Born in Valley Head in 1916, Finster spent decades as a preacher in Alabama and Georgia. He said he had visions from the age of three, and began creating folk art with Bible verses and themes ...

Local fans of Howard Finster, the legendary Baptist preacher-turned-folk artist responsible for more than 46,000 works over a 25-year painting career, used to have to trek all the way to Georgia ...

Closed for more than 25 years, the World’s Folk Art Church at Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden in Summerville reopened to the ...

Finster’s work began to gain popularity in New York art galleries in the early 1980s, and received its widest exposure when the Georgia-based rock band R.E.M. asked him to create the cover for ...

Finster’s artistic triumphs, his cover art for REM and Talking Heads albums, his dying wishes, and everything in between are documented in this walk-in journal.

By the early 1990s, Finster had made enough money from art to move into a big white house, the kind his wife had always wanted, in nearby Summerville. He turned the gardens over to his children.

The Rev. Howard Finster was a preacher first and an artist second. But one look at anything he touched during his 84 years on earth — from early examples of woodwork to the thousands of portr… ...

Finster, who saw his art as a religious calling, said of the Talking Heads album: “I think there’s 26 religious verses on that first cover I done for them.

When Howard Finster died in 2001, his famed Paradise Garden folk art environment slid into a decade-long decline, and the steady flow of tourists visi ...