Trouble in Paradise

Birmingham, Alabama-based evangelist preacher and real estate investor Tommy Littleton owns a garden and Chicago art dealer David Leonardis wants it. Sounds like a modern-day Bible tale.

The garden isn't just a garden, it seems, but an "art environment" created by folk artist Howard Finster that has fallen into disrepair. Littleton and the nonprofit Paradise Gardens are trying raise the money to bring it back from the brink, but thus far they've met with little luck. Leonardis — he owns Finster's house and has restored it, creating a museum — thinks he'd be more successful.

The question is, if this garden is, indeed, Finster's "greatest work," how come a museum or some other art institution hasn't stepped in to tend to them? Littleton told the New York Times' Brenda Goodman that because the nonprofit is an "upstart organization," they'd had trouble getting "a major entity to believe in the project and fund it." Last month, Susan Crawley, a curator from the High Museum in Atlanta, which has some of Finster's work in its collection, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Bo Emerson, "Rescuing environments outside a museum is not part of the brief of an art museum." Didn't the Guggenheim buy Richard Prince's Second House in upstate New York?