Tuesday, May 12, 2009

George Kornegay

A number of years ago, the legendary Bill Arnett introduced me to the folk-art installation of the Reverend George Kornegay. Kevin Duffy now brings us up to date on this remarkable 95-year-old's story:

http://likethedew.com/2009/05/11/turning-lifes-debris-into-art/

The larger story of the perennially threatened folk-art environments of the South (and of the state of Wisconsin, and of a good many other places around the globe) remains neglected, or shunted off to the specialty pages of the vernacular-art journals such as Raw Vision. But the story needs to be told in a more general context. And it needs to be linked to the quite different story of the vernacular environments of art-school-educated creators (as well as the category of "folk artists with Ph.D's in non-art fields").

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This has been noted. And if I drag myself, my two children, and my dog down there, there'd better be more to see than a couple of cracked cement stepping stones.

dlc

littlejoke said...

I can't guarantee anything, for I have not seen it. I saw a good installation there all these years ago, and you have a not very informative photograph in the likethedew.com story to which this links.

You need to get Mr. Arnett himself to give you the Grand Tour. I have forgotten where the really good stuff was.