Seeing Beauty In The Mundane

Looking for traces of a celebrated but unusual artist in suburban Idaho.

- Samir S. Patel

Next to the small, run down house at 5015 Eugene Street on the north side of Boise, Idaho, is a white washed clapboard shed. Inside, the walls are covered with peeling, puckered blue wallpaper decorated, incongruously, with sailboats. It might have been built as a chicken coop, or perhaps just for storage, but for 30 years it served as the studio and living space of a man named James Castle. He is the reason that, in October 2016, archaeologists, students, and volunteers arrived at the shed to excavate its dirt floor.

Castle was born in 1899 in the remote town of Garden Valley, in the mountains north of Boise, to a large, hardworking Irish Catholic farming family. He was profoundly deaf from birth, and despite five years at the Idaho School for the

Deaf and Blind, Castle never learned to communicate in any traditional way. It was a time when an impairment like his could result in institutionalization, but the Castles were protective and encouraged his predilection for art from a young age. Castle scavenged discarded paper, mail, and food wrappers, and made his own ink. When the family moved to the Eugene Street house in the 1930s, he began to live and work in the 12-by-12-foot shed. Day after day, decade after decade, until his death in 1977, Castle spent almost all of his time drawing and piecing together abstracted constructions of paper, string, and wire.