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Information:
Update 3/2009
Sadly, the site has been torn down.
"Hers is no ordinary yard. This acre of desert is the site of Tiny Town, an ever-evolving miniature ghost town with its own saloon, church, courthouse, jail — even an auto body shop. A scavenger, Lange uses all sorts of things that would otherwise have ended up in the dump or been abandoned along the roadside. "If it ain’t broken, busted or rusted," she says, she has no use for it. A cast-off skylight forms the roof of the saloon. Tarpaper with a dotted yellow line serves as a road through the miniature ghost town. Broken glass fills three shallow troughs, forming rivers."
"There's a bone motorcycle and a bridge over a stream made of broken bottles. A bone dollhouse is decorated with a sign: Better Bonz and Gardens. The creation is by tattoo artist Tammy Jean Lange, whose work has appeared in galleries and Baltimore's Museum of Visionary Art."
UPDATE: March 17, 2008 - excerpted from the Santa Fe New Mexican
Tiny Town's final days
Photo: Tammy Lange has been called a visionary and a ‘human firecracker’ as well as a local icon in so-called outsider art, using roadkill, rusted objects and broken toys as her media. Her art has been on display on a 1 acre tract of land near Madrid, below, for the past 10 years.
One woman's explorations into 'outside art' could come to an end
Julie Ann Grimm | The New Mexican
3/16/2008 - 3/17/08
The term "outsider art" does not begin to describe what's on display at Tiny Town. Even so, the roadside attraction just north of Madrid just isn't what it used to be.
Wind, weather, sun and the passing of time have turned the one-time sea of broken glass and artfully arranged bones into ramshackle, dilapidated outdoor display.
Now the mayor of Tiny Town is moving on.
Artist Tammy Jean Lange has been called a visionary and a "human firecracker" as well as a local icon in so-called outsider art, using roadkill, rusted objects and broken toys as her media. A discarded cigarette machine, rust-red iron cookstove, set of putt-put clubs and dozens of partially clothed dolls are among the current occupants.
"If it isn't dead, broken or rusted, I just can't use it," Lange said during an interview at Tiny Town, where she stood in stockinged feet on the bare ground, sipping an icy beverage in the afternoon. "It's 'Better Bones and Gardens,' Mother Nature's natural art."
Lange does not pay rent to use the 1 acre site, and over the last four years has done less and less to keep the place looking like the small wonder that it used to be, said longtime benefactor Bille Russell.
Russell has for more than a decade allowed Lange to set up her found art on about an acre of her 112-acre Lodestar Ranch.
When Lange, 49, also known as Tatt2 Tammy, started using the area as her primary residence and drifted away from what Russell called "brilliant things," Russell said she reluctantly took steps to change the situation.
"I think her art has a right to exist," said Russell, who met Lange when a friend helped get her art into the Mineshaft Tavern gift shop. "So the initial deal was that Tiny Town could be there and she could work there, but she could not live there."
Russell said she was worn down by neighboring landowners who called the project an eyesore and wanted it cleaned up.
"It had its peaks, but in four years it's taken quite a dive," she said. "It became more like a dump instead of her working her art."
Although she's requiring Lange to move out and dispose of piles of debris that have grown up outside the fence that marks the borders of Tiny Town, Russell said the artwork is welcome to stay and Lange is welcome to keep working on it.
Lange, a New Mexico native, moved Tiny Town to the Lodestar from the Four Corners area in the early 1990s — around the same time that her work was part of a multi-artist exhibition at American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. Before that, she says she was one of the first female tattoo-shop proprietors in Phoenix and Tempe, Ariz.
Some of Madrid's eclectic residents want to do what they can to help Lange, who has inarguably fallen on hard times.
Liz Falconer said she has been a friend of Lange's since she moved to town about three years ago. Falconer, a painter who runs the Aka-tombo Gallery in a red railroad car in Madrid, is trying to encourage other artists to take advantage of Tiny Town's visual madness before it's gone.
On March 22 and 23, she's hosting "Come to Tiny Town," an invitation to paint, sketch and construct artwork out of the Tiny Town stuff for a $35 fee. Work created as a result of the weekend can then be displayed for free at the gallery during a show that will open April 19.
Voluntary proceeds from the event and art sales will help Lange pay for insurance and registration on a mobile home she plans to use as her home base.
"She has a political point of view that is out the norm and her artwork is out of the norm," Falconer said of Lange. "She's been here such a long time and is so much a part of Madrid that I just thought this was a neat way to help out another artist."
Recent visitors can't grasp the glory that once was Tiny Town.
A welcome sign that once included a a curtain of keys on strings sits on the ground next to the gate. A new sign says "Everything for sale, barter or trade."
Faded and ripped fabric fights the spring wind. The signature work, a miniature town with a church, saloon, courthouse and other buildings — like an oversized model-train setup — is also in shambles.
Despite the looming eviction and uncertain removal of some of the items on the land, Lange says her art career is not over. She plans to visit her mother in Blanco through May, then return to Madrid and start concentrating on producing again.
"When I come back, I am going to do nothing but art," she said. "Tiny Town will stay. Tiny Town is not dead, honey."
Contact Julie Ann Grimm at jgrimm@sfnewmexican.com.
High County News
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