On a quiet street in Edgewood, behind a white picket fence and an expansive porch with a slim wooden Santa beside the front door, is the home of Pat McCardle, who has championed this region’s folk art with same passion he has for old records, good rock ’n’ roll and Aliquippa High School football.
The McArdle home is brimming with the works of many who’d been unsung before he found them, along with others long famed. I invited myself over after receiving an email saying about 135 pieces from his collection will be auctioned —starting at $1 — starting Monday on through the online marketplace Everything But The House (EBTH). The auction ends next Sunday night.
The idea that something might go for a buck gives Mr. McArdle pause, but the man’s been taking risks his entire life. He’s old enough to collect Social Security — “I’m six-nine” is the way he gives his age — and he’s made his living all kinds of ways.
He was an iron worker who helped build the Westinghouse and U.S. Steel towers in the late 1960s, then drove tractor-trailers, and eventually spent about 18 years hosting record conventions that began with selling off his own collection. Then he got into booking rock acts with the singular goal of working his way up to R.E.M, which he brought to Pittsburgh for a half-full concert on a “million degree” night in 1985, and then a sold-out concert in the same place the next year.
He’d sell records and book acts, with the former a sure thing for a while and the latter allowing him to hang out with his heroes. A trip to see R.E.M. in Atlanta in the fall of 1987 led him to the home of the legendary folk artist Howard Finster in the southern reaches of Appalachia.
He showed me the painted wooden cheetah he bought from Mr. Finster that November day, with an inscription on the back urging him to put Finster poems on T-shirts and such to “help me save a sinking world.” He said the man who’d done album covers for R.E.M and Talking Heads told him, “you can do that for your own economy.”
And so Mr. McArdle began making and selling silk-screen prints and T-shirts with Finster’s words and images.
He bought a lot more of Finster’s work after that, and some are for sale in this auction, but “the one that hurts because it’s so super” is one by the late Brentwood artist, Andy “Pap” Flanigan. Mr. McArdle discovered him in the late 1990s when his son Reese, now 27, was then in grade school and the boy said he needed to use a rest room.
The McArdles walked into the old Point View Hotel on Brownsville Road in Brentwood and when Mr. McArdle saw a painting of the Mon Incline he asked the bartender who did it. One of the shot-and-beer regulars, Mr. McArdle was told. Soon enough, Mr. McArdle met the artist and then set up an exhibition of Mr. Flanigan’s “Pap Art” at a Shadyside gallery. Mr. Flanigan was 100 years old then.
This auction will sell only a fraction of Mr. McArdle’s collection. He let Brian Graves, co-founder of Everything But The House, have a shot at everything but what he’d hung on the walls of his home or had otherwise displayed. Before he let the man go through his collection, though, they bonded over some games of pool at the Take a Break Bar in Lawrenceville.
“He’s a very good shot — and so am I,” Mr. McArdle said.
Other artists in the sale include Marie Kelly, W. Glen Davis, Louise Pershing, Louise Scott and Robert Wright. Mr. McArdle discovered Mr. Wright’s work at a junk store in Wilkinsburg in the early 1990s. The man had been a landscaper at Calvary Cemetery in Hazelwood, where the quintessential Pittsburgh folk artist, John Kane, is buried.
When he mowed the graveyard lawn, Mr. Wright told Mr. McArdle, “I always gave Kane a special cut.”
I know few people who have more love for this region than Mr. McArdle, or are more conscious of its quirks. He can name every Hall of Fame quarterback who grew up in Western Pennsylvania, but says “we’re deep with art, too.” Everything he has, he bought from its creator, but “the artist makes the art so people can see it.” Whatever these pieces sell for, he feels good they’ll no longer be hidden in storage, and someone new can have the thrill of discovery.
Brian O’Neill: boneill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1947 or Twitter @brotheroneill
First Published: January 7, 2018, 5:00 a.m.