Butch Anthony, Folk Artist

The first step to appreciating artist Butch Anthony is finding him. This is easier said than done.

Deep in the forests of southeast Alabama, somewhere near Seale but not quite, lies the farm/home/workshop of one of the most original names in contemporary folk art. Denoted only by an aluminum mailbox marked “B. Anthony,” many have accidentally sped past his dirt-gravel driveway.

Only at the intersection of highways 169 and 431 do they see his most well-known work, the Museum of Wonder, a drive-through art exhibit lovingly hand-crafted and first put “on the map” by the History Channel TV show “American Pickers,” which featured Anthony’s collections on a 2010 episode. Built from shipping containers with sides replaced by Plexiglas, the museum features a carnival procession of recycled oil paintings, found objects and ponderous sculptures with no prevailing theme or even medium—just a commitment to abstraction.

The museum sits, with meager explanation, like a monument in the middle of nowhere, and this is how Anthony prefers it—all display and intrigue, without having to explain himself.

“Never was gonna do art; I was gonna be a paleontologist,” Anthony says. “I kinda just fell into it. I make stuff with bones on ’em. Most of my things have skeletons drawn over them.

I never went to school for art. I just taught myself how to make stuff.”

In 1979, at 14, Anthony discovered a dinosaur bone in the woods near his house, introducing him to Auburn comparative anatomy professor Jim Dobie. In high school, Anthony would travel with Dobie’s paleontology classes on dig expeditions, assisting in an excavation of a T. Rex skeleton in Montgomery County in 1982.

“We would catch turtles and bats and whatever and bring them back in jars [and] dissect them,” Anthony said of his time with Dobie. “I got into anatomy so I incorporated it into my artwork.

“I went hog wild,” Anthony says of his studies at Auburn, where he focused his classwork on biology. After leaving Auburn, he worked a few zoology jobs but was uninterested in “9-to-5 crap.” Finding a human-shaped turnip one day, Anthony dared his friend John Henry Toney to sell it in a neighborhood antique shop.

“As a joke, we took it down to this old junk store and put it there with $50 on it. Somebody came and bought it, so I put $50 on mine, stuck it in the window and someone came along and bought it next day. It took off and we ain’t stopped since.”

Anthony and Toney, now 51 and 83, respectively, have been busy.

Skeletons painted over portraits; collages of found photographs, arrowheads and bent wire; a cowbone chandelier. The only consistent theme here is the symbiosis of nature, found artifacts and wit. A shredded oil painting with a deer head protruding through a massive hole hangs in Anthony’s house, which itself was built from reclaimed timber.

Thanks to his occasional posts on social media, recognizing his style has become de jure for the self-respecting modern folk-art aficionado, even as the art world’s imposed definitions increasingly fall short of doing him justice. Anthony prefers his own definition: “Intertwangleism.”

“It’s just a made-up word that I came up with,” Anthony says from the back porch of his workshop-showroom, a converted barn built in the early 20th century. “ ‘Inter’ means mixed, ‘twang’ is a way of speaking, and ‘ism’ is like a theory, so it’s my theory on mixing things up. I made the word up but everybody likes it so much it just caught on.”

Anthony has cultivated a brand of privacy across decades, even as his artwork has garnered critical praise and collectors around the world. It wasn’t always like this.

Years ago, when the Museum of Wonder was still seeping into regional consciousness, Anthony hosted a weekend art and music celebration called the Doo Nanny on his property. As word spread, crowds became larger. Louder. Less polite. Some people overstayed their welcome, while others tried running  off with artwork. After three years of crowds reaching into the thousands, the Doo Nanny was formally ended. He has no regrets. “I’ve always liked being by myself. Being around a ton of people drives me nuts. But I have to be around them when
I go to an art show.”

Anthony does lot of art shows now, finishing his fourth London gallery show and planning another in Moscow. A museum in Charleston, S.C., is planning a retrospective, giving him two years to prepare.

“All the hipsters in London love it. They’re into graffiti and street art. I’m kind of in that category… painting over other people’s stuff.”

The only public function Anthony regularly attends by choice is the Possum Trot, a loosely formalized auction and cookout down the road from his home. A cinderblock wareroom with an open-air hall next door hosts people from all over who come to sell their pickings and bid on others.’ The History Channel’s “American Pickers” has attended this as well.

Here is where Anthony finds most of his material and inspiration.

“New stuff is expensive,” he notes. “A tube of paint in an art store is like $40. Dang art students go broke trying to buy canvases. They want a hundred dollars for a big canvas, or you could go to the Possum Trot and get one for $5.”

Raised in a family of “junk collectors” who brought back twice as much from the Russell County dump as they left with, Anthony is the center of attention at the Possum Trot. People ask about his crops or offer their latest find while he ambles from one table to another. There are always plenty of ideas to be found.

Because, as Anthony notes, “I sell everything.”