The Paradise Garden Foundation has an annual operations budget of about $40,000.
So its officials were thrilled Tuesday to announce they had received a $445,000 grant to operate and renovate Paradise Garden, Howard Finster's four-acre collection of buildings, sculpture and other visionary folk art near Summerville, Ga.
"That will be a [vitamin] B-12 shot for our project," foundation Executive Director Jordan Poole said. "It's the start of something good."
The grant money will cover such things as labor and materials to convert Finster's former studio into a museum and welcome center, dredging the small canals that Finster built to drain the swampy site and stabilizing the World Folk Art Church, a distinctive structure with a circular tower that Finster, a one-time Baptist preacher, built atop an existing church on the site.
The grant comes from ArtPlace, a new national collaboration of 11 major foundations including the Ford, Rockefeller, Kresge and Andrew W. Mellon foundations; six of the nation's largest banks, such as Bank of America, Citi and Deutsche Bank; and eight federal agencies, one of which is the National Endowment for the Arts.
ArtPlace made 47 grants nationwide to a pool of 2,200 applicants to support artworks that "improve quality of place."
The Paradise Garden Foundation got the only ArtPlace grant awarded in Georgia. The other regional group to get a grant was the Glass House Collective, which got $300,000 to revitalize East Chattanooga's blighted Glass Street commercial area.
"I think our selling point is the economic development potential that this site has through tourism," Chattooga County Sole Commissioner Jason Winters said. "Those dollars are going to be able to do things at that site that we thought were years away."
The Paradise Garden grant will pay for marketing materials and "wayfaring signage" to help visitors find the site, which is tucked away in a residential neighborhood.
"We know it's a special place. We hope that it gets on everybody's 'bucket list,'" foundation board member Janey Byington said.
The ArtPlace grant also will buy a house near Paradise Garden to provide an artist-in-residence facility for artists and school and college groups. Funding is also available for future art camps on the property.
The grant also will pay for an executive director to oversee the renovation project.
Chattooga County has a good number of self-taught artists, Poole said. The Vision Gallery that opened in March in downtown Summerville is run by about 20 self-taught artists, he noted.
Self-taught artistry may stem from the practice of traditional crafts, he said, noting that Dalton, Ga.'s carpeting industry owes its birth to the traditional craft of tufting.
"We've just got a lot of self-taught artists in this county. I don't know what the anomaly is, how it occurred here," Poole said. "It's not unusual to be a self-taught artist here."