(male announcer) Production costs for Rare Visions and Roadside Revelations have been paid for in part by Fred and Lou Hartwig, generous supporters of Kansas City Public Television, and by viewers like you.

Thank you.

(man) ♪ Welcome to a show about things you can see ♪ ♪ without going far, and a lot of them are free.

♪ ♪ If you thought there was nothing ♪ ♪ in the old heartland, ♪ ♪ you ought to hit the blacktop ♪ ♪ with these fools in a van.

♪ ♪ Look out, they're driving hard, ♪ ♪ checking out art in their own backyard.

♪ ♪ Randy does the steering so he won't hurl.

♪ ♪ Mike's got the map, such a man of the world.

♪ ♪ That's Don with the camera, ♪ ♪ kind of heavy on his shoulder.

♪ ♪ And that giant ball of tape, it's a world record holder.

♪ ♪ Look out, they're driving hard, ♪ ♪ checking out art in their own backyard.

♪ ♪ Look out, they're driving hard, ♪ ♪ checking out the world in their own backyard, ♪ ♪ checking out the world in their own backyard.

♪ ♪ (Don) Man, it sure is bouncy back here.

How's that bench seat?

(Don) Dear TV Mailbag, are we there yet?

Hi, Don the camera guy here, bouncing around in back while those weaselly producers ride smooth up front.

But lo and behold, say hallelujah, because Bethlehem, this is.

And this bus stop means we've found our man-- or at least a manifestation of him.

Mr.

Imagination, a.k.a.

Gregory Warmack, grew up in Chicago, survived a shooting there, and emerged from his near-death experience determined to make art with found objects at a fever pitch.

He recently relocated here and wasted no time making his presence known on city streets, the grounds of Lehigh University, even the back bathroom of a home decor store.

Here is going to be, like, a wave, you know.

It's going to be like a wave like that.

And I got these here from the mountain of Lehigh.

And I don't know why I chose this idea.

Like, it's something about fish.

I love fish.

I do do lots of fish out of actually bottle caps.

(Don) Mr.

I's presence here is due in part to his good pal Norman Girardot, professor of religion at Lehigh and fan of outsider art who often teaches courses that mingle the two.

And I remember I had gone back to visit my alma mater, University of Chicago, down on the south side and got back late at night.

And I walked into the gallery, and this man is standing there with a bottle-cap jacket on and a bottle-cap hat.

And I knew that I was in the presence of authentic strangeness.

And it cried out to me, and we introduced ourselves, and I ended up going to his house.

And since I was in the business of studying religious worlds, as well as artistic worlds, this was a very special moment.

(Mr.

Imagination) I never studied art.

But, like, I was able to look into a stone and see these images.

And I had this out-of-body experience, and I feel that, during my travel, that I came in contact with each different nationality.

I started off doing paintbrushes first.

And then, after the paintbrushes, I started to see lots of brooms.

And, like, I found this wastebasket.

I just right away seen a woman with a large bust and a tiny waist.

And right here, this is a self-portrait here.

I use lots of old hangers.

I have been preserving art of history.

And in order for a bottle cap to come off a beer, you know, the bottle is held by someone, so their spirit is involved in this cap.

So that is what makes the bottle caps special, just like my bottle-cap hat.

It was a very big decision to move from where I was going, but I feel that change is good, and it took about seven truckloads.

But there's a reason for everything in life.

Sometimes people would think that they made a very big mistake in walking this way or turning your car the right way when you were going to go to the left.

But as you go that path, you run into someone that you have not seen in a long time.

So there's a reason for everything, and that's why I'm here in Bethlehem.

(Randy) How does Bethlehem compare, for stuff you find on the streets, to Chicago?

(Mr.

Imagination) Well, I'll tell you, you know, for a while, it was very hard to find things.

This place is so clean, it's hard to find something.

But I did find some spots.

(Norman) What makes certain artists different than others-- in this case, outsider artists-- is that some of them have that kind of special intensity in terms of their own life that has transformed them in a way that they're then able to communicate to others a healing message.

(man) ♪ Mr.

I don't ♪ ♪ get to where he's going in a day.

♪ ♪ (Mr.

Imagination) I feel that I am a minister within art and working with kids and it's encouraging artists when they feel that "I can't make my art anymore."

So I try to encourage that.

(man) ♪ Along Mr.

I's way.

♪ (Norman) Human culture is the shaping of experience with the human imagination, you know.

It's the making a mark on the world.

I mean, culture is embodied imagination, and art is the mechanism of making imagination real.

If you could just explain that one more time.

You kind of lost me there.

(Don) Okay, maybe grad school isn't such a good idea for any of us.

But on the way out, we chose to show the proud product of our own limited imaginations, the world's largest ball of videotape, which Mr.

I admired and adorned in his own special way.

Remember, change is good, and if you've got some extra bottle caps, bring 'em to Bethlehem.

Tell them Rare Visions sent you.

(Randy) Oh, that's us.

That's really us, that big green thing.

(Don) So what's the weather going to be?

Oh, rain.

And more rain.

More rain, all week.

(Don) I think Delores has it pegged.

We're going to be slogging around for some time.

So after embracing a modern marvel of motel technology, the waffle you make yourself, we tossed on the rain gear and resumed the driving portion of our show, driving north towards Bangor-- Pennsylvania, not Maine-- in what they call the Slate Belt, searching for something that sounds sort of like Stonehenge.

It's a place of mysticism and where the planes sometimes kind of intersect.

Could you keep your hands on the wheel?

Please?

You're making us nervous.

(Don) Play Misty for me.

(Bill) People finally find it when they are supposed to.

They come from everywhere.

(Don) Guess that means we were supposed to find it, though what we found might be harder to say.

Columcille takes its name from ancient Irish lore and its purpose from a self-confessed recovering Presbyterian minister.

(Bill) I've been going to the Isle of Iona since 1957.

And in 1967, I had a dream over there, a dream that a circle of stones were circling me, and they kept coming closer and closer.

And they looked down upon me, and all I could feel from them and for them was unbelievable love.

In the meantime, I bought this land.

It was like a strange encounter for the third time.

Remember that old movie where the guy had to build that plastic-- Well, I had to set stones.

This is called our Infinity Gate, and it's a reminder to people, when they come through here, they go into no time.

We have a sign which says, "Travel at your own risk.

"Come dance in the spirit.

Leave your dogma at the gate with the dog poop."

And-- [laughs] You can advertise my new book I just put out, Come Dance With Me.

Say, you got a mosquito on your forehead.

You better sock it.

(Mike) Oh, it's huge.

Yeah, here; come here.

Co me here; come here.

[laughs] This is Manannan back here.

That's our tallest stone.

Manannan after the Irish sea god.

This is called a regeneration rock.

The Celts always held that if a rock had a natural hole in it, it was a sign of regeneration or healing.

And that is the Thor Gate, and then that center stone, which was here, we call that the Cauldron Stone.

You know, we all have a million years of memory.

(Randy) It's already in the-- It's on your DNA.

It's in the matrix there?

Yup.

(Don) I heard that once, but I forgot it.

(Bill) We, first of all, built a chapel out here.

That was the first building, and it has a large boulder in the center of it to keep us grounded and centered.

I've always wanted to build a bell tower, so we built a bell tower, and we named it after St. Oran.

That's a reminder that the way you think it is may not be the way it is at all.

In other words, always keep your paradigm unzipped.

Then we have another circle, and then there's an outer circle.

The Fairy Ring is further out.

(Randy) How many stones?

(Bill) 80, around 80.

(Randy) Well, this is the land of myth and mystery.

(Bill) Yeah, I call it the Land of Myth and Mystery.

(Mike) And mosquitoes.

(Bill) An d mosquitoes, yeah.

I'm imagining there's one there.

[laughs] [Bill whistling] Duke.

What does Duke do with that tennis ball?

Carry it.

We throw it.

He was carrying stones and breaking his teeth off, so we got all these tennis balls.

Duke, go deep!

(Don) This place is magically delicious.

But it's about to pour down rain at any minute, so we'll have to come dance with Duke another time.

And there we are, tracking back from Bangor through Pen Argyl, when all of a sudden, our pop culture potentate recalls that a certain busty B-movie starlet who met a tragic end ended up here.

Jayne Mansfield.

Someone's putting flowers on her grave.

(Don) She slammed into a bed of a truck.

Oh.

(Randy) She wasn't even driving.

That was the sad thing.

The car swerved.

Whap.

Rest in pieces.

Don, get back in that cramped Chrysler bench seat.

(Mike) ♪ Dust in the wind.

♪ I've never been to Philly before.

And they call it "Philly" here, I noticed.

Yeah, "Philla."

(Don) Every lane is Philla'd.

God, this is traffic at its best, isn't it?

This is why we stay off the freeways.

(Don) Yes, it's true.

Crowded urban areas are often off our radar altogether.

And South Street, where we're headed, is right down in the belly of the beast.

But here's the sound of my jaw dropping... splat!

at the sight of surface after surface tiled to the hilt and all tiled by one man, one man named Isaiah Zagar.

(Randy) I'm struck dumb.

Dumber.

(Mike) Got that right.

(Don) Okay, he did do art school.

But his heroes are the same kind of self-taught overachievers we like so well.

(Randy) I suspect that's him.

(Don) Isaiah, however, does have one request: that, narratively speaking, I give my inner Arlo a rest.

Now, even though I'd never tell him how to make mosaics, I will clam up, at least till we're out of town.

(Randy) Everything's on South Street.

What's the South Street magic?

(Isaiah) Well, the key is, that's where we moved to.

We were three years in Peru while the Vietnam war was revving up.

We came home, and we wanted to be a part of the change that we thought had to happen in this country, and we didn't know how.

And I had a nervous breakdown.

That began this.

I am attempting to change the consciousness of a city.

By changing the consciousness of a city, I'm attempting to change the consciousness of a country.

By changing the consciousness of a country, I'm attempting to change the consciousness of the world.

Okay, you coming?

Come on in here.

Now, I needed buildings to make my art.

The buildings served as places to realize what I wanted to do as an artist.

But, also, I had apartments, rented the apartments.

The people that live in the apartments think they're renting apartments to live in.

But they're renting art and living in the art and paying me, and I just raise the rent.

(Randy) Are you a coffee drinker, Isaiah?

Is that part of the secret?

(Isaiah) I am; I am, you know.

I wasn't until I was about 40 years old, and I started drinking coffee and drinking beer.

Well, look at all this-- I mean, these bottles.

Wine and beer.

I drink a lot of-- I drink a lot.

Rolling Rock.

Rolling Rock.

What's important about this is that this is a blob, and the blobs are the key to all my mosaics.

I put a blob up, and that tells me what's next.

It isn't designed beforehand, but I put that blob up, and, bap, I got it going.

(Randy) So there's theories of blobs and other-- Yeah, I got a theory.

I got a lot of theories.

I got a lot of theories.

(Randy) We can talk all we want about the concept and stuff, but there's hard physical work involved here.

(Isaiah) Yeah, you know, and I'm a little bit upset that you're interviewing me now, because I could be working.

But I could be working while you interview me.

I have to mix cement.

Thousands of pounds of cement, thousands.

(Mike) And all mixed by hand.

All mixed by hand.

(Randy) Do you always use the same kind?

Yes, always the same.

Type I Portland.

One cement to three sand.

I give classes on how to do this, because if somebody wants the whole world to be mosaic, they can't do it alone.

They need help.

The thing about bottles is, there's no gripping, so you've got to surround them.

Do you hear that out there, the guy or the gal that's going to try to do all this?

Surround the bottles.

(Mike) So how much time is spent out, you know, actually collecting up the materials?

(Isaiah) Not much.

I try to make that a minimum of my time spent.

But what I do do is a lot of this that you see.

This is what I do a lot of.

Nurse, nurse!

I'm here.

I'm here, Isaiah.

Okay, okay.

(Randy) Have I not seen you say that Philadelphia is actually the center?

(Isaiah) Oh, of course.

Philadelphia is the center of the art world, yeah.

Why is it the center of the art world?

There's so much going on here music-wise, sculpture, architecture.

(Randy) Coffee.

(Isaiah) Yeah.

And Rolling Rock beer.

Rolling Rock.

Rolling Rock.

You think I know what's next?

I don't know what's next.

I just know what I've done, not what I will do.

I don't need to be honored; I need to be allowed to work.

I'm not an artist; I'm an art worker.

Yeah.

Ooh, this is coming.

This is coming, folks.

Getting good.

Getting good.

Another five years, and we'll have it.

(Jeff) Testing.

Uh, hi, this is Jeff, the audio postproduction guy.

Since Don's still under that gag order, the boys wanted me to tell you they had a great lunch, vegetarian, with Isaiah and his assistant, Allison, prepared by his wife, Julia, and to remind you that if you're ever around South Street, you should definitely check out the amazing stuff this man has done.

And, oh, yeah, they know there's lots of popular attractions in the City of Brotherly Love, but you won't see them here.

Looks like they're crossing the Delaware now.

That puts them in New Jersey.

So, camera guy, things should be getting back to normal soon.

Thank you for your attention.

(Randy) Look right there.

What do you think?

Is that Joseph Laux's fairy garden, maybe?

(Don) Looks like a fairy garden to me.

(Randy) Well, this is the fairy garden state, isn't it?

(Don) Are you touched?

I am, 'cause this has got that-- you know, the feel of just one guy's little obsession in making the world a little nicer place in his own little corner of the yard.

I think it's very sweet.

I think there's a quality about it that just really-- (Randy) Works for you?

(Mike) Yeah, works for me.

(Randy) You aren't tearing up, are you?

(Mike) No, I'm not tearing up.

But I'm a little sad.

Okay, okay.

No, no, put the camera away.

(Don) Okay, okay, I'm back.

And I think what we need now is a map to see where we've been and where we're headed, which appears to be deeper and deeper into Jersey's agricultural core.

Vineland's famous for Welch's grape juice and the mason jar.

But we're here to see something that's been and gone and is now coming back one brick at a time thanks to some Vineland visionaries determined to rebuild the Palace of Depression, a genuine roadside revelation George Daynor started on in 1929.

(Kirchner) It was a swamp with a junkyard.

When he got here, he looked at it.

Most people would get frustrated.

He got in a truck body, slept that night, and he dreamed, or an angel appeared to him during the night, either one of the two, and told him to build this palace.

He dug a few holes, put the truck body in the middle of the thing, built a foundation around it, did some drains, drained everything back into the stream, and he lived here then till the mid-'60s and supported himself by charging a quarter-- first 10¢ and then a quarter-- to get in.

This is the ticket booth, and this was the main entrance to the palace.

So was Daynor behind this little ticket booth?

He would be in there, or his wife would be in there, one of the two.

But most of the time, it would be him.

(Mike) So he just used what was here.

He used what was in the dump at the time to create his palace.

He didn't have steps; he had ramps that turned and went around.

There's a coin in the wall somewhere on here.

There's another gear wheel over there.

I mean, that's the kind of stuff that he used.

Whatever he could put in the walls, he did, and he tried to make something out of it.

Probably, I was around four or five years old the first time we come over here, and it was right around the time Abbott and Costello met Frankenstein and the werewolf.

And Lon Chaney, when he would go to there, well, that's what George Daynor reminded me of, and I was scared to death of him.

He just was a man of his own mind-set and borderline genius, borderline nut, you know, but very creative.

He had a picture on the wall that was kind of three-dimensional and had a large nose.

When you would grab the nose, it would actually work a pulley, and it would work a pulley what was in his knock-out room, and a brick would come down, hit you in the head.

(Randy) Now, is that fun?

(Kirchner) That was fun in those days, okay?

We're going to use a Styrofoam brick in there in case somebody does get hit.

You look at this thing, and you say, when you looked at the picture, we're pretty far away from that.

Well, we are, but we're not in a hurry.

We anticipate about two more years being done.

(Don) Actually, the palace has been revived once before but only in make-believe form for that 1980 cinema classic Eddie And The Cruisers, which reaches its dramatic conclusion at a place inspired by this.

Our drama, however, is done for the day.

See you at the shore.

Will you guard my shoes?

(Don) Half a continent away from home, and what do we do?

Break out the ball gloves and toss a few quick ones, because, well, because we can.

(Mike) Let's see your best Sandy Koufax.

Whoa!

(Don) Besides, Mike insisted on tickling his tootsies in the foamy brine one last time before we turned tail and headed north on the New Jersey Turnpike, yet another of those pay-as-you-go tollways that has us paying and going and bitching and moaning.

This is not as complicated as Oklahoma, but still.

I feel nickled and dimed to death.

Got it?

I don't want to have to, like, wash... 35, I think.

Like, wash the New Jersey Turnpike dishes.

All right, see if I'm still good.

(Randy) You're green.

You're golden.

At least till the next one.

(Don) So thanks to me and viewers like you, we paid the piper all the way to Newark, whose gritty city streets feel somewhat less ominous when you're walking them in the company of an ex-cop.

After his wife passed away suddenly, Kevin Sampson quit the force to focus on family and making sculptures from parts he picks up on strolls around the neighborhood known as Irontown.

(Sampson) By moving to Newark, I got access to all these different materials, you know.

And I would find the junk, you know, just laying around.

And so I would bring it home and start creating these pieces.

And I have hundreds of sculptures.

I just have so many, I had to farm them out, 'cause you can't move in here.

This fan is probably--the fan had broke in my son's room.

I just got him a new fan.

So before I throw the fans out, I pull the blades off them.

On this piece, I found a maraca-- what do you call those things you shake--in the street.

The American flag is a recurring theme over and over and over.

I did a series of chairs, and what I did was, my parents are from the South, so what I did was, I made up this fictional slave character in my head.

And I was thinking about this fictional woman designing these dresses from anything she could put together.

And I titled that character Beulah Ball.

So I did this whole series of slave dresses that this woman made, and this is one of the first ones.

This is Beulah Ball's Dress Number One.

This is about the plantation, so this actually depicts her journey over on the slave ship to the plantation.

And there's an aerial view of the plantation down at the bottom here.

These are actually the treetops.

(Randy) Are those chicken bones I see?

(Sampson) Those are chicken bones.

The kids in this house are required to save everything they eat.

I've been a widow for almost ten years now, and I'm raising three kids on my own, so a lot of this big macho cop thing went out the window, so, you know, I'm a housewife.

I'm probably more of a housewife than anything.

I mean, that's what I'm doing.

I'm washing clothes and cooking and cleaning.

And so--also in my head, Beulah was also my alternate personality, you know.

This is who I am.

So I design these dresses.

I'm doing another dress now.

The art was my way of resolving all of the problems that I had, so I worked myself through it.

I had deaths--I mean, best friends dying, everybody, just like a whole series all in a row.

This art is my way of resolving a lot of those.

It's my therapy, so I would get depressed or down, and I would run, and I would do a piece.

And the art--making the art is the easiest part, 'cause I spend most of my time-- I walk around for hours and hours and hours.

I run my mouth with everybody from the gas station clerk to-- you know, everybody around me.

I just run my mouth, figure out what's going on in the community, and I run back, and I make pieces.

I kind of like to think that I'm making artwork that represents the community that I'm in.

So I'm making work that has their fears and dreams and goals and everything.

So when I'm out talking, I come back, and whatever I talked about, I put into my work.

(Don) Plenty of Kevin's pieces are popping up in prestigious places across the river in Manhattan.

But to misquote Eva Gabor, Newark is where he'd "rahther" be.

And I have no idea what this is, but at least our van's still where we parked it, and I am still Don the camera guy, signing off.

(female announcer) To learn more about the sights you've seen on this show and plan a road trip of your own, visit Rare Visions on the web at: You can also purchase DVDs, videotapes, and a companion book to this award-winning series.

Call: [happily] Oh!

Oh!

[caps jingling] (Mike) I like it.

You can play that thing.

See if you can do it while you're working with the camera.

Captioning and audio description provided by the U.S. Department of Education.

Captioning and audio description byCaptionMax www.captionmax.com (Mike) Welcome to New Jersey.

I think it's a Christmas card.

(male announcer) Production costs for Rare Visions and Roadside Revelations have been paid for in part by Fred and Lou Hartwig, generous supporters of Kansas City Public Television, and by viewers like you.

Thank you.