Richard Brown: A Legend in His Own Time
Hutchinson, Kansas
A miniature town of home-made statues occupies the front lawn of an otherwise unexceptional house. All appear to be made of rebar-covered cement. There are buffalo and cattle, an Indian brave on a palomino pony, and a mustachioed cowboy with a flying saucer hat.
"Richard Brown: A Legend in his Own Time," states a neatly hand-lettered sign next to the statues. Brown, it explains, created the artwork himself, but the sign hints that he is no longer alive. "If he had a Problem he Could Figure iT ouT WhaT a SmarT Man," the sign says, using its own unique capitalization and sentence construction. "WhaT A TRUE Cowboy he lived LiFE To The FulleST He ShoWed Me What liFe was all AbouT." The sign is attributed to Steven Brown, the legendary Richard Brown's son, and concludes, "I Love My Dad WiTh all My heart."
We later learned that Richard Brown is in fact dead, and that the sculptures came from "Lost Acres Ranch," a folk art environment of cement statues built by Richard Brown in the early 1990s.