The Mythical Indigenous Australians Guarding their Rainforest

Through the ferns of an enchanted forest with tall gums and the call of wild birds all around, stoney eyes are watching in the land down under. At one with nature, fused with the rocks and the tree trunks, mysterious sculptures of a native people are all around, forever guarding and protecting their native paradise. We’re in…

Discovering Black Outsider Art in a Whitewashed World

Their abilities don’t come from any artistic establishment. They didn’t have any formal training and they were not influenced by other mainstream artists. Hailing from places like Mississippi, Tallapoosa, and other rural pockets of the deep south, they’re the African American Outsider and Folk artists whose voices and colour palettes explored a world that wasn’t…

He’s the P.T. Barnum of the Deep South, leading a One-Man Art Movement

Butch Anthony’s cabinet of curiosities, aka the Museum of Wonder, isn’t easy to find. Beyond the help of Google Maps down these sparse backroads of rural Seale, Alabama, you have to rely on Anthony’s hand-drawn map. There’s no sign, just an ordinary black mailbox. Your one clue that you’ve found the place is the address…

Inside the Mystery of an Untranslatable 600 Year Old Book

It’s like Medieval Times, with a kiss of psychedelia. A book in which strange globules float freely, alien plants shimmy across the pages, and female figures slide into a pool of green plasma. Binding them all together? A beautiful, albeit entirely indecipherable script by an unknown author. The “Voynich Manuscript,” is an ancient codex that…

13 Things I Found on the Internet Today (Vol. CCCXXII)

1.Freddie Mercury’s First Band You can see him, centre, with his bandmates in 1958. Their band was called “The Hectics”. The school-band was formed while all five were students at St. Peter’s Boys School, an English boarding school near Bombay (now Mumbai), India. The band only played at school events and were not allowed to venture outside for bookings. Found on…

A Space Pod Palace Built on a Neolithic Burial Ground Just Landed on the Market

Straight out of a science fiction novel, it’s perched ever-so delicately atop a rock formation in the heart of the Ardèche region of France, as if it just touched down from another galaxy. Its lively forms are no accident; the octopean abode is a rare example of the movement known as Architecture-sculpture, born in France…

Death Row Inmates Are Making Art. Would You Buy It?

Nicola White didn’t leave her heart in San Francisco, she left it in the San Quentin State Prison, just over the Golden Gate Bridge. “It’s funny,” she tells us by phone from her native England, “I never set out thinking, ‘I’m going to Death Row and I’m going to start a project with these prisoners…

Every Day Since 1964, this Outsider Artist Made a Collage of Found Objects

New Yorkers have a special relationship with trash, which is as much a fixture of the cityscape as the Manhattan skyline. Not to wax romantic about littering, but some of that, shall we say, “street ephemera” – the lost tickets, photos, business cards – can give us the most honest, intimate window into the city’s…

These Magical Outsider Art Temples Need Our Help

It’s no secret that our favourite art lives on the fringe. So when a reader wrote in with a tip about a temple of Outsider Art in Prenton, England, that needed our help, we dove right in. Known as “Ron’s Place,” the house is a portal into one man’s obsessive love of antiquity (with an…

For Over 30 Years, a Tokyo Soba Chef Drew Everything He Ate

Sometimes, it’s the simple stories that stay with us the longest. Like that of Itsuo Kobayashi, a former Japanese soba chef born in 1962 who has recorded his meals in painstakingly detailed, hand-drawn food diaries of sorts for the past 32 years. In addition to recollections about taste, Kobayashi’s pen has accounted for every last…