150947612John Podhorsky18861963John Podhorsky envisioned fantastic buildings and machines in his meticulously annotated works on paper. Some are sketched in graphite, and others in vivid colored pencil, mixing freehand drawing with precise straight lines. He designed churches with bell towers, grand structures featuring rounded windows and gable roofs topped with weathervanes, and bridges that spanned rivers populated with waterfowl. Figures on horseback hunting with bows and arrows are depicted alongside animals and plants from around the globe, giving these scenes a surreal sense of place. His blueprint-like drawings, which are sometimes double-sided, are labeled with lavish descriptions, both direct, such as “red tiles roof,” and more impressionistic, such as “happy home old style here.” He signed these works “John Podhorsky, Expert Builder.” Like those of many long-term hospital patients, much of Podhorsky’s life remains obscure, though his story has increasingly emerged through research in census and other public records. He was born in 1886 in Bohemia, in the modern-day Czech Republic, and immigrated to the United States as part of a wave that brought hundreds of thousands of Czechs to the United States between 1850 and 1914. His mixing of w’s and v’s in his writing reflects that his first language was Slavic. He married in New York in 1927 and soon moved west to California, where he worked in many industries—as a cabinet maker in Long Beach, later as a contractor at a termite extermination company, and by 1940 at the Alberhill Coal and Clay Company, a sprawling industrial operation in Riverside County. This professional background helps explain his knowledge of and interest in architecture. Though the circumstances leading to his institutionalization around the late 1940s remain unknown, he made all his known works while he was a patient at a California psychiatric hospital in the 1950s and the early 1960s. He died a hospital inmate and was interred in a mass patient grave in 1963. His artwork gained public recognition through the attention of the psychologist and art professor Dr. Tarmo Pasto. Best known for his involvement with the artist Martín Ramírez, Pasto collected patient-produced art and studied its visual connections to mental illness. Allison C. Meier and Dylan Blau Edelstein, 2025 Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). JohnPodhorskyhttps://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/2795/fullThe few known works by John Podhorsky were revealed by Dr. Tarmo Pasto, a psychologist and professor of art at California State University in Sacramento, who is better known for his involvement with artist Martín Ramírez. Podhorsky apparently was a patient at DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn, where Pasto was active. Little information exists on the artist, but it has been stated that he may have been a carpenter in California during the 1950s. In his hermetic and condensed artworks, animals, bridges, houses, and machines seem to float in multilayered and multidimensional landscapes. Keywords and indecipherable sentences surround every subject, possibly standing as reminders for future projects to be realized, or as depictions from direct observation. Most of the motifs in this work are displayed in pairs, like the two fancily dressed women mounted on spotted horses hunting birds and beasts with their bows and arrows.Valérie Rousseau, “Houses and Two Hundred Animals,” exhibition label for Self-Taught Genius: Treasures from the American Folk Art Museum. Stacy C. Hollander and Valérie Rousseau, curators. New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2014.(1886–1963)John Podhorsky