Earl's art shop

by Stephen Flinn Young

As a child growing up in Bovina, Mississippi, Earl Simmons began making his own toys from cardboard boxes, lids of baby-food jars, and bottlecaps, using a Coca-Cola bottle for a hammer. Today he is still constructing "just toys" and other fanciful creations which he sells from his studio-gallery, Earl's Art Shop 'n Bovina, and by commission to collectors throughout the United States. His ultimate project and his fulfillment, however, is his combined home cafe, workshop, and sales gallery, called Earl's Art Shop. It is a series of interconnected buildings he began to construct himself in 1978. Created from waste materials and objects gathered from local sawmills and landfills, this is a work of art that Simmons conceived as a community resource, meeting place, and basis of income.