Spiritual American Trash: Portraits from the Margins of Art and Faith

by Greg Bottoms

In Spiritual American Trash , Greg Bottoms goes beyond the examination of eight “outsider artists” and inhabits the spirit of their work and stories in engaging vignettes. From the janitor who created a holy throne room out of scraps in a garage, to the lonely wartime mother who filled her home with driftwood replicas of Bible scenes, Bottoms illustrates the peculiar grace in madness.

Using facts as scaffolding he constructs intimate narratives around each artist, painting their poor and difficult circumstances on the outskirts of American society and demonstrating struggle’s influence on their largely undiscovered art. Both mournful and celebratory, these profiles embrace these compulsive creators with empathy and visceral sensory details.

Each sentence reads with the cadence of a preacher who engages the art of the spirit and passion that often strays into obsession. Raised in the working-class South as a devout Christian with a deeply troubled brother, Bottoms understands how these eight outsiders “made art for a higher power and for themselves.”

Genres: Art, Biography, History

234 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Kitap Yakıcı · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was definitely unexpected. I thought I was requesting a book of outsider art from the library; instead this is a book of vignettes about several late USAmerican outsider artists. Generous, gentle, grateful, and impeccably respectful of the artists and their circumstances.

I think I get outsider artists. I think I get suffering, which bends and reshapes a person the way extreme sun bends and reshapes a tree. I think I get religious or spiritual obsessions and how they arise from our deepest needs. Partly this is because I get that people cannot survive without some sense of sturdy meanings. When sturdy meanings collapse, when the world stops making sense, as it did for the artists I write about, we—you, me, them—have no choice but to rationalize and relativize, to create a new world in our minds, and then wholeheartedly believe in it. (5)

[Major · Rating 5 out of 5]

Still hope to hug this guy one day

[Ellie · Rating 5 out of 5]

obsessed with the way this man does history. i think this book is mainly about grief, with visions and creations, outsiders and artists lightly intertwined. a worthwhile read.