Folk Art: Bottle Village

littlemissattitude · 08-13-2005, 08:51 AM

Folk art is something that I don't know a lot about, but it fascinates me way out of proportion to my knowledge about it. There's just something intriguing about art made by people who are mostly self-taught, sometimes seen as eccentrics, who are sometimes outisde the mainstream in a lot of ways.

But one bit of folk art that I do know a little bit about is Grandma Prisbey's Bottle Village in Simi Valley, California. I know about it because it is part of my childhood - it is about half a mile down the road from where my own grandma lived when I was a little kid. I've always liked the idea of its existence, but I've only begun learning recently that the village is quite famous and very well regarded in folk art circles.

You can see pictures and find out more about it here: http://echomatic.home.mindspring.com/bv/

Grandma Prisbey collected bottles and other bits of what most people would call "junk" and built a number of buildings on her property over the years. She would walk a mile or two to the local city dump every day, pulling a wagon behind her, and bring back the treasures she had found to use as building material. I can remember seeing her many times when I was young, and I thought it was the neatest thing that she was able to do what she was doing even though, to be honest, a lot of people in the area thought of her as just slightly looney. But she accomplished something that none of those people did. So who was the better off?

Although the village sustained heavy damage in the 1994 Northridge earthquake, there are people working to preserve it, helped along by its status as being listed on the National Register of Historic Places as well as being a California State Historical Landmark.

Alexa · 08-14-2005, 01:00 PM

People like Grandma Prisbey live in the world of primitive art instinct, too busy following their dream and do not care what others think about them. They live only for the moment when they can give life to the beauthy foreseen into a dream. No wonder the fascination of their work.