Howard Finster started preaching at sixteen, and every artwork he created was part of a lifelong sermon. “I don’t consider bein’ an artist at all,” he said in a 1992 interview. “My art is visions from God.” Although his magnum opus was his Paradise Garden in Summerville, Georgia, northwest of Atlanta, which became a place of pilgrimage for folk art fans and believers alike to witness the spiritual art environment’s proliferating signs and assemblages, he made a dizzying number of works—over forty-six thousand. He formed religious figures from sand-cast concrete, crafted mosaics from bottle caps, painted scenes of heaven on plywood with mirrors and light bulbs providing a celestial glow, and shaped sculptures of trains from wire. The consistent element was his frenetic text, which always reads like fragments of a stream of consciousness, calling on the viewer to be redeemed and saved.
Born in rural Alabama in 1916, Finster frequently preached at Southern tent revivals before, in 1976, he had a vision to “paint sacred art.” The handiness he brought to his various odd jobs of bicycle repair, carpentry, bricklaying, and plumbing was applied to his eclectic art. With his charismatic magnetism, banjo, and blue suit, he even achieved celebrity status, designing album art for R.E.M. and the Talking Heads and appearing on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show.
Finster was a national figure by the time of his death in 2001; his obituary in The New York Times described him as “a Baptist preacher whose evangelical faith, outgoing personality and compulsive work habits made him one of the most prominent and prolific folk artists of the 20th century.” His Paradise Garden is still preserved, and although visitors are no longer greeted by Finster himself offering sermons and songs, they can encounter his messages in every corner of his creation, in which, as he once inscribed above the entrance, “I took the pieces you threw away / And put them together by night and day / Washed by rain and dried by sun / A million pieces all in one.”
Allison C. Meier, 2025
This artist’s work was reviewed as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
