N. J. Girardot

NORMAN GIRARDOT is University Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Religion Studies Department at Lehigh University, Bethlehem PA, USA. Trained in the comparative history of religions at the University of Chicago, he taught at Notre Dame University and Oberlin College before coming to Lehigh in 1980. In addition to his work on Chinese religion and Daoist studies, his current research and writing largely concerns “outsider” artistic and visionary tradition, especially as seen in the work of artists like Howard Finster, Mr. Imagination/Gregory Warmack, Myrtice West, Norbert Kox, Aloise Corbaz, Charlie Lucas, Lonnie Holley, and others. While at Lehigh University, he developed a number of exceedingly strange, yet curiously refreshing, courses and quasi-shamanistic performance-art events; and with help from his students and Mr. Imagination, he created the Lehigh Millennial Folk Arch and an art park colloquially known as the Outsider Enclave. From 2009 to 2013, he was a primary investigator for a Henry Luce Foundation grant that led to interdisciplinary student programs in China and the construction of an ancient Chinese woven timber bridge on the Lehigh campus and a traditional Chinese pavilion on Bethlehem’s south-side Greenway. In addition to numerous published articles and catalog essays, he has curated a number of exhibitions about outsider artists (Finster several times, Mr. Imagination, Lonnie Holley, King Orthy, Charlie Lucas, Norbert Kox, Hugo Sperger, Minni and Garland Adkins, Jessie and Ronald Cooper) and related topics (face jugs, popular African signage about Barack Obama). He also periodically participates in an art collaborative called EATART which has produced several installation and performance works. The EATART Collaborative is dedicated to Jean Dubuffet’s proposition that “the need for art is as basic as the need for bread, perhaps even more so. Without bread, one dies of hunger. But without art, one dies of boredom.” The EATART Collaborative is “amoeba-like in its ability to digestively absorb all who affirm the darkly processed and surreal aesthetics of spam and Twinkies.” His most recent book is an interpretive book-length study of the incredibly prolific Southern Baptist preacher, Christian shaman, cheetah trickster, quasi-Western Daoist, and visionary artist, Howard Finster (1916-2001). This work is entitled Envisioning Howard Finster: The Religion and Art of a Stranger from Another World. He is currently working on the life and work, the agony and the ecstasy, of Mr. Imagination. Finally, it has sometimes been noted that he has a seemingly perverse, if not an obscene, fondness for calabash gourds.