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USA
Southwest
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Phoenix, AZ
Sunnyslope Rock Garden - Grover Cleveland Thompson
?-1978
Environment with rocks
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Information:
Built: 1952 - 1972
"The Kohler Foundation is funding a relocation of the Sunnyslope Rock Garden from it's existing location to the new satellite campus of Arizona State University."
"The Sunnyslope Rock Garden is an odd cluster of tiny buildings, weird masks and rock fountains, on the front lawn of a house in a weedy, biker neighborhood. Builder Grover Cleveland Thompson, who died in 1978, moved to this unincorporated area of Phoenix in 1952, and spent twenty-two years building his fantasy world. He had been inspired by Petersen Rock Garden in Redmond, OR, a more ambitious testament to the onset of dementia concretia.
Thompson used shards of Fiestaware because it was cheap, and rumored to be radioactive. "Only a little Strontium 90, " says current owner Marion Blake (Marion snapped the place up when she moved from New York twenty years ago).
Thompson cast the faces of his figures by pouring concrete into '50s Halloween masks."
Roadside America
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Bibliography:
On DVD - Rare Visions and Roadside Revelations, "Cali-Zona, Here We Come," KCPT, Kansas City Public Television, 2007.
"Self-Made Worlds: Visionary Environments" by Roger Manley and Mark Sloan, Aperture, New York, 1997.
"Phoenix Outsider Art Environments" text and photos by Ron Gasowski, Folk Art Messenger, Vol. 19, No. 1, Fall/Winter 2006.
"Rare Visions and Roadside Revelations Coast to Coast Travel-o-Pedia" by Randy Mason, et. al., Kansas City Star Books, 2009. |
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