Closed for more than 25 years, the World’s Folk Art Church at Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden in Northwest Georgia will reopen to the public on Sunday, June 22.
Beginning in the mid-1980s, Howard Finster constructed this iconic five-story structure atop a modest wooden country church that adjoined his growing folk art environment in the Pennville community just north of the Chattooga County seat of Summerville. Finster purchased the abandoned original one-story church building with partial funding awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts based on a grant written by the artist’s friend Victor Faccinto, then-director of Wake Forest University’s Hanes Art Gallery.
Working without detailed architectural drawings, Finster completed his 56-foot-tall structure in July 1987. He used the building for several purposes -- an art studio, historic artifact museum and storage for a variety of found and donated materials that the artist was saving for any number of projects across Paradise Garden.
Including the World’s Folk Art Church, the Garden was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2011. Finster himself designed the lofty vernacular architecture creation, and served as its the main contractor, guided by his vision instead of detailed architectural drawings.
“When I got that church, I didn’t wanna just leave it like it was,” the artist explained in Tom Patterson’s 1989 book Howard Finster: Stranger From Another World – Man of Visions Now on This Earth. “I had a vision to build that big steeple on top of it and a big solar heat room on the back with windows all over it. I wanted it to look like these great mansions that I seen in my visions.”
Throughout his art career, Finster repeatedly drew and painted these “heavenly mansions” – towering, often exotic-looking, spire-topped structures that were inhabited angels. In drawing or painting these mansions, Finster suggested the promise of a heavenly afterlife for those who conducted lives aligned with God’s teachings.
But the World’s Folk Art Church was different -- a 3-D heavenly mansion rooted in the Earth.
The folk artist unquestionably had grandiose notions of its potential. In John F. Turner's 1989 book Howard Finster, Man of Visions: The Life and Work of a Self-Taught Artist, Finster shared his vision: “People can go to church in numbers or alone and get the messages by reading them from the walls or shooting photos with their cameras. They can carry the messages with them when they leave the church and give them to people all over the world. It will belong to the whole population of earth planet. People all over the world can see and read from it wherever they may be. Even angels will look upon it.”
Finster even spoke of plans to build an aerial tramway from the church that would wind through the Garden. Alas, the forces of nature kept his highest aspirations from being achieved. Inside the church, Finster had constructed a curving wooden staircase to the top, so that visitors could peer out upon his greatest creation, Paradise Garden. But, after several years of the elements slowly extracting a toll outside and inside the structure, visitors were not allowed to access the upper floors due to growing safety concerns. Finally, Finster closed the World’s Folk Art Church in 1999, just two years before he died on October 22, 2001, at age 84.
Still, since its completion in 1987, this Paradise Garden landmark has survived hundreds of heavy thunderstorms and several area tornadoes.
In 2018, the nonprofit Paradise Garden Foundation received a National Endowment for the Arts grant to create a preservation plan. Structural and condition assessments were completed by Lord Aeck Sargent, an architectural firm specializing in historic preservation. Rehabilitation and conservation work stabilized and safeguarded the structure. Phase 1 of the project was completed in 2021.
Even as the stabilization project was still underway, former Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution Gerald Wayne Clough, a civil engineer, visited Paradise Garden in 2020 and insisted on climbing the winding stairs to the top of the World’s Folk Art Church.
“You know I saved and rehabilitated most of the historic museum buildings in D.C. for the Smithsonian, and I’m going to tell you that this unique historic structure is a national treasure worth saving!” Clough proclaimed.
By September 2023, a successful capital campaign had produced a sizable lead donation from an anonymous philanthropist. Many other Finster admirers and public funders made donations or extended grants, including the Jim and Lynne Browne Family, the Dan and Merrie Boone Foundation, Thomas and Tommye Scanlin, and the Georgia Council for the Arts.
The initial stabilization project laid the groundwork for Phase 2 of the World Folk Art Church’s conservation. In June 2024, a full rehabilitation of the structure began – guided again by Lord Aeck Sargent, carefully completed by the master carpenters of Summerville’s Willingham Construction Services.
A series of Summer Solstice Celebration events are planned for the reopening. The World’s Folk Art Church will be open to the public starting Sunday, June 22, 11am-5pm, with gospel music by Jeneal Johnson and daughter Jackie Shropshire-Hammond and the Chattooga Garden Club famous Paradise pimento cheese sandwiches and homemade southern pound cake.
A special celebration for Chattooga County residents is scheduled for Saturday, June 28, 11am-5pm with tours throughout the day and serving a specialty designed World’s Folk Art Church cake.
Paradise Garden is open to the public year-round Tuesdays through Sundays, 11am-5pm. Special tour group bookings are available.
Chattooga County Residents -- Free
General Admission -- Adults $15, Senior (62+) $10, Students $5, Children 12 & under free