Art Shapes a Rural Alabama Compound

LIKE a medieval village, Butch Anthony’s 80-acre family compound is a self-contained universe, and every inch of it is an expression of his prodigious creative spirit. It makes a tempting destination for folk art aficionados, as well as the sort of art world tourists who’ve already ticked Marfa, Tex., or Joshua Tree, in the California desert, off their lists.

Mr. Anthony, a lanky and laconic 46-year-old who dresses exclusively in Liberty denim overalls (he owns 25 pairs) and a battered straw hat (he has 10), is a self-taught artist, builder and local hero, whom the state of Alabama once chose to make a Christmas tree ornament for the White House — the Bush 43 version. He is also the host of the Doo Nanny, the annual alt/folk art “micro” festival, as he calls it, that started as an “art party” he and two friends gave on the side of the road 15 years ago in nearby Pittsview, and moved to Mr. Anthony’s property here three years ago.

“There’s a 100-foot vagina we’re fixing to burn,” Mr. Anthony remarked recently while filling a garbage can in the back of his battered truck with water, a precautionary measure, one gathered, in case things got out of hand.

But why a vagina? “They’ve got a burning man, why not have a burning woman?”

Like Burning Man, the extreme art fair held each summer in the Nevada desert, the Doo Nanny offers both a burning effigy and an exercise in creative camping. Mr. Anthony has thoughtfully provided a tepee, an outdoor kitchen, a solar-powered shower, outhouses and a wood-fueled hot tub, all built from and decorated with the sort of handmade trash-into-art pieces — ethereal chandeliers pieced together with cow bones and twigs gnawed by beavers — that are his specialty.

It now attracts an intrepid crowd of makers and their fans who gather on the last weekend in March not only to show their work — and sell some, too, if they’re lucky — but to hang out with like-minded friends and partake of Mr. Anthony’s particular brand of Southern hospitality, which is certainly as homespun and country as his accent, but has an impish, renegade backbeat.

It is also a chance to see Mr. Anthony on his own, very atmospheric, turf.

His compound, which once belonged to his grandfather, a cotton farmer, is now home to Mr. Anthony; his father, Bishop Anthony, a retired insurance adjuster and occasional restaurateur; and sometimes Mr. Anthony’s partner, Natalie Chanin, and their 4-year-old daughter, Maggie. (She and Maggie come and go “on a part-time basis,” Ms. Chanin said, because her business — producing handmade clothes and soft goods under the Alabama Chanin label, which is sewn by local seamstresses and coveted by fashion world insiders — is run from her own home in Florence, Ala., a five-hour drive away.)

Other permanent residents include two peacocks, three chickens (Bob Ross, a blind 21-year-old white-crested Polish show rooster with a gift for fortune-telling, passed on last month), four dogs and a cat. Until recently, a tiny dancing donkey named Soapstick lived here, too — a YouTube video showcases his talent — but he kept escaping, and Mr. Anthony got tired of chasing him, so he gave Soapstick away.

Les Blank, the documentarian with an appetite for American originals (he has made films about Dizzy Gillespie and Alice Waters), came 12 years ago, and has been filming Mr. Anthony ever since.

When will the movie be done? “That’s a good question,” said Mr. Blank, who described Mr. Anthony as a kind of “national treasure.”

In any case, there’s much to see here, including the one-room log cabin Mr. Anthony built at 14 and the log house he began in 1988 and is still tweaking, made from heart pine salvaged from an old mill and put together with the help of his homemade rigging — cables and pulleys strung from the branches of pine trees. There are fields of artwork — like Dia: Beacon, but rural Alabama-style — that include enormous “bowls,” woven from beaver sticks, cow bones and old shoes and spray-painted white, and scraps of metal Mr. Anthony weaves together with hog wire to make siding, a material he has used in projects for the Rural Studio, the Auburn University architecture program that creates innovative housing for Alabama’s poorest residents.

A truck ride away, but still on the property, is the Possum Trot, a barbecue restaurant and junk auction house run by Mr. Anthony and his father, which comes to life Friday nights. Last week, the auction proceeds, $500, benefited the bands Mr. Anthony invited to the Doo Nanny, which this year cost him $5,700. There were about 1,000 visitors, whose combined donations totaled $1,500. “Maybe someday we’ll make some money,” he said.

Finally, there is the Museum of Wonder, a barnful of curiosities — the “world’s largest gallbladder,” a replica of a human skeleton, a stuffed chicken — and more of Mr. Anthony’s artwork, which includes 19th-century portraits painted over with crisp white images of skeletons and old photographs affixed to paintings of mythical creatures of his own imagining.