Tom Patterson at the Etowah National Monument near Cartersville, Georgia, 1980.
Photograph by Jonathan Williams.
The Nerve Museum website is a forum for selected things I've written over the years - essays, reviews, articles, and other pieces that seem to have some continued relevance or retrospective value. The primary categories are contemporary art and culture, with a particular focus on what is now commonly called Outsider Art, after the title of an influential book by the late cultural scholar Roger Cardinal. As the author of books about Saint EOM (Eddie Owens Martin) and Howard Finster, both originally published in the late 1980s, I was pegged early in my career as an authority on Outsider Art in the American South. The only authority I claim is that of an attentive writer, but I admit to having a longstanding interest in and enthusiasm for the subject.
Tom Patterson at the Etowah National Monument near Cartersville, Georgia, 1980.
Photograph by Jonathan Williams.
For the last thirty years and counting, my primary residence has been a 540-square-foot garret apartment in a 1920s bungalow in a small city in North Carolina. Most of the wall space is covered with paintings, drawings, photographs, and other works by artists I've written about or otherwise known personally, and most of the furniture stores a library of some 2,000 books. Volumes not shelved tend to be stacked on tables, chairs, or other available surfaces. Three walk-in closets function mainly as repositories for my archives and additional artworks.
When my late brother J. Hunter Patterson visited, he (jokingly) observed that the place made him nervous, constantly concerned that he might accidentally knock something over and start a chain reaction of collapsing and overturned objects - a chaotic jumble of books and art. Hunter took to calling the premises my Nerve Museum.
Artist: Hieronymus, NERVE MUSEUM sign, mixed mediums on cabinet door, 2005.
A self-selection of miscellaneous writings on outsider art and related topics, originally intended as a book manuscript. It includes its own table of contents and my brief introduction, which, among other things, explains the structure of this selection. Most of these writings have been previously published in slightly different forms, as detailed in italicized notes at the end of each pre-published piece. The cool gray lines of type are here and there relieved by captioned and credited photographs.
Four interlinked memoirs reflecting on art, culture, identity, and the creative imagination in the 1970s and 1980s:
An early version of the first book's opening chapter was published in 1984 as The Phantom Sheik, a chapbook from Binturong Press/The Bisbee Press Collective in Bisbee, Arizona. Slightly different versions of two chapters from the first book have been previewed in regional literary journals - “Reconstituting Black Mountain” in Appalachian Journal (2017/2018), and “The Convivial Anarchists” in St. Andrews Review (2018). The entire third memoir was published in book form in 2021 by Hiding Press in collaboration with the Jargon Society. The other three are ostensibly complete and currently circulating among potential publishers, but in the meantime interested parties can read them here, piecemeal or in full, in or out of chronological order. For the most part, individual chapters are written to function independently as stand-alone stories. The author is grateful to the Arts Council of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County, North Carolina, for financial assistance through its artist fellowship program.
With artist Mose Tolliver at Tolliver's home in Montgomery, Alabama, 1993.
Photograph by Lynne Ingram.