By Joe Norris / The Active Age
It was April 24, 1924. In Germany, Hitler had just begun the first month of a 5-year prison term for the treasonous Beer Hall Putsch. In Wichita, people were paying a quarter to see the new Buster Keaton movie. And in Lucas, Kansas, S.P. Dinsmoor was exchanging wedding vows with his second wife, Emilie.
The bride was 20 years old, quite beautiful, and may or may not have been pregnant. The groom was 61 years older than the bride, stood just over 5 feet tall, and wore scraggly billy goat chin whiskers. He was also half blind. But love, apparently, is totally blind. The newlyweds went on to have two children together.
The 81-year-old Dinsmoor couldn’t afford to spend all his time making babies, though. He was busy building the Garden of Eden in the yard outside his home, formed of limestone to look like a log cabin. Dinsmoor’s Garden wasn’t leafy and green. It was made entirely of concrete. He hand-formed 113 tons of wet cement into a collection of 150 sculptures. Some of the concrete scenes are lifted from the Old Testament — like the sculptures of Adam, Eve and the serpent at the Garden entrance. Other sculptures are more like three-dimensional political cartoons — including the one that depicts a crucifixion of Labor by a Doctor, a Lawyer, a Preacher and a Banker.
Dinsmoor built the entire project as a tourist attraction, and included himself as one of the exhibits. He constructed a limestone mausoleum in the corner of his yard with a concrete coffin inside and installed a glass window in the coffin lid. After he died in 1932, Dinsmoor’s remains were placed inside the coffin according to the precise instructions he’d left behind. Tourists could pay admission to shine a flashlight through the glass and see Dinsmoor’s face. An air leak in the coffin — and perhaps an infusion of good sense — put an end to that morbid practice. But tourists still flock into Lucas to see The Garden of Eden.
Not all Lucas residents were fans of Dinsmoor’s creations. But Florence Deeble, who lived nearby, was inspired to try her own hand at sculpting with cement and rocks. In her backyard, she recreated scenes from her summer travels, including Mount Rushmore, Capitol Reef National Park and Shiprock, N.M. A three-year restoration of the Deeble Garden was just completed in December, and it would have made Florence proud.
Florence died in 1999, and soon afterward an entirely different kind of garden began growing inside her house. Artist Mri-Pilar covered the walls of the Deeble house with foil, then transformed them with hundreds of sculptures made from recycled materials. In the living room, hands reach out from printed circuit boards and human faces emerge from old kitchen tools. In the bathroom, the sink and tub are both overflowing with unclothed plastic dolls. The art installation is called The Garden of Isis, and it is a stunning example of how junk can be turned into something that you’ll still be thinking about weeks later.
The Deeble Garden is open to the public, but to see the Garden of Isis, you’ll need a tour guide. You can find one at the Grassroots Art Center. You’ll want to check out the Center even if you don’t choose to visit the Garden of Isis. The Center defines grassroots art as “work done by self-taught artists operating outside the traditions of fine art and folk art. These intuitive artists follow a personal vision. They seem to work to please only themselves.”
You’ll see stone sculptures, paintings, glasswork and assemblages of objects that defy description. You’ll see things you love, but also things that make you scratch your head. As art critic Jerry Saltz once said, “Art is for anyone. It just isn’t for everyone.”
“That quote is a perfect description of Lucas,” says Erika Nelson, who owns the Roadside Sideshow Expo across the street from the Grassroots Art Center. “Not everyone here loves everything. But even the people who don’t like the art in Lucas often protest in a visual and amazing and snarky way. One man painted signs of protest and attached them to his fence. He wasn’t on Facebook, so he called it Fencebook. I used to take art students over to see it.”
Signs outside the Expo describe it as “The World’s Largest Collection of the World’s Smallest Versions of The World’s Largest Things.” Nelson, who created everything in the place, doesn’t take herself too seriously. In the front window of her Expo, she’s mounted a huge enlargement of a nasty one-star Google review, which reads, “VERY SMALL. Mostly has pictures of things. AT LEAST IT WAS FREE.”
Nelson still laughs at the reviewer’s word choices. “That couldn’t have been a better review. Because, yeah, that’s exactly what the Expo is!”
As the sign suggests, the Expo is populated by tiny versions of the world’s largest things, including the World’s Largest Ball of Twine, World’s Largest Cow Hairball and World’s Largest Belt Buckle (all claimed by Kansas). But not all the exhibits are miniatures. The World’s Largest Pickled Egg is here, too. So is the World’s Largest Ball of Gum, a project that was “halted in 2019 for obvious reasons.”
Nelson’s quirky sense of humor is on display throughout the Expo with exhibits like the Petrified Ham and a withered Commemorative Donut, “procured from Randy’s Donuts on Sept. 14, 2012.” Both exhibits are safely behind glass to discourage snacking.
After grad school, Nelson wanted to join the circus, but she lacked the skills for tightrope walking or fire eating. So she created her own carnival sideshow-style curiosities, painted her own gaudy sideshow posters and spent two years touring the country in a converted bus. “I was looking for some little area that had art integrated at its core,” she said.
The bus broke down in Lucas, forcing Nelson to spend a couple of months volunteering in town while waiting for the bus repairs. She ended up finding an affordable house right next to the Garden of Eden. And in 2017, she acquired the building where the Expo now lives. So the traveling show became a permanent show on Main Street in Lucas. In addition to operating the Expo, Nelson is an artist, an educator, a speaker and co-director of the Garden of Eden.
“Dinsmoor came to Lucas just a year after it was founded, and got the art movement off the ground,” Nelson says. “He was the bedrock of developing your own vision, and that gave everyone else a permission slip to show their own ideas in visual form.”
There are many other fun places to visit in Lucas, including Miller’s Park, the Switchgrass Art Gallery, the American Fork Art Park and Bowl Plaza, the public restroom that looks like a giant toilet. Because it’s just two hours northwest of Wichita, Lucas is a great day trip destination. The drive up includes the Post Rock Scenic Byway and Wilson State Park, a great place to stop.
The perfect time to visit Lucas is coming on April 1. That day is celebrated in Lucas as Fools-a-Palooza. Artists all over town have an open house, exhibiting new works. And traditionally, new businesses open on that day. Nelson is busy revamping the exhibits inside the Expo right now, as she does every winter. She chose the name “Expo” because “Museum” sounds like everything is from the past. But an Expo is a place where things change. And things are constantly changing in Lucas.
Joe Norris is a writer and former Wichita marketing executive. He can be reached at joe.norris47@gmail.com.
This article was republished here with the permission of: The Active Age