Think back, now: Remember that craft closet in the basement? The one full of beads, and acrylic paints, and yarn, and strange multicolored plastic things that you put on a pegboard and fused with an iron? Everything we made was art, back then; everything got hung on the refrigerator or stapled to a bulletin board or displayed in the classroom on PTA nights. Those were the days.

Though at least a few of my former professors would probably convulse to hear me say it, I think the reason folk art is so fun to look at is that it reminds me of the imagination and ingenuity I once possessed. But it's summer, so I'm going to blissfully push off academic skirmishes over art vs. craft in favor of an artist who used everything from corrugated cardboard to chicken bones to express his visions of the world. A recent exhibition (closed July 8) at New York's American Folk Art Museum celebrated the work of Eugene Von Bruenchenhein (1910-1983): a "Freelance Artist—Poet and Sculptor—Inovator[sic]—Arrow maker and Plant man—Bone artifacts constructor—Photographer and Architect—Philosopher," according to the helpful self-definition the artist inscribed on a kitchen plaque displayed in the exhibition. Von Bruenchenhein lived mostly in Milwaukee, didn't finish high school, and was self-taught. This was the first in-depth show of the artist's work. And although the exhibition is now closed, you can get a taste of it in the catalogue, available from the AFA Museum.

Von Bruenchenhein would be formally classified as an "outsider" artist—a category most broadly applied to the untrained. If you're not familiar with the designation, perhaps you know of Henry Darger, whose tracings, drawings, and imaginative stories were made famous by the 2004 documentary In the Realms of the Unreal (a small selection of Darger's work is displayed on the same floor as this exhibit). Like Darger's strange creations, Von Bruenchenhein's work is the product of an imagination few grown-ups are bold or uninhibited enough to explore, careening boldly from painted visions of cities to portraits to intricate abstract geometry to flowers.

The chronologically arranged exhibit begins with photography of his wife—playful, sweetly awkward, and occasionally naked pin-ups. Next the artist turned to ceramics formed into delicate foliage, then paintings of mythical cities, often on corrugated cardboard and framed with masking tape. He made anthropomorphic miniature chairs and towering buildings intricately constructed from leftover chicken bones which he dried in the oven and painted silver, using donated automobile paint and brushes made from strands of his wife's hair stuck through pen barrels and straws. And, finally, he turned to pen and paper, with abstract geometric drawings reminiscent of the Spirograph drawings familiar to anyone who has been a kid in the last half-century.

The work is pleasing and, at times, quite skillful. Von Bruenchenhein was certainly talented, but he also spent a great deal of time doggedly making art (sometimes a painting each night) in quantity, and the practice served him well. And he was fiercely determined to circumvent barriers that confound the unresourceful: his scavenged materials hint both at tight finances (he worked as a florist and a baker, and after a forced early retirement in 1959, lived for the next 24 years on a monthly $220 Social Security check) and at his real love—just making stuff.

Admittedly, the AFA Museum's exhibition was small, and one gets the idea that much wilder visions likely were among the many pieces left out of this show. But it raised an interesting question: Would his work be as celebrated had he had access to proper paintbrushes and canvases? Would he have resorted to making these fantastic chicken-bone sculptures?

We'll never know, of course, but it does make me wonder why I stopped making jewelry from buttons in the big glass jar in the closet in the basement, or when exactly I gave up making creatures from pillowcases and scraps of fabric. At what point do we start blaming our lack of creativity on lack of resources? Eugene Von Bruenchenheim reminds us that we have no excuse: all we need is a good imagination and the dinner leftovers.

Alissa Wilkinson edits Comment and teaches English and humanities at The King's College in New York City. Her articles and criticism appear in Christianity Today, World, Paste, and other publications.

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