Visiting the Throne
If you are ever in D.C. (or you live here and just haven't gone), everyone should visit the Smithsonian Museum of American Art and see their Folk Art Collection, one of the best in the country. The centerpiece is the amazing Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly by James Hampton.
Hampton was a janitor with the General Services Administration who rented out a warehouse where he worked 4-5 hour a morning, after finishing work at midnight. It is constructed with gold and silver foils, cardboard, broken light bulbs, green blotters, tape, tacks, pins, wood furniture, flower vases, and jelly jars, glittered under a dozen 500 watt bulbs. While up close you can see the tin foil, from a distance it looks like the kind of religious art you'd see in the great cathedrals and religious art museums. It's an amazing piece.
To read someone else who is obsessed with the piece, take a look at the location blog by Kim Bender who was interviewed on WAMU.
What I love about the Throne is that it epitomizes American Folks art (or outsider art, or visionary art). Here's someone with no formal art training who imagines this massive installation. It's that line between art and madness, in some sense. Yet, I can stare at the small portion of the installation for hours because you can almost imagine him going to work on his masterpiece in the early hours, collecting the materials, reading the Bible or being inspired by the stories he heard as a child.