By David Leonardis

Chicago gallery owner and art entrepreneur David Leonardis discovered the work of nationally acclaimed Georgia folk artist Howard Finster in 1989. It was the beginning of an involvement with Finster’s art and eventually with Howard himself that has led to Leonardis becoming the country’s largest dealer of Finster’s work and the creation of the Howard Finster Vision House in Summerville in Northwest Georgia. For Vision House photos and an interview with Leonardis, see the MySpace and YouTube links at the bottom of the page.

Like a lot of people that graduated from high school in 1985, I was a Talking Heads fan. In my dorm room I had a Talking Heads Poster as well as posters from a few other bands. After college, I rolled up my Talking Heads poster and put it in a closet. Years later after I was working with and publishing Howard Finster’s prints, I pulled out the poster and had Howard sign it and then I had it framed in the wood-burned molding that he had personally designed.

I first saw the Rev. Howard Finster’s paintings in a Chicago art gallery in 1989. I was drawn to them. There was a whole wall of Howard Finster originals of different sizes and shapes. The one that spoke to me was a cutout of a Camel, “The Desert Taxi.” I couldn’t afford it, so I got a job at the gallery so I could get a discount. “Desert Taxi” was $500 even then. I got my 50% off and I owed $250. I could work for other art from the gallery but I had to pay cash money for the Finsters. Read the rest of this entry »

Agriculture and Industry
Georgia, like other southern states, was predominantly rural and agricultural in the early decades of the twentieth century, and cotton was preeminently the crop of the region. The state’s economy was to a large extent dependent upon the success of the year’s crop, and fortunes could, and frequently did, rest on such variables as rain or lack of it, and after 1913 on the boll weevil. The post card views of cotton fields, gins, and compresses, and of town squares and city streets jammed with wagon loaded with bales, leave no doubt as to the importance of cotton. Small towns sometimes measured themselves against other small towns by how many gins they had. Farmers competed with one another for the distinction of bringing in the year’s first bale. One of the cards included here records for us the date on which W.A. Brannon delivered two hundred bales of cotton to Newnan.

There were other crops that were a part of the Georgia economy - peaches, for instance, especially the Elberta peach, famous long before anyone had heard of the Vidalia onion. Corn was one of the major crops in the early 1900s. Many of the state’s farmers grew sugarcane. Steamboats carried cotton, naval stores and other agricultural products down the Chattahoochee, Flint, Savannah, Coosa, Ocmulgee, Oconee, Altamaha and other Georgia rivers to ports at New Orleans, Apalachicola, Darien, Brunswick and Savannah. Read the rest of this entry »