Throughout the world and over the centuries the phenomenon of decorating the home environment has been practiced with a variety of intentions and a myriad of visual results including temprorary observations of festivals as well as permanent installations. To consider the artistic contribution of the latter is the underlying thesis of the curators and photographers whose work is presented in the Lore Degenstein Gallery. More than sixty photographs document the curators' world-wide investigation of the efforts of artists--largely self-taught--whose homes have become the canvas for their art. Some represent private contemplative responses; others exemplify a need for public awareness, perhaps even in the spirit of advertising a political or religious point of view. Often the ornamentation developed out of an elaborated garden design. Raymond Isodore, a cemetary caretaker in Chartres, France, sought to embellish his home with bits of glass and broken ceramic plates creating mosaics which ornament the garden walls. As his passion grew, so further did the impact of his need to expand, finally into the house. Every aspect of the house is covered with mosaic decoration, even the furniture. Beginning his work around 1938, he continuted to work on his property until shortly before his death in 1964. The impact of Isadore's work imposes imags of the cathedral and details of nature, almost to the exclusion of anything organic in his environment. Following a trend in the artworld today to look to "outsider art" as a sort of new frontier the exhibition celebrates the self-taught artist and the message conveyed by the work. Some of the photographs show work fraught with religious opinions, often dependant upon verbage displayed as signs or as messages on buildings. Finding public opinion negative in some instances the artist creates a message of confrontation. W. C. Rice's "Miracle Cross Garden" in Prattville, Alabama, is covered with hundreds of crosses bearing messages which engender tension with his neighbors. Alternatively, Samuel P. Dinsmoor's "Garden of Eden" in Lucas, Kansas, describes an Old Testament morality through allegorical tableaux created out of concrete. It is the oldest complete, self-taught artist's environment in the United States. Seeking to document sites of self-taught artists has been the quest of the exhibition's curators who have identified numerous examples hoping to preserve them. Finding that most of the artists they have encountered appear to have something to say, Roger Manley, author of the accompanying catalogue, notes: They react to their own worlds of racial injustice, religious doubt, love, and loneliness. Most of them display the kind of enormous productivity that would be impossible to sustain without the commitment that comes from having a definite point of view--a point of view nurtured by its origins in a very particularized context. Manley identifies means of supproting the art through foundations and societies, charging the museum with responsibility to inspire such preservation. In some European installations, preserving the work has been an effective goal. One of the earliest preserved environments was created in 1879 near Lyon, France by Ferdinand Cheval. It defines a type of architectural construction that suggests ancient civilizations and ritual forms. The building is four-stories tall and over eighty-six feet long, covered with figures and verbal commentary carved in stone. He called it his Ideal Palace, a tribute to his own creativity. The contributions of eleven photographers comprise the exhibition, facilitating both an understanding of the idiosyncratic effect of the artwork and a dialogue with the artworld, raising new questions about the nature of the creative process. The catalogue of the exhibition, written by Roger Manley and Mark Sloan, will be available at the Lore Degenstein Gallery. La Maison Pique-Assiette. Raymond Isidore. 1938-64. Color photograph by Ted Degener.