The Road to Paradise (and Elsewhere)

Across Alabama and Georgia, in search of Southern Folk Art's prophets and dreamers

by

Further Afield

Listening closely to the road, watching carefully at the sky, there is a shift in the light once you hit the Alabama state line coming from Mississippi. It’s like walking into a church with red-covered pews and that soft yellow of filtered light on a Sunday morning. The red clay rises to meet you, and the stories come surging. 

A thousand-foot meteorite struck Alabama 85 million years ago, leaving a crater in the ground that is almost five miles wide—shaking up the aquifer, making all the water run extra bright with imagination. Later, the stars fell on Alabama in 1833, a celestial event that came to be known as “the night of raining fire,” showering stories across the state, from the very top to the very bottom. 

We are headed out looking for stories, like always, according every good Southerner’s compulsion. It’s hard to pick a definite route in Alabama; we could go hear about the man who made pottery with his mule, or drive to the saloon that is built in the crack in the mountain, where they used to keep pigs in the winter. We could go to Dismal Canyon—and that’s a jumping off point for any good Southern gothic story, but in the fall they have glow worms, too. We could go to the crater, or head north to the grave of space monkey Miss Baker, drop off a banana or two. Then we could bring flowers to Hank and see the baby blue car he died in, the one his son would later drive to high school. I heard Little Richard is buried somewhere around here. But something about the two weeks of ice and cold that kept us inside staring outside at the same white frozen snow and blue promise-less sky suggests we should refill our winter souls with color. Folks usually can do that. Art always does that. So, folk-art seems like a good direction to point our wheels.

The folks, as it turns out, come from wildly different religious backgrounds, but the compulsion to make a heaven of their own is a driving force. Heading east from the Mississippi state line, the Alabama sign asks us to “Keep Alabama The Beautiful,” which is a pretty good way to point out Alabama just thinks about things different. On the interstate we can hear the distant ghost howls that emanate from the Coon Dog Cemetery in Cherokee, chasing us on. 

Our first stop is the Ave Maria Grotto in Cullman, Alabama. We drop off the interstate onto a two-lane country highway through small towns and past a million pine trees. Located on the quiet grounds of St. Bernard Abbey, Alabama’s only Benedictine monastery, the grotto is made up of more than one hundred little structures created by Brother Joseph Zoetl over the course of forty-six years. A “creative genius,” Brother Zoetl arrived at the monastery in 1892, one year after it opened, and lived out most of his life without ever setting foot outside of it. 

Stepping into the Grotto Gift Shop—the site’s entrance and exit, I notice a friendly reminder that the artist is buried just one hundred yards north. The shop offers a selection of breads, cookies, and jams made by monks, in addition to rosaries, books, holy water, statues, medals, and cards. This would be an opportune time for the road-tripper to pick up a Saint Christopher medal; he's the patron saint of travelers. 

It is sort of a beautiful idea that he was shoveling coal while imagineering a Temple of the Fairies made out of cold cream jars, complete with a miniature pipe organ. From his mind, bound with his body to Cullman, Alabama, Zoetl traveled the world. He didn’t forget The Alamo and even made a small grotto that honors all guardian angels.

Just outside, the grotto itself is made of Alabama marble and cement; it appears as a yawning cave full of stalactites, with Mary at the peak. There is a statue of Brother Zoetl standing across from it all, his hands tucked under his apron and a look of tired but satisfied approval of his life’s work. His tools sit at his feet, well cared for, next to the miniature church of his homeland. As we walk toward the grotto from the gift shop, I can’t help but exclaim, “wow,” at how the structures, miniature works of art and architecture, go on and on. The work is much like an Our Father or Hail Mary, determined, thoughtful, orderly, prayerful. 

In true folk-art fashion, to build the grotto, Brother Zoetl used whatever he could find: broken plates, marbles, seashells, costume jewelry. He made many replicas of buildings on the “outside,” based on photographs or printed descriptions. Wandering through, we become giants on a mythical landscape, peering into replica churches, shrines, abbeys, and biblical towns. The duties of a monk at St. Bernard include working to keep the abbey functioning, and often Brother Zoetl could be found in the power house, shoveling coal. 

[Read this: "Folk Art Quilts—Judith Braggs creates fabric art based on memories of her plantation childhood"] 

It is sort of a beautiful idea that he was shoveling coal while imagineering a Temple of the Fairies made out of cold cream jars, complete with a miniature pipe organ. From his mind, bound with his body to Cullman, Alabama, Zoetl traveled the world. He didn’t forget The Alamo and even made a small grotto that honors all guardian angels. Walking among his handiwork, carefully preserved since his death in 1961, it is easy to picture him as a guardian angel of sorts, too. A whisper over your shoulder: “Did you notice this?” “Did you see that?” “Can you believe it was made out of….?” “Do you see the glow behind her?” 

We leave the grotto feeling a little lighter. A stepping stone reminds us as we depart, “Angels are never too distant to hear us.”

The next stop is Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden in Summerville, Georgia. We tune up Man of Many Voices, and Finster fills the car with bird calls and banjo music, old gospel songs and hunting stories. Alabama’s creativity was born in him, there in Valley Head, back in 1916. Finster was a retired Baptist preacher and handyman when he began making art at the age of fifty-nine. He quit preaching after he started going around asking his congregation what the sermon had been about after service that day. No one could ever really remember.  

Paradise Gardens was the result of a vision he received:

 “...one day I was workin' on a patch job on a bicycle, and I was rubbin' some white paint on that patch with this finger here, and I looked at the round tip o' my finger, and there was a human face on it... then a warm feelin' come over my body, and a voice spoke to me and said, ‘Paint sacred art.’”

Finster declared that God asked him to spread the gospel by making five thousand paintings. The Good News includes depictions of Elvis, George Washington, UFOs, Hank Williams, and Ronald Reagan. He quickly passed the five thousand threshold and before he died at age eighty-four had finished more than 45,000 artworks. Some say he lived off of Coca-Cola, instant coffee, and peanut butter. He worked in the garden during the day and painted at night. As an ex-preacher, he had a talent for showmanship. Later, after he had made album covers for The Talking Heads and R.E.M., it wasn’t unusual to see collectors taking pictures with their art piece and Finster as proof of provenance, but it was even less unusual for the story of meeting Finster to outshine the artwork itself. 

When you arrive at Paradise, it’s down a tiny road lined with houses that remind one of the Mississippi Delta. Summerville is a small town that seems to grow a little more every visit—each house with its own sort of droopy character. Some folks have cats, some folks have tiny little chickens, some have fig trees and giant sailboats looming in their backyards. It’s normal to see a groundhog or a deer, and ironically, Paradise backs up to a prison, but you’d never know it except for the signs that delineate the properties. 

You quickly find yourself in another realm, the World’s Folk Art Church, shining through the trees. The welcoming committee often includes two orange cats, Calvin and Hobbes. 

The ghosts and angels across Paradise are evident everywhere, faces painted and faded all over a Cadillac, on the walls, on the ground. Finster’s primary message is clear: love each other. 

It’s hard for me to write about Paradise without trying to tell you everything. The entrance is where Howard Finster used to work, and that is the gateway into one man’s life of invention, where he “took the pieces you threw away and put them together by night and day, washed by rain, dried by sun, a million pieces all in one.” 

The garden is a sprawling space, fenced perhaps not so much to keep people out, but to keep Paradise in. Each year it grows a little brighter and a little more organized; in the spring, flowers bloom around sparkling mirrors, glass, and tools set in the cement walkways. There is a smaller church with pews facing an empty white casket and one of Finster’s painted angels smiling above it. Everywhere you look, painted signs tell us something about his heart or his beliefs, still imparting wisdom and religion from beyond the grave. There is a walkway that brings you above the gardens; on the inside, it is plastered with artwork given to Finster, and articles and stories written about him. The Gardens are perhaps a reflection of what it was like inside his mind: constant motion, constant creation, rambling around the property. The furthest corner of the land asks you to slow way down, to notice the faces in the cement, the tools in the ground, the buildings made of mirrors. 

[Read this: "Six Offbeat Museums—Small collections to delight a hardcore culture vulture"] 

We stay at the Airbnb hosted by Paradise Garden, which allowed us to explore the property after hours, all to ourselves. The ghosts and angels across Paradise are evident everywhere, faces painted and faded all over a Cadillac, on the walls, on the ground. Finster’s primary message is clear: love each other. 

I fall asleep, as cozy as a squirrel in its nest, then wake in the middle of the night to what at first sounds like Finster’s banjo, before I realize it’s rain on the roof. We eventually arise into a misty golden morning, roosters crowing across the neighborhood, before the starlings wake up and rain song on us, too.

We then head south to Pasaquan, near Buena Vista, Georgia. It’s a long and winding road there, quiet, and you have to really want to go to Pasaquan to get there. (I thought I’d seen the middle of nowhere before, but this took the cake.) From one strange place to another; Pasaquan is the dream and creation of Eddie Owens Martin. He was one of many children in a sharecropping family, and his life reads a little bit like a Southern Gothic novel. His father abused him and so he fled at fourteen to New York City, where he became a fortune teller—describing himself as a poor man’s psychiatrist. 

He claimed that, in a fever-induced vision, a spirit ordered him to create the Pasaquoyan religion, naming him Saint EOM. Pasaquan supposedly means “the past coming together.” 

The existing photos of Saint EOM himself are remarkable; he is often in a bright tunic and a wide hat with tassels, grinning behind a large grey beard. They say he spoke still like a boy from Marion County, like sunshine and honey, a little sleepy still from dreaming. “Keep kindness in your heart and go on along, and keep in the rhythm, and keep in the song.” 

“The universe has great force, great character. It’s being destroyed because man don’t do his rituals no more.” —Saint EOM

When, in 1956, the spirit commanded him to return to Georgia, he headed back South, where he began to build the aesthetic and architectural articulation of his distinguished faith. “I built this place to have something to identify with,” he is known to have said. He did it with the proceeds of his fortune telling, painting his concrete structures to resemble people he knew. 

Entering the campus, you are greeted by two smiling faces painted and sculpted into the concrete, and from then on, way out in the pines, you are never alone; each turn brings another smile, larger than life. Saint EOM’s fantastical world combines ideas from Eastern Medicine, world religions, Indigenous art. These concepts come together into a sort of village, much like a temple, complete with totems and pagodas in technicolor. We walk around the property under a blue sky, and you can feel the love and creativity coming up out of the ground. The brightness is palpable and I wish I could’ve known the man who built it, had my fortune told, made friends. “The universe has great force, great character. It’s being destroyed because man don’t do his rituals no more.” 

Against such a clean and empty landscape, the brilliance and strangeness of Pasaquan’s buildings are all the more emphasized. There is no clutter, and even in Saint EOM’s old kitchen, it is bare and hard to detect the kind of life he might have lived among these dazzling colors and patterns that cover every inch of the buildings, inside and out. 

[Read about folk artist Rebecca Henry, here.] 

It’s been forty years since Saint EOM’s death, and his eight-acre visionary art environment has been stewarded by various passionate entities since—the latest being Columbus State University, the Pasaquan Preservation Society, and the Kohler Foundation, which restored Pasaquan into its current state: bright, resplendent and otherworldly. 

From Pasaquan we are due southwest to Seale, Alabama, home of folk artist Butch Anthony’s drive-thru Museum of Wonder. It’s open 24/7 365 days a year, and free. Anthony began his museum in a log cabin he had built on his parents’ rural property when he was a teenager. He filled it with his own constructions and projects while practicing a genre of artisanship he deemed “Intertwanglelism” (inter = to mix; twang = a distinctive way of speaking, thinking, behaving, assessing; and ism = a theory).  It’s a practice in combining folk art sensibilities: giant painted signs about “Bob Ross, the mind reading chicken,” quilts made out of animal bone. A true southern storyteller, Anthony marries the human realities of life and death, and mixes in wonder. 

The peek into Anthony’s mind reveals an artist that is always studying, imagining, creating, like a fire is beneath him and he can’t put it out. We walk through the bright red shipping containers, peering in at fossils and skulls, rings found in potatoes, strange natural phenomena with tags that read “what is this?” You are challenged to wonder. The museum is witty, clever, unserious, while still displaying natural wonders that were collected, made, and displayed with obvious care. 

When the museum became too chock-full, and too popular, he shifted his attentions to creating “The World’s First Drive-Thru Museum” out of shipping containers. It opened in 2014. 

Personally, I recommend parking the car to get the full experience, and to relegate more than one hour. There is just so much to see: this fantastical collection of arts, artifacts, and antiques. The peek into Anthony’s mind reveals an artist that is always studying, imagining, creating, like a fire is beneath him and he can’t put it out. We walk through the bright red shipping containers, peering in at fossils and skulls, rings found in potatoes, strange natural phenomena with tags that read “what is this?” You are challenged to wonder. The museum is witty, clever, unserious, while still displaying natural wonders that were collected, made, and displayed with obvious care. 

From Seale, we head towards home through Birmingham, towards Joe Minter’s African Village. This is the last stop on the folk-art road trip, and it really feels like a culmination of our studies. The signs appear before you turn on to Minter’s road, off the busy interstates that pulse through Birmingham. When we arrive, I am excited to see that the man himself is there, leaned up against his painted truck, the bed stuffed with painted signs and materials. 

“Hello Mr. Minter! Can we take photos?” 

“Of course.” 

We head out and are amazed by the size of the Village—this sprawling art environment filled with sculptures made out of bicycle parts, ironing boards, cement sculptures, basketball hoops, all transformed into giants, into snakes. What isn’t covered in text is a sculpture, but there is so much to see, it’s hard to take it all in.

The houses around Minter’s house are painted, and the signs and sculptures stretch across a huge backyard that backs up to an old, wide cemetery. If the gate is open, you can enter at your own risk. If the gate is closed, no worries—we got more than an eyeful walking the perimeter. 

“The whole idea handed down to me by God is to use that which has been discarded, just as we as a people have been discarded, made invisible. That what is invisible, thrown away, could be made into something, so it demonstrates that even what gets thrown away, with a spirit in it, can survive and grow. A spirit of all the people that has touched and felt that material has stayed in the material.” —Joe Minter 

Mailboxes, microwaves, tires, babydolls. Whatever Minter finds, whatever he is given, is painted. Again, the primary message in his world is love. Minter brings us a guestbook to sign and explains that everything we see he has made or built: the porch, the concrete. He ushers us to said porch for a panoramic view of his landscape and tells us how he plays a drum there sometimes for the hundreds of ancestors resting in the cemetery. Inside the artist’s books, we discover his mission. 

Minter’s work connects with his life experience growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, experiencing firsthand many of the Civil Rights Movement’s pivotal moments. “The whole idea handed down to me by God is to use that which has been discarded, just as we as a people have been discarded, made invisible. That what is invisible, thrown away, could be made into something, so it demonstrates that even what gets thrown away, with a spirit in it, can survive and grow. A spirit of all the people that has touched and felt that material has stayed in the material.” 

Minter has lost a son and a wife, and his tributes to his loved ones and the unknown myriad ancestors is ever present in his messaging. He takes visions, hopes, and hurts, and with them has made his own world. “Art is the one way man can have a common thread that would connect the hearts of all people," he writes. "Art is for universal understanding. There is no ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’ art, because art is one. All that we know, all that we have been, can be explained in art.”