Dull Tool Dim Bulb

Odd Fellows Ark of the Covenant Folk Art Needlework from a Banner

Odd Fellows Ark of the Covenant Folk Art Needlework fragment from a banner.
No date. Collection Jim Linderman

Antique Folk Art Child's Needlecraft Dove and Text

Antique Folk Art Child's Needlecraft. Two pieces 1905. Dove and Christmas Message. Collection Jim Linderman

Art Car ! You can Come in Praying if this van is Swaying Jesus Freak Van

You can Come in Praying if this van is Swaying Jesus Freak Van circa 1990 original photographs Jim Linderman

Antique American Folk Art Wood Carving Woman in Pink Sweater

Antique American Folk Art Wood Carving Woman in Pink Sweater.
Collection Jim Linderman

Justin McCarthy Blond Beauty Self-Taught American Folk Artist

Justin McCarthy "Blond Beauty" Self-Taught American Folk Artist Crayon mounted on wallpaper scraps c. 1920 (Illustrated in the catalog Justin McCarthy Allentown Art Museum 1985.
Collection Jim Linderman

Old Folk Art Carving / Sculpture of a Baby

Old Folk Art Carving / Sculpture of a Baby. Anonymous, circa 1950? Collection Jim Linderman

Antique Folk Art Wax Figure of a Seated Woman

Antique Folk Art Wax Figure of a Seated Woman. Collection Jim Linderman

Folk Art Environment Vernacular Architecture Photograph Anonymous

Folk Art Environment Vernacular Architecture Photograph Anonymous. A grotto-like installation around living quarters. No date. Thanks to BOX LOT on Facebook.
See also the 250 page book In Situ: American Folk Art in Place by Jim Linderman

Not Available on Trivago! Vintage Hotel Snapshot of Uncle Sam and his Cabins

No way to compare rates for this patriotic "no tell hotel" once operating somewhere in America....(Or Canada. See comment at end of post)

Vintage anonymous snapshot, no date. Collection Jim Linderman
See also IN SITU-AMERICAN FOLK ART IN PLACE

Folk Art Figural Ice Sculpture in Minnesota 1937

An interesting folk art sculpture made from SNOW in St. Paul, Minnesota 1937. The creation even shows a pair of folk art portraits on the wall! Figural snow and ice sculpture have been staples of the St. Paul Winter Sports Carnival since 1885, when the city decided to create an ice palace while the prominent Montreal, Canada festival was on lock down for a smallpox outbreak!

An ephemeral folk art sculpture which has melted away.

Many other images of the festival are collected by the Minnesota History Center HERE but this one does not appear.

St. Paul Winter Sports Carnival 1937 Real Photograph Post Card collection Jim Linderman

Similar examples of unusual folk art and sculpture appears in the recent 250 page book IN SITU: AMERICAN FOLK ART IN PLACE by Jim Linderman. Available in affordable ebook and paperback HERE.

Checkers in Prison Anonymous Watercolor Painting

Checkers in Prison Anonymous Watercolor Painting circa 1955 3" x 4"
Collection Jim Linderman

Antique Folk Art Birds at Water Feeder Sculpture Yard Art

Antique Folk Art Birds at Water Feeder Sculpture Yard Art Collection Jim Linderman

Large Folk Art Carving / Sculpture Articulated Man with Big Feet and Little Hands.

Large Folk Art Carving / Sculpture Articulated Man with Big Feet and Little Hands. Nearly 22 inches tall. Figure is wired to "walk" when cranked. Circa 1940?
Collection Jim Linderman

Make-Do Primitive Folk Art one drawer Stand / Desk in Original Paint Antique

A beautiful Antique Make-Do Primitive Folk Art one drawer Stand / Desk in Original Paint. The wood came from a crate used to ship "Noiseless" matches, and the legs are wood branches. With characteristics of a twig stand, but heightened by original paint in a lovely Green / Robin's egg blue.
34 inches tall.

Collection Jim Linderman

Victor Joseph Gatto Nude Woman Oil Painting on Board American Outsider Artist

"Most of Gatto's paintings—scenes of everyday life in New York, exotic cultures, historical events, and tropical episodes —are packed with endless detail built up with many layers of minute brushstrokes. Gatto, a bachelor and a former featherweight boxer, lived with his widowed stepmother in the section of New York known as "Little Italy." Painters Elaine and Willem De Kooning lived in the next apartment in the late 1930s, and Elaine De Kooning and other artists encouraged Gatto's painting. His work received critical acclaim through several exhibitions in New York galleries during the 1940s and 1950s, his most productive period." Lynda Roscoe Hartigan Made with Passion: The Hemphill Folk Art Collection in the National Museum of American Art (Washington, D.C. and London: National Museum of American Art with the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990)

Oil on Board c. 1950 Collection Jim Linderman

Gatto in the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Gatto papers at Syracuse University

The Art and Times of Victor Joseph Gatto in the Clarion 1988
Text in full begins on page 58 HERE

Watch your Fingers. Vintage Chinese Fireworks

Antique Folk Art Sculpture Man sliding into a Coffin

Antique Folk Art Sculpture Man sliding into a Coffin. Depression era. Collection Jim Linderman

How to Cook with Spirits Vernacular Photograph

How to Cook with Spirits Rotary Club Gaggle of Goblins
1946
Books and Affordable Ebooks by the author of Dull Tool Dim Bulb HERE

Winner! Buffalo Bill Folk Art made from 4,000 inches of Crepe Paper !

First prize winner May Hauser poses with her folk art Buffalo Bill sculpture made from a coat hanger and 4,000 inches of twisted crepe paper.

Original Press Photograph 1946 Collection Jim Linderman

Art of the Japanese Baseball Card

1949 set of Japanese Baseball Cards.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jim Linderman

"...Linderman is widely regarded as one of the foremost figures in a field of vernacular art collectors working beyond the margins of most institutional axioms and impulses, in what is essentially it's own self-taught art form."
Ursula Magazine Hauser & Wirth 2019

"Linderman produces the most sublime books on dreamy, arcane subjects, sexy stuff, too, all with rare one-of-a-kind images." Craig Yoe 2017

"...disclosing an underground history of American popular culture one oddball tale at a time"
John Strausbaugh in The New York Times

"...one of the blog writers to watch for"
ARTSlant

"...wonderful, extraordinary, fascinating, remarkable and profound" Fans in a Flashbulb International Center of Photography Museum 2016

"Brilliantly Astute, Acerbic and Aesthetic Jim Linderman"
The Museum of Everything 2014

"Dull Tool Dim Bulb is always worth a visit" THINGS Magazine 2016

"...grumpy..." The Austin Chronicle 2014

"Perpetually ahead of the collecting curve...a one man Taschen. An authentically curious individual...diligently archiving the forgotten curiosities of American History"

Emma Higgins in Art Hack May 2012

"Jim Linderman likes Art, Antiques and Photography and his collection of Vernacular Photography, Folk Art, Ephemera and Curiosities is a wonderful place..."
LifeElsewhere with Norman B. 2014

"...collected over the years by Jim Linderman, a character who seems the perfect subject for a Harvey Pekar comic. Linderman treats collecting like a calling, and his finds have a resulting air of authority, stunning in their capture of bygone picturesque moments."
Derek Taylor Dusted

"The pictures, discarded artifacts of ecstatic Americana, come from the stash of Jim Linderman, who in his introduction recalls advice he’s plainly taken to heart: “Collect the heck” out of whatever you find interesting."
Drew Jubera Paste Magazine

"His interest in art is rivaled only by his interest in music, and one expression informs the other. He pursues objects with thoroughness and an innate sense of curiosity..."
Tanya Heinrich Folk Art Magazine

"Linderman acknowledges the obscure at the same time that he elevates it.... His collections tell vast stories in sotto voce, allowing curios and objects shadowed by mainstream culture and ideology to converse and be heard. What we hear is an enormous American sub-culture speaking in forbidden, marginalized languages: stuff discovered boxed in the attic out of embarrassment or zealotry, smutty ash trays crowing next to religious pamphlets, each claiming a part of the complex, sometimes contradictory, always conflicted American imagination, a chaos of memories that will one day vanish."
Joe Bonomo Author of Conversations With Greil Marcus, Jerry Lewis Lost and Found and No Such Thing As Was

"...he's one of the world's greatest pickers."
Brian Wallis in The New York Times

"Documenting--one clipping at a time--the scrapbook of a leg and garter aficionado that was dumpster-dived in Virginia in the 60s" "...an outstanding image-archaeologist who has compiled a shelf-ful of worthy and unique photographic histories."
William Smith Hang Fire Books

"Linderman has a knack for discovering untold stories and introducing them to a wider audience"
Joey Lin Anonymous Works

"Jim Linderman...makes us all look a little puny"
Could it be Madness-this?

"...insatiable collector of ephemera and ringleader behind an incredible circus of blogs — including the treasure trove dull tool dim bulb"
The Cynephile

"Yo no sé ustedes pero creo que es uno de los mejores sitios que he visitado en mucho tiemp"
Color Me in Blog

"...there's something beyond the endless photos and postcards and weird propaganda from another time that he lovingly documents - I think it's the collection as a whole, the portrait of a person fascinated with culture and communication. I have met people like this before, and in reading Dull Tool Dim Bulb I feel I have been lucky enough to meet one more. This site is a goldmine in terms of links..."
The Hyggelic Life October 2009

"Linderman is always on the lookout for the new and exciting"
Chuck and Jan Rosenak Contemporary American Folk Art

"...an amazing collection..."
Revel in New York October 2009

"Jim Linderman has a nice little colllection of interesting books and blogs...But every so often he just loses it."
American Digest March 2010

"FOR MOST OF HIS LIFE, COLLECTOR JIM LINDERMAN has searched high and low for authentic things--unique and special objects that define the artistic culture of the American experience. From folk art to popular culture, from pulp fiction to Delta Blues-- Jim is a walking authority on so many things American they are too numerous to mention. One thing is certain-- his collecting interests are for things that have fallen through the cracks, those things lost and forgotten--the box of material under the table at the flea market booth. If it wasn't for dedicated collectors like Jim Linderman-- so many important objects about our culture would have surely been lost to time and indifference."

"Jim Linderman maintains a most interesting blog about the most amazing things from his collection—a site he calls “Dull Tool Dim Bulb,” the only curse words his father ever uttered. I love it, and read it everyday."
"...an excellent writer and I devour your blog daily. I am impressed at your deep knowledge of things within your niche..."
John Foster Accidental Mysteries

"I am grateful to Jim Linderman for first alerting me to the existence of the 1930s Spiritualist hymn "Jesus is My Air-o-plane."
William Fagaly New Orleans Museum of Art, Author Tools of her Ministry: The art of Sister Gertrude Morgan

"Linderman describes a long gone world...(he) claims not to be a writer but he is most certainly an excellent researcher..."
BOOKSTEVE

"Jim Linderman, King of the Internet Ephemeral Arts"
Spaniel Rage

"Jim is a fantastic historian...show him some love"
Astrid Daley Fringe Pop / Sin-A-Rama

"Almost an experimental narrative"
Idiopath

"He came to us with hundreds of jaw-dropping baptism photos that he'd been collecting for 25 years," Ledbetter explains. "By the time he found us, he'd already done half a lifetime's works, and he trusted us to handle it properly." Lance Ledbetter in Creative Loafing 10/13/11

Fair Use

Though the images, which I have myself largely scanned from my personal collection of photographs and ephemera, some are subject to © by the artist, syndicate that distributed them or otherwise the individual artists. The use here is regardless covered by the U.S. fair use laws because:
1. The image illustrates an educational article; its inclusion in the article adds significantly to understanding the text because it is a historical sample of the art covered in the critical commentary, and shows use of an innovative style. Therefore the image substantially improves the educational value of the article.
2. The image is used as the primary means of visual identification of the article topic, which directly concerns a visual artist, and is indicative of the style for which hethe artists are renowned.
3. Images are of lower resolution than the original. The image is not used here for profit.

4. It is not in any way replaceable with an uncopyrighted or freely copyrighted image pertinent to the work referenced in the article

The copyright for some images are most likely owned by either the publisher, the writer(s) and/or artist(s) which produced them originally.

Any other uses of this image may be copyright infringement.

Although most of the images here are original photography and objects owned by the author and in the author's personal collection, we cannot absolutely guarantee the exact copyright status of the items or offer written assurance that every or any aspect of this work is completely cleared for all usages. Responsibility for making an independent legal assessment of an item and securing any necessary permissions ultimately rests with persons desiring to use the item.

Any Trademarks used in this item listing are used for strictly descriptive purposes only. No association or endorsement is implied or inferred. No character or trademark ownership is given or implied.

If you are the owner of any aspect of an item which you believe to be copyrighted, please contact us immediately at j.winkel4@gmail.com