American Art Collaborative

Howard Finster wanted to celebrate "all the inventions of mankind" in his art (Liza Kirwin, "The Reverend Howard Finster," American Art, Summer 2002). He created Paradise Garden next to his home in Pennville, Georgia, an environmental sculpture that shows portraits of such greats as Henry Ford, Leonardo da Vinci, and George Washington amid towering constructions of television parts and bicycle frames. Finster often combined modern technology with messages from God, and in this piece he inscribed lines from his sermons, including "Jesus is coming back" and "Get ready to meet God.
"I am my own T.V. picking up visions all through the night hours of darkness from thin air my pictures come in over a pattern wave beyond the light of the sun." The artist, probably 1978, Howard Finster papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution