried about what would become of his creation as he approached the end of his life, he sold off a number of its major site-specific sculptures and other environmental works (including that sign, now in the High Museum of Art), while other pieces subsequently went missing. Much of what remained at Paradise Garden was weather beaten and sinking incrementally into the ‘skeeter-loving swamp bisected by three streams.
A new site management plan from the Atlanta architectural firm Lord Aeck & Sargent recommended myriad overdue restoration projects and emphasized that visitor interpretation was needed.
“The biggest missing feature of the garden is Howard, not the art,” foundation executive director Jordan Poole said. “People who visited back in the day knew what to expect, that this man was there making art. Now, after all these years, it’s important to tell a new generation what transpired here.”
The exhibit intended for the visitor center’s sparkling white walls will not be complete in time for Finster Fest next weekend. Nor will the adjoining video room, which will feature footage of the garrulous artist regaling Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show” and a music video R.E.M. filmed here. Both date to the early 1980s when Finster was America’s favorite hellfire-and-brimstone preacher-turned-performance-artist.
The facility is targeted for an August grand opening.
A window wall at the visitor center’s entrance frames a view of the garden’s best known landmark, the wedding cake-shaped structure that Finster dubbed the World’s Folk Art Church. While the first phase of Paradise Garden restoration has included adding interior structural supports to keep its fanciful cupola from collapsing, the church, with its chipped-paint exterior and rotting wood, otherwise remains to be addressed later.
But out beyond it, transformations are readily apparent. With an invading army of invasive plants turned back and new shrubs and flowers planted, the garden seems to have again found the sweet spot between tended and wild. Stroll about and you get the recurring whiff of warming manure and fresh sawdust.
Improvements include:
- The sprawling Rolling Chair Ramp — which Finster built atop stilts in the center of the property to provide views of creations such as his towering bicycle-part sculpture and his Bottle House of mortared 64-ounce Coca-Cola containers — has been steadied with buried wooden cross-braces. Gutters have been added to channel rainwater away from the L-shaped structure's base.
- The mosaic sidewalks, in which Finster had cemented chunks of tile, mirror, glass, old tools, marbles and an array of tchotchkes, were excavated from under layers of silt and damaged areas carefully mended. Concrete sidewalks busted by tree roots have been repaired. In some places, new walkways have been poured, such as one now encircling the popular Bicycle Sculpture.
- Truss supports have been added under the tin roof of the bicycle repair shop where the handyman and self-proclaimed "Man of Visions" was famously commanded to "paint sacred art" by a face that appeared in a dab of paint on his fingertip in 1976.
- Almost as important as what has been repaired or added is what has been subtracted. Ten dumpsters — overflowing with carefully parsed stuff that Finster had found, or his faithful had brought to him, or that others stored after his death — have been hauled away.
"This year has been a lot of the 'Field of Dreams' approach," Poole said during a tour, as songbirds sang and carpenter bees buzzed. "We've got to get it ready so they will come. We hope next year they will come."
Jason Winters, Chattooga County’s sole commissioner who made restoring Paradise Garden a priority during his first term, is keeping the faith that more people will make the pilgrimage and that more grants can be secured to keep the improvements coming.
Winters, 33, grew up in the tiny Chattooga town of Lyerly and recalls telling his parents after a visit that he wanted their yard to look like Paradise Garden. (His folks' response: "No. No!") He hopes to make the attraction the linchpin of a cultural tourism push for Chattooga, one of the state's poorest counties.
“You need to be able to take advantage of what opportunities you have in your community,” Winters said, “and there are so many that would kill to have something of this international designation.”
Finster Fest, which features a crop of emerging self-taught and fine artists showing and selling their creations as well as a slate of rootsy music, is one of the county’s biggest annual events, drawing 3,000 last year.
Free shuttles will run between the festivities in Summerville’s Dowdy Park and Paradise Garden. A ticketed Man of Vision Concert will be held the evening of June 8 on a downtown side street, with Norman and Nancy Blake leading a varied lineup.
There, folks will find an open-air performance space that will feature information panels about the garden on its brick walls. The county and the Paradise Garden adapted this space, a once burnt-out hardware warehouse, to better link Finster’s creation to the county seat of Summerville.
To explore other opportunities, the Georgia Department of Economic Development is planning a Tourism Product Development resource team visit this spring.
Finster might have enjoyed the irony of that, suggested Dr. Jim Arient, a Chicago dentist. His family’s extensive folk collection was a major contributor to the the exhibit “Stranger in Paradise: The Works of Reverend Howard Finster,” which recently concluded a three-year U.S. tour.
Arient recalled discussing the garden’s future with the artist in the 1980s. “He was concerned about it, but there was no interest by politicos or tourism to do anything, as Howard was still considered rather eccentric back then,” said Arient, who is lending some of his collection of Finsters to an exhibit opening in Paris this fall. “Amazing how things change.”
Tom Patterson, who compiled the 1989 as-told-to autobiography “Howard Finster: Stranger From Another World, Man of Visions Now of This Earth” and more recently served as a consultant on the Paradise Garden site management plan, applauded its 11th-hour rescue. But he also expressed a reservation.
“Paradise Garden will never be what it was in its heyday, but … I’m relieved to finally see a proper professional effort being made to restore what remains and to establish standards for its continued maintenance,” Patterson said.
“Even in a diminished state, the garden stands as a remarkable example of what one inspired, creative individual can do.”
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