Buildings of JunkJoe Doughbeck (1883 - 1964)

Joe Doughbeck’s “buildings of junk” were constructed over an unknown number of years on a small plot of land at the edge of Wilson, Kansas, a farm town only twenty miles from the art environments of S.P. Dinsmoor and Ed Root. Doughbeck was born in 1883 and served in the United States Army in his adult years. Upon his return, he built at least three structures (a house and two sheds), a walkway, and a decorative fence from salvaged materials, including sheets of tin, wooden boards, fluorescent light bulbs, discarded Christmas trees, plastic flowers, and old sewing machine legs. Along the fence and exterior of the house, Doughbeck painted alternating vertical stripes in blue and red-orange. On one side of the fence, he displayed a figure cut from tar paper which was decorated with silver paint and aluminum foil. In order to have “roll-down windows” in the walls of his house, Doughbeck repurposed salvaged car doors and incorporated them into the building’s structure. Due to the particularity of his home within the community of Wilson, Doughbeck suffered physical attacks and property vandalism regularly. As a Mennonite in a largely Catholic community, Doughbeck felt persecuted for his faith; in his attempts to do research on Doughbeck for his Master’s thesis at Cornell, art historian and artist Gregg Blasdel records having great difficulty gleaning information about Doughbeck from neighbors, and notes that the artist spoke fervently against the “fish-eaters” (Catholics) in his community. Upon Doughbeck’s death in 1964, his buildings were razed. 

Narrative by Gabrielle Christiansen, 2024

Sources: 

• Gregg Blasdel, “Some Unrecognized Kansas artists,” May 1963, Gregg Blasdel collection, SPACES Archives
• Gregg Blasdel, “Biographical sketches of four Kansas artists,” Gregg Blasdel collection, SPACES Archives
• Gregg Blasdel, “Catalog: Grass-roots Artists,” Gregg Blasdel collection, SPACES Archives

Gabrielle Christiansen, Gregg Blasdel

Wilson, Kansas
Latitude/Longitude: 38.8250106 / -98.4753437

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