Hyattsville, Maryland, United States of America

3810 Nicholson St Hyattsville, Maryland, United States of America

38.960579, -76.954071

art environment

Vanadu Art House by Clark Bedford

Junk Art House and Junk Art Cars

Born in 1947 in Greenwich Connecticut, Clarke Bedford entered Williams College in 1969 as a science major. He graduated an art major four years later, mostly having produced paintings and sculptures in the multidisciplinary, experimental atmosphere of the 1960s. After graduation, he moved between the country, New York City, and Boston, and his jobs included working for a small printing company, a textile designer, and administering polygraphs for a psychologist. His interest in assemblage sculpture, which was to become a lifelong obsession, emerged at this time, while he still continued to make realist and calligraphic-like abstract paintings.

After a friend’s suggestion, in 1977, he applied to an art conservation program in Cooperstown, New York. With his background in both the arts and sciences, he was accepted into the program, and there, as part of the conservation training, he learned photography. Mesmerized by the distinctive soft-focus warm-tone look of later 19th century photography, he was inspired to make stylistically similar photographs of often humorous subjects: light passing through monumental broccoli stalks, or small kewpie dolls that at first glance look like 19th-century topographical photographs of carved Egyptian monoliths. His interest in early photography is an outgrowth of his passion for objects and processes dating from about 1880 to 1920: “that exciting period: late Victorian, reform Victorian, the beginnings of Modernism, Arts and Crafts, English Arts and Crafts, Wiener Werkstätte, early Art Deco, Pre-Raphaelite….” After completing the conservation program in 1980, Bedford moved back to Baltimore (where his family had relocated in 1960). An internship at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC led to a 23-year art conservator position, during which he worked on Modernist sculptures as well as on paintings by Mondrian, DeKooning, Miro, Eakins, Homer, and numerous others.

While working full time and raising a family, Bedford continued

Clark Bedford's Vanadu, Art Environment, Hyattsville, MD

Vanadu Art Cars & House

Many years ago, museum curator Clark Bedford found himself alone and with plenty of time on his hands in his modest, mid-sized Maryland home. From that day forward, Bedford used all of his energy and a pile of unique objects and recycled metal to create one of the most hidden, incongruous, and extravagant art houses in the world.

Called "Vanadu," Clarke Bedford's art house is filled with a vast collection of antiques, junk and historic objects. In the tightly packed collection of sculptures and mosaics, you'll find a horned wooden owl, a black-and-white striped cone, a skull, a statue of John Locke, a German language globe stuffed into a rusty horn, and a woman's face covered in glass and colorful junk.

Clarke Bedford owns four fully functioning art cars made of everything from car parts to used washing machine parts to moose antlers, which are usually set up along the roadside of the art house. The most famous car, the moving Vanadu Ford, features vases and horns on the sides and graveyard pillars on the roof, and even has its own Facebook account. When he worked as a curator for the Hirshhorn Museum, Bedford drove one of the ornate silver cars to work, and to this day, the art cars are one of Bedford's primary modes of transportation.

Clarke Bedford named his art car and home "Vanadu" in honor of the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose famous "Kubla Khan" poem grew out of an opium-induced dream about the ancient Chinese city of Xanadu, once under the rule of Mongol emperor Kublai Khan. In addition to "Vanadu," Bedford also calls his collection of recycled materials "Assemblage Cottage," which is pronounced with a French accent as "As-sem-blage Co-ttage."