Ray's Ornamental Gardens

One of the most interesting and compelling areas of study in the field of American folk art is the folk environments that were once great attractions but, owing to time and the elements, are now considered defunct. Often these works exist only in the photographs that visitors had the foresight to take when they could still be taken. I recently purchased two old black and white photographs of a folk environment on eBay and as a result had a whole new wold open up to me.

The photos I purchased are the ones at the top and bottom of this post. The dealer who sold them knew only that the bottom one was from Stephenville, Texas. He did not know where the top one came from. At first glance, they looked similar to me. Something about the style of the concrete, glass, and ceramic pieces that made up the environment.

After some digging online, I found out that these photos were taken at the once-famous Ray's Ornamental Gardens in Stephenville sometime in the 1940s. George Ellis Ray was born in Tennessee in 1881 and married Melissa Gallaher there in 1900. She died in Stephenville in 1932 and that, I believe, is when George began his environment (the dealer mentioned something about the maker doing this project out of grief for his wife).

It was such a local attraction that several postcards were made at the time, two of which I illustrate here. One book on Stephenville even described the popularity and nature of the site, which was a real find:

"A unique and interesting Stephenville novelty was the inimitable Ray's Gardens, which brought people from near and far. There, guests could view the often bizarre and unusual folk art of George Ellis Ray (1881-1957). He made sculptures of concrete, tile, colored glass, shells, and petrified rock. While visiting, guests could read George's homespun, thought-provoking, philosophical aphorisms, listening all the while to gospel music played trough a loudspeaker system."

George died in 1957 and, as is often the case, the environment fell into disrepair. Supposedly nothing of it can be seen today. We can. however, enjoy George Ray's work through these images, and admire his ability and desire to express himself visually and share that vision broadly. That is, for me, the hallmark of great folk art.

Placido Tobasso, Utica's Forgotten Folk Artist

The brightly painted concrete figures must have startled passersby by the way they stood out against the drab industrial landscape. In the 1950s, the upstate New York city of Utica was thriving economically and teeming with immigrants. One of them, a retired bricklayer and mason from the Abruzzi region of central Italy created this improbable sculpture park sometime before his death in 1958. Not a trace of it remains today.

Very little is known about the artist. Placido Tobasso was born in Italy in 1904. It is not known when he immigrated to Utica, but he lived on Hubbell Street, two blocks from the factories on Broad Street in the eastern part of the city. Most of Tobasso’s working life was spent laying bricks and cutting stone, until poor health forced him into early retirement.

Tobasso’s health did not deter him from realizing what must have been a powerful desire to express himself creatively in the materials he knew best: plaster and brick. The American Hardwall Plaster Company, located on Broad Street, often gave out broken blocks and torn bags of plaster to worthy people, and Tobasso was among those able to receive building materials for free. Unlike those who needed and used these materials to build homes and churches, Tobasso used them to create a series of monumental figures on city property for all to see.

He chose a vacant lot on Broad Street at the foot of Mohawk Street. The latter is a major thoroughfare through East Utica, so the sculptures would have been visible for several blocks. Here Tobasso fashioned large statues of historical figures of his adopted homeland, including the American Indian chief Yahnundasis, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and a Civil War soldier. He represented his ancient Roman heritage with a statue of a wolf suckling Romulus and Remus and a figure of a fierce winged lion. Lastly, at one end of the assemblage, Tobasso included a large statue of Christ blessing the immigrant neighborhood he overlooked.

The sculptures were remarkably powerful in their rigidity and strong patterning. Characteristically, many people did not understand the artist or the value of his work, but Tobasso had a number of knowledgeable and influential proponents. The renowned sculptor Henry DiSpirito said in a 1958 interview, “He was a great artist. He worked where sculpture should be – in the open, under the sky.” Richard McLanathan, director of Utica’s celebrated art museum at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, also admired Tobasso’s work. When he hosted the great art collector Maxim Karolik (whose American art collection is the foundation for the holdings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) he insisted that they see the Tobasso sculptures. Karolik took one look at the figures and exclaimed, “What spirit!”

It’s a pity that the Utica city officials did not share this view. In the 1960s, at the height of the cultural destruction of Urban Renewal, Tobasso’s artwork was destroyed. Fortunately for posterity, these works had been captured (along with pictures of the artist at work) in a series of photographs in the 1950s by the Utica photographer Dante Tranquille. These images speak eloquently of Tabasso’s passionate and public realization of a personal devotion. Nestled among the massive and impersonal industrial complexes, Tobasso’s sculpture park stood for years as an improbable – and all-too-fragile – affirmation of the humanity that toiled within.

The Woman-Made Garden

One of my first posts was about those special places that represent a folk artists attempt to draw you into their world in a real, physical setting. Called Folk Environments, these places can provide an incredible experience as you inhabit a landscape of dreams and visions. Environmental folk art is a worldwide phenomenon, but you shouldn’t discount what may be in your own area. It is also largely a man-made art form, owing to the immense physical challenge of reshaping the land. But you should never assume that a woman-made environment can’t be as ambitious in design and execution as any man’s.

The best example of a female folk artist realizing her vision for an environment is Veronica Terrillion, an artist I had the pleasure of meeting in the early 1990s at her home in Indian River, New York. My first introduction to her work came from a lecture I attended by Varick Chittenden, the Executive Director of a group called Traditional Arts in Upstate New York (TAUNY). The slides he showed were striking, and it was particularly interesting to me that Mrs. Terrillion made artworks of singular, individual importance in addition to creating a large environment. I was, at the time, very interested in expanding our folk art collection at the Fenimore Art Museum to include more 20th-century artists, so Mrs. Terrillion was definitely on my list of people to meet if possible.

After making some inquiries, I found a great piece of Terrillion’s artwork in a gallery in Buffalo. There were several unusual and appealing elements to the piece. It was kind of a three-dimensional painting, a painted canvas with sculptural elements, which I had never encountered before. The work was also highly personal, as it depicted the artist’s father sledding logs in the Adirondack Mountains. I bought it for the collection.

There is no way to fully appreciate this piece, however, without meeting the artist in person. That summer I took the two-hour drive up to Indian River and met Veronica Terrillion. She was amazing. Almost 85 years old and still making art. In concrete. She was very gracious (most Adirondack people are) and showed me her “woman-made” house and garden. She built the cedar log house, by the way, and dug out a big pond (renting a backhoe) as a setting for her concrete sculptures.

And what a setting it was, three acres that included a menagerie of animals and religious figures and scenes from her life (that's her family below, including a poignant detail of her holding the baby she lost in infancy). Overseeing the whole landscape was, appropriately, St. Francis of Assisi, who looked very much at home in the north woods of New York State. Veronica had been a devout Catholic her whole life, as well as a lover of nature. The house was equally amazing, especially the painted “floor mats,” actually rectangular areas coated with concrete and painted in lively, abstracted patterns. One caught my eye; it was a representation of the annual spring runoff, complete with birds and flowers and blue for the water.

Veronica noticed my reaction. She immediately pulled out a painting on wood panel of the same scene, and gave it to me for the museum. Veronica died in 2003 at the age of 95, and her family still allows people to see the environment by appointment.

An American Dream in Sheet Metal and Paint

Humble pieces in the folk art collection often have a special meaning to me owing to their connection with an experience in the field. One day back in the early 1990s, I was at work on an upcoming exhibit at the Fenimore Art Museum when an invitation came across my desk. It was for an opening of an exhibit of local folk art at the Delaware County Historical Association in Delhi, New York, about an hour away. I always keep my eye open for these little local shows because you never know what you might find. One of the pieces featured in the invitation was a striking metal sculpture of a medieval castle.

I was on the road south to Delhi in about ten minutes. The invitation read that the artist was one Joseph Schoell, and the lady at the reception desk told me over the phone that she thought he lived in nearby Margaretville but didn’t have the address. So I thought, how big could Margaretville be? So I headed off to this little village in the Catskills after viewing the exhibition in Delhi.

You would think that, if you had an artist in your village who produced sheet metal sculptures and placed them on his front lawn, that you would be able to direct a stranger to the house. Not so. I drove around Margaretville for about an hour, looking at front lawns and stopping to ask people if they knew a Joseph Schoell or were aware of his lawn environment. No luck. The receptionist must have gotten it wrong, I figured.

Deflated, I reluctantly headed out of town. On a lark, I tried a shortcut over the hills back to Cooperstown. A few miles out of town I was navigating a long, gentle curve in the road (following the path of a creek on the left) when suddenly, on the right, something colorful caught my eye.

A mailbox, but not just any mailbox. A fanciful and brightly painted metal house, complete with dormers and an American flag. In cut metal letters above the house was the name “J. Schoell.” I felt like I had found the Promised Land.

I stopped, of course, introduced myself to Mr. and Mrs. Schoell, who were home, and over time became good friends with the family. I learned that Joseph was an immigrant from Hungary who came to the United States following the failed uprising against the Soviets in 1956, settled on Long Island and got a job as a sheet metal worker. After retirement, he bought a summer house in Margaretville and began making whimsical sculptures to place on the lawn. He would make one a year, in the winter, and bring them out to Margaretville every summer.

We caught him at a good time, as he told me he was now too old to keep the summer house and wanted to sell the sculptures. The museum ended up acquiring several, including a great Statue of Liberty (above) and a fanciful castle (left). The last piece I purchased from Joseph, however, is the one that means the most to me.

It’s the mailbox, the first piece I had laid eyes on. To me it represents the joy of discovery and the reminder that roadside America is the most exciting art exhibition: always open and always free. Seeing this piece in the museum always makes me want to hit the road.

Folk Art: It’s on your way to anywhere

The most remarkable thing about folk art is that it can be found anywhere. Perhaps the most exciting place to find folk art is along the highways or back roads of any region in the country. There are numerous folk artists who do more than make art; they create experiences by transforming their property into artistic environments that can be explored on foot.







These roadside attractions have been around for decades, but they have received a great deal of attention in the past 20 years or so. The most famous example is Watts Towers in Los Angeles, (above, right) created by Simon Rodia from the 1920s to the 1950s and now a National Historic Landmark. Rodia was an Italian immigrant who spent 33 years making these 99-foot-tall towers out of steel pipes and rods coated with mortar and embedded with ceramic and glass.



Some of my favorite environments are in the South. Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden in Summerville, Georgia (above), was an amazing experience up until the mid 1990s, when I had the pleasure of visiting on several occasions. Finster was a Baptist preacher who believed he was instructed by God to "paint sacred art." The garden was one way he had of spreading the Gospel. Much of the best art from the garden is now in the collection of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, a necessary step as exposure to the elements poses threats to many of these creations.




Another favorite folk environment is closer to home: Veronica Terrillion’s “Woman-Made” house and garden in Indian River, New York (above). I had the pleasure of meeting Mrs. Terrillion some years ago and getting a tour of her environment. It is a stunning collection of concrete figures that represent her life and her interest in nature. Veronica died in 2003, but her garden can still be seen from the roadside and can be visited by appointment. You can find out more here.


Why do these artists create these fantastic settings? Many are driven by an intense need to share some aspect of their lives, and for them, a picture or series of pictures isn't enough. They need to draw people into their world in a real, physical way. If you have ever been in one of these environments, you will quickly realize that being enveloped in some else's imagined and created world is an extremely effective way of understanding their life and its relation to your own. That really is the point of all art. It's just doubly impressive when someone with no prior aptitude in the arts is able to draw upon their manual skills gleaned from a lifetime of hard work to make something truly magical. I'll be featuring some stellar folk art environments in more detail in the weeks to come, so keep your eye out here and on the road. Do let me know if you see something I should be aware of.

After a visit to any one of the hundreds of these environments in the US, you will forever be on the lookout for great folk art on your journeys just about anywhere. It can make an ordinary trip the experience of a lifetime.