The works depicted in Self-Made Worlds--some very well-known, others presented for the first time--challenge long-standing ideas about what art is and what it can be. From Le Palais Idéal, built in a small French village by the mailman Cheval, to the Hubcap Ranch by Litto Damonte of California, to Nek Chand's hundreds of human and animal sculptures made from waste and recycled materials and set in a massive landscaped rock garden in northwest India, Self-Made Worlds is an international tour of some of the most remarkable manifestations of the idiosyncratic, eccentric glory of the human imagination.
Ever since the first cave dweller decorated the walls with charcoal and ocher, people have sought to elaborate on their immediate surroundings in ways that balance the relationships between themselves and the world they live in. Scattered across the globe are remarkable individuals variously termed "outsiders," "obsessive visionaries," and "folk artists," for whom the everyday conventions of modern society do not apply. These unique individuals and the environments they create are celebrated in Self-Made Worlds.
Included is a comprehensive, illustrated appendix locating all sites known to the authors.
Included environments by: Ferdinand Cheval, Chief Rolling Mountain Thunder, St. EOM, Howard Finster, Abbé Fouré, Annie Hooper, Leonard Knight, Mickey McGowan, Mary Nohl, Simon Rodia, Nek Chand Saini, Vollis Simpson, Fred Smith, Robert Tatin, and many others.
Photographers whose work appears in Self-Made Worlds are: John Blumb, Lucinda Bunnen, Ron Byers, Ted Degener, John Geldersma, Lawrence Harris, Guy Mendes, Tom Rankin, Marcus Schubert, John Vachon, and Michelle Van Parys.
The META Museum is an unincorporated creative collaboration started by Mark Sloan, Roger Manley, and Michelle Van Parys in 1985. The META is a conceptual museum which neither occupies a building nor holds a permanent collection. Its purpose is to probe the ulterior questions of the museum world. Since its inception, the META Museum has produced exhibitions, publications, symposia, conferences, public actions, and media events internationally. The museum sponsors a biennial symposium (with no agenda) on the site of the former Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Museum correspondents live worldwide and contribute to various META projects, including this book.
Roger Manley is a photographer, folklorist, curator, and writer based in Durham, North Carolina. He has curated several exhibitions of visionary art, including: "The End is Near!" and "The Tree of Life," both for the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, as well as "Signs and Wonders: Outsider Art Inside North Carolina," for the North Carolina Museum of Art. He has collaborated with Tom Patterson on books about Georgia's visionary artists St. EOM and Howard Finster, and with Reynolds Price and Shelby Stephenson on collected stories.
Mark Sloan is a curator, writer, and photographer. He currently directs the Halsey Gallery at the College of Charleston School of the Arts in South Carolina. He has coauthored two books with Michelle Van Prys and Roger Manley: Hoaxes, Humbugs, and Spectacles and Dear Mr. Ripley: A Compendium of Curioddities from the Believe It or Not! Archive.
Jonathan Williams is a poet, essayist, photographer, and the publisher of the Jargon Society since its inception at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, forty-five years ago. Among the texts he has written for Aperture is his introduction to Clarence John Laughlin: The Personal Eye.
