Boundaries - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 182

second coming. In 1950, Hampton rented an unheated, poorly lit garage in a
deteriorating neighborhood, telling his landlord that he was "working on
something" that couldn't fit into his boarding- house room. There, until his
death in 1964, he built one of the great works of American folk sculpture:
The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General
Assembly, now on display in the National Museum of American Art, in
Washington, D.C.
Hampton would finish his janitorial duties at midnight and then work at the
garage for five or six hours thereafter. Let no man judge with ill intent the
motivation of James Hampton or Helen Martins. Their visions gave joy and
purpose to lives that much of society might have deemed unworthy of notice,
or in a final phase of decline.
Hampton's throne contains 177 separate pieces (see Figure 5.1), mounted on
rising platforms, and symmetrically disposed about the central structure
(Figure 5.2), presumably Christ's throne for his second coming. Hampton
crafted his pieces with consummate ingenuity and patience, from bits and
fragments of used or discarded objects. Most larger pieces are constructed
upon a base of old furniture. The central throne is an armchair with faded red
cloth cushions; two semicircular offertories are fashioned from a large round
table, sawed in half. (Merchants in a used-furniture district near Hampton's
garage recalled that he often browsed among their wares, and then returned
with a child's wagon to haul away his treasures.) Other pieces have no such
substantial base. Some are built up from layers of insulation board, others
from hollow cardboard cylinders that had supported rolls of carpeting.
Around these foundations, Hampton wove, wrapped, nailed, and otherwise
affixed his glittering ornaments. He scavenged the neighborhood for gold and
aluminum foil—from store displays, cigarette boxes, kitchen rolls; he even
paid neighborhood bums for the foil on their wine bottles, and carried a sack
wherever he went to hold any bits and pieces found on the streets. He also
gathered light- bulbs, desk blotters, sheets of plastic, insulation board, and
kraft paper—all, apparently, from the trash bins of government buildings
where he worked.