Wisconsin: Outsider Art Heaven

The James Tellen Woodland Sculpture Garden is located on a dead-end street at the southern end of Sheboygan, Wisconsin. A modest sign points the way to a shady parking lot behind a 65-foot-long split-log fence. On second look, though, there’s something funny about this fence: it’s made not of wood but of cement. A cement Native American chief in a full headdress is climbing over it, while cement bear cubs frolic close by. They seem so real, you have to shake your head to be sure.

Follow the winding path into the quiet pine woods, and you’ll encounter more figures that seem to have wandered in from the deeper forest. A cement Abraham Lincoln is splitting a cement log that might have been felled from the nearby trees. A cement man leans over from his horse to watch a cement woman working in her kitchen. Small spots of sunlight dapple Snow White’s dwarves playing harp and fiddle. A cement Jesus is lost in melancholy meditation.

This is one of America’s great art installations, and it’s free to anyone who can find it. And it’s just one of 10 remarkable outsider art sites in the state, most of them purchased and maintained by the Kohler Foundation, a non-profit launched by the heirs to the porcelain-bathroom-fixture empire. The artists may have lacked training and credentials, but empowered by an innate talent and passion, they created art well worth seeking out.

Many of them followed Tellen’s lead in exploring the aesthetic possibilities of Portland cement, the quick-drying compound that began to be mass-marketed in the U.S. after World War I. Many Wisconsinites, as elsewhere, were content to purchase gnomes, jockeys and Virgin Mary’s from garden and curio stores or to use molds to make the statues themselves.

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James Tellen Woodland Sculpture Garden

A few, though, weren’t willing to use someone else’s design. They each had a personal vision to pursue, and they discovered that wet cement can be easily sculpted and decorated with any material that might stick to it. Soon they were filling their properties with figures, fences and buildings.

Father Matthias Wernerus, for instance, used 6,000 bags of cement to surround the Holy Ghost Church in Dickeyville, Wisconsin, with shrines, niches and sculptures. Wernerus, the parish priest from 1918 to 1931, even built chain-link fences made from cement rather than metal. This eccentric example of religious art still exists as the Dickeyville Grotto.

Dickeyville Grotto

All of his creations are encrusted with coral, shells, starfish, petrified sea urchins, petrified wood, coal, quartz, iron ore, onyx, stone, glass, Native American relics and drive-shaft knobs. The iconography is Catholic and patriotic, but the sheer exuberance of materials and design overwhelm the message with a decidedly personal vision.

Up the road in southwestern Wisconsin, dairy farmer Nick Engelbert was inspired by Wernerus’s example and spent the ‘30s transforming his home and lawn in similar fashion. He covered his Hollandale home in cement and then stuck porcelain fragments, colored glass and river stones into the wet coating to turn his modest bungalow into a glittering palace.

Grandview

He surrounded his castle with a sausage-shaped elephant, a double-headed beer-glass eagle, a lion quinting in thought, a Viking standing in a dinghy, a concrete tree full of concrete monkeys, and a seashell-bra-ed Snow White encircled by dancing elves. He called it the Grandview Sculpture Garden, a proto-Disneyland without the grandiosity and commercial calculation.

Farther north are Herman Rusch’s Prairie Moon Sculpture Garden and Museum in Cochrane, the Wisconsin Concrete Park in Phillips, the Paul and Matilda Wegner Grotto in Cataract, and the Rudolph Grotto Gardens and Wonder Cave. Carl Peterson used rounded pebbles embedded in concrete to create scale-model castles and lighthouses. Originally built in St. James, Wisconsin, Peterson’s work is now housed in the garden of the Kohler Art Center, a second museum three miles from the Kohler Art Preserve, which is six miles from the Tellen Woodland Garden.

The Art Preserve, whose strikingly modern building opened in 2021, was created to house art works that are too fragile to be outdoors or whose original site no longer exists. It displays pieces not only from Wisconsin artists but also from such legendary figures as India’s Nek Chand, Louisiana’s Dr. Charles Smith and Georgia’s Eddie Owens Martin. It rivals Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum as one of the world’s greatest outsider art showcases.

Dr. Charles Smith at the Kohler Art Preserve

Out in front of the Art Preserve are two metallic ostriches by Dr. Evermor, a Wisconsin artist who worked in scrap metal. He used the adhesive qualities of welding in much the same way Wernerus used cement: to create juxtapositions that transform the meaning of the materials. Located an hour north of Madison in Sumpter, Wisconsin, Dr. Evermor’s Sculpture Garden is a sci-fi fantasy in three dimensions and rust.

The site got its start in the 1980s, when Tom Every, an industrial demolition expert, got tired of turning machines into scrap metal. Renaming himself Dr. Evermor, he decided to reverse the process and turn scrap metal into works of art. Using his welding torch and imagination, he filled a large meadow in rural Wisconsin with futuristic technology and creatures.

The centerpiece is the Forevertron, a machine that purports to transport people into outer space. 50 feet tall, 120 feet wide and weighing 300 tons, the contraption features four mammoth ceramic zappers aimed at an egg-shaped cage that might carry a lucky passenger beyond gravity. Supporting the thrusters are a steam engine, steampunk telescope, voltage generator and observation gazebo.

One of Dr. Evermor’s Ostriches

The rest of the park is devoted to more whimsical creations. Everywhere you look are giant ostriches made from dark-brown metal. Their bodies may be assembled from trumpets, wind chimes, pliers, circular saw blades or wind chimes, but they always look like birds craning their neck to stare back at you. Every died in 2020, but his widow and children keep the place going.

There’s a temptation when talking about outsider art to be patronizing, to emphasize the biography of the often-peculiar creators over their creations. This is unfair to the artists and to us, the viewers. Outsider art should be approached like any other subgenre of visual art—as something with its own vocabulary and history. Some of it is mediocre; some of it is brilliant; all of it deserves to be taken on its own terms. It’s not trying to wow us with polished technique but with the strength of a personal vision that allows us in—as should be true of all art.

Geoffrey Himes has written about music for the Washington Post, Smithsonian magazine, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, Jazz Times, Sing Out and many other publications since the late 1970s. He has won three ASCAP/Deems Taylor Awards for music writing. Born in the USA, his book on Bruce Springsteen, was published in 2005