built environment

Arguably, the most renowned of all Wisconsin outsider art built environments is Fred Smith’s Concrete Park. I first learned about this site when I was in grad school at Cranbrook Academy of Art where I studied under the early champion of outsider art, Michael Hall. When I saw the images of the Concrete park I knew right away I need to make a pilgrimage and so Wisconsin went on my bucket list. And there it stayed for about 15 years until I was lucky enough to be granted a sabbatical with travel funds by my employer, Concord Academy. Armed with the invaluable resource of Lisa Stone and Jim Zani’s book, “Sacred Spaces and Other Places” I mapped out a route that criss-crossed Wisconsin. I was determined to visit every outsider art environment in the state. I assumed that October would be a lovely time to visit Wisconsin. After all, that’s the best time to visit New England and Wisconsin is at about the same latitude, right? Well, it turned out to be a miserable time, at least that year, weather-wise, to visit Wisconsin. It was cold, dark, and drizzly just about every day. It was so dark I had to stop at a drugstore to restock my film supply (yup–this was a pre-digital trip. You will excuse the images that you’ll see in this post which are scanned from slides and so not as sharp as the originals) to buy low light ektachrome. Nothing could dampen my spirits, though, as I drove up to Phillips in the north woods of the state to finally get to see the Concrete Park in person.

Fred Smith, born in 1886 of German immigrant parents began his working life as a teen lumberjack. Later,to supplement his lumberjack income, Smith grew ginseng (surprising thing for the early 1900’s, no?) and Christmas trees for sale. He also built and operated a popular roadside watering hole, The Rock Garden Tavern. The Tavern provided the first real outlet for Smith’s creative impulses. Providing the nightly entertainment at the tavern, Smith fiddled on his homemade fiddle, sang, and danced with sleigh bells strapped onto his legs.

In 1949, at the age of 62 Smith quit lumberjacking, ostensibly due to arthritis. Arthritis or not, he threw himself into the making of his Wisconsin Concrete Park (his title). Though disdainful of the modern era of car travel (too much rushing around, thought Smith) , Smith realized the benefit of siting his roadside attraction alongside the highway. Smith clearly loved the attention that his ambitious creation brought to him.

Portrait of Fred Smith. Photo credit: Robert Amft. (Amft was an early admirer of Fred Smith’s work. He visited Smith often in the 1950’s and 60’s and photographed the artist and the site extensively. He even introduced Smith to the work of other self-taught artists.)

Smith worked obsessively on his sculptures, ultimately jeopardizing his marriage and sacrificing his family life. He filled his 120 acre property with an astonishing number of figures–over 200 pieces, which he embellished with colored bottles embedded into the wet concrete. Smith liked using the bottles both for their reflective quality and like the other recycled material he incorporated, the fact that he “could get them for nothing”.

When Fred Smith first started his work on the Concrete park, he thought of his sculptures as commemorative pieces. He set to work sculpting historical and mythical figures he admired including Sacajawea (just one of several Native American figures he sculpted), the Chinese statesman, Sun Yat-sen (a little random, eh?) , Abraham Lincoln, Kit Carson, and a Paul Bunyan who bears a great resemblance to Teddy Roosevelt.

Besides these commemorative works Smith paid homage to his fellow lumberjacks, farmers, and plain old common folk.

For good measure Fred Smith scattered several deer and moose, native to the Wisconsin north woods, throughout the property.

Sadly, after Fred Smith finished sculpting the last of his Clydesdale horses for his ambitious Budweiser beer tableau he suffered a stroke which ended his creative output.

Fred Smith described his Concrete Park, “a gift for all American people everywhere. They need something like this. ” Couldn’t agree more!

Just a few years after the Wegner couple (last post) began their mosaic-ed home environment, Nick Englebert began to transform his farmhouse and property in Hollandale, Wisconsin into a roadside environment. Like the Wegners he had made the trip to visit the nearby Dickeyville Grotto and it clearly lit the fire in his belly. He went home, stirred up some concrete and began coating his clapboard house. Into this soupy surface he pushed bits of glass, shells and stones. The effect is surprisingly light and lacy.

For anyone else this would have been a life-long project, but not for Nick Engelbert, a man of many talents and boundless energy. Prior to teaching himself to sculpt, Engelbert had been a machinist, a sailor, and engineer, a prospector and like any good Wisconsinite of the day, a farmer and cheese-maker . His house transformation was just the beginning of an astoundingly ambitious environment including figurative sculptures which cavort about his extensive property which Engelbert proudly called “Grandview“.

Unlike the Wegners, Mr. Englebert did not adopt any of the religious bent of Father Wernerus’s Grotto. Instead, he paid homage to his European immigrant neighbors, which surely must have endeared his neighbors to him.

And for his own “portrait” he sculpted first an Austro-Hungarian eagle and then an American eagle.

Sprinkled about the environment are tell tale signs of Englebert’s love for his adopted homeland.

The oddly random subject matter of his sculptures and evident sense of humor made me wish that Nick Engelbert were still puttering about his yard when I made my visit. Sadly, Engelbert completed his last sculpture in 1950.

Born just five years after Nick Engelbert in 1885, Herman Rusch, too, was inspired by his visit to Father Wernerus’s Dickeyville grotto. (I assure you, if you make the trek to Dickeyville, on your plane flight home you will start formulating a plan for a yard art project of your own.) Besides the Dickeyville Grotto, Rusch had also visited and loved the roadside attraction in neighboring Iowa known as “Little Bit of Heaven” created by B.J. Palmer which is sadly no longer in existence. Both Palmer’s and Wernerus’s environments provided technical and aesthetic models for the do-it-yourself-er obsessive builder. Like most good Wisconsinites at the turn of the century, Herman Rusch had been a farmer, and though he worked diligently at that endeavor for 40 years, farming just did not satisfy his hungry soul. By the time he retired from farming in the 1950’s he was hankering for something new to sink his teeth into. He found the perfect project already waiting in the wings. His whole adult life, Rusch had been quietly and obsessively amassing a huge collection of Americana–tools, antiques, and oddities from the natural world. He was determined to create a museum of curios and found a dance hall near Cochrane, Wisconsin (I notice the village of Cochrane’s website does not make even one mention of Prairie Moon–hmmm) to transform into an exhibition space.

For three years he worked on his museum which he dubbed “Prairie Moon”. When the museum (the blue building above) was complete Rusch set to work building structures to grace the grounds of the museum which he hoped would tempt passersby to stop in. Today, all that remains of Prairie Moon are these outside attractions as the museum has long since closed. Most iconic and attractive of Rusch’s structures is the gracefully arcing, mosaic-ed fence that serves as a border to his property:

In all, Rusch made 45 sculptures to surround his museum, an odd assortment including a miniature Hindu temple:

an obelisk: and a dinosaur (why not?).

One cannot help but be charmed by Rusch’s sculpted self portrait onto which he wrote the following rather awkward inscription on the back: “Born in a log cabin in 1885…A lover and student of nature. Farms 40 years then sells farm to son. Always helping him in busy times and at the same time started this venture when 71 years old. And did all the work himself…A good way to kill old age boredom.”