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A Call from On High Best-selling author Robert Hicks traces the beginning of his obsession with outsider art photography by Jerry Atnip
I
often say that my first encounter with Outsider Art came from a short article in Esquire magazine in the fall of 1979. The write-up was about an itinerant preacher, the Rev. Howard
Finster from Summerville, Georgia, who had been called by God to create “sacred art� to better lead to Christ a world that was traveling its last path toward damnation. And while I can say that reading that piece about Howard was to change my life forever, truth is I had been prepping for that day my entire life. As a Southerner who had grown up in the South of the late fifties and sixties, I was surrounded by Outsider Art at every turn. There it was, and there it had always been, on homemade signs at every bend in the road of the pre-interstate South, extolling the glories of Heaven while it pleaded with me to repent and turn away from my sinful life before it was too late. Maybe all the rest of my fellow eight- and nine-year-olds could ignore such warnings, but these signs and wonders fascinated me. 38 | July 2O13 NashvilleArts.com