From Shane McAdams, Curator in Residence at Saint Kate:
Facebook Marketplace, that agent of omnivorous contemporary human consumption, is overvalued as a tool for material happiness but, I think, undervalued as a divining rod for strange and unexpected detours into the lives of others. Who really cares about the snowblower someone found for a hundred bucks? The real discovery is the person selling it: an unwitting co-conspirator in a life of curiosity, invention, and possibility. That's the real prize—the reason to keep looking.
Some version of that impulse led me to Liz and Dave Riedel. A chance encounter, born from a Marketplace misadventure and a relayed phone call, brought me to their home in Dousman, where a Frank Lloyd Wright house was being thoughtfully restored alongside a 1961 Plymouth and an extraordinary collection of custom-modified televisions. Created with their longtime collaborator, Mike Scott, these objects are so singular that calling them simply "art" feels incomplete. They are equal parts science fiction, mid-century design, found object, and slightly anthropomorphic sculpture.
Following that thread led me to Scott's home in West Allis—another remarkable environment where collecting, tinkering, and making merge into a deeply personal creative practice. His house is a temple to postwar popular culture, filled with objects both found and transformed. The modified Philco televisions exemplify this approach: hybrids of industrial design and sculpture that elevate familiar artifacts into something uncanny, playful, and unexpectedly profound. Across the work of the Riedels and Scott, we encounter a shared belief in the capacity of ordinary materials to become icons through imagination and care.
As compelling as the televisions themselves are, the real artwork, for me, emerged in the conversations we shared. With the Riedels, we talked about preservation, beautiful oddities, and the ways individual agency can reshape the built world. With Scott, we talked about a lifetime spent discovering meaning through collecting, embellishing, and reimagining everyday objects. Together, these encounters reaffirmed a simple idea: art is less a category of objects than an attitude—an openness to connect people, materials, memories, and ideas in unexpected ways.
The customized cathode-ray contraptions and ephemera gathered here offer a glimpse into lives devoted to invention and spontaneity. They invite us to imagine alternatives: to what we buy, what we value, what we make, and ultimately, to the stories we choose to build into the furniture of our lives.
