Clarence and Grace Woolsey

1929 – 1987          1921 - 1982

Clarence and Grace Woolsey together sculpted hundreds of objects with bottle caps in the 1960s and early 1970s, and showed their work briefly before it vanished into the loft of a brother’s barn for more than 20 years. After the couple’s deaths, the sculpture hoard (including enough leftover caps to enable the creation of counterfeits using original materials) was sold at a farm auction. Feeding the legend was the sale price – the whole body of work brought less than $100 – and the market-making aftermath. The pieces passed rapidly through a chain of antique and art dealers until what started as a pastime, and initially looked like conventional Americana, came to the market branded as significant self-taught art.  Grace said she woke up one morning and said, ‘“You know, I dreamt I made something out of bottle caps.” Clarence looked at her like she was crazy. She went ahead and took some bottle caps and baling wire. The first thing she made was a small stick figure of a person. She painted it with spray paint. It grew from there…. She talked Clarence into making other stuff. Clarence designed and built the figures with just a jigsaw – no power tools – in an old chicken house.  The bottle caps came from pop machines in stores around central Iowa, and the wood was from old fruit crates. “We had a two-foot by two-foot board. We’d lay all the bottle caps out. We had a little punch and a hammer and we’d punch a hole in each bottle cap,” he said, noting that Grace was particular about the hole being perfectly centered. With the Woolseys, you can see it in their teepees and other structures, but their materials’ expressive potential finds its fullest representation in the dozens of figures they produced, typically around four feet tall, their basic shapes defined by strings of caps that wind around to create heads, torsos, legs, eyes and ears or antennae. Caps are nailed on flush to suggest faces and to cover feet. Popularly known to collectors as “bunnies” or “aliens,” these figures are actually too enigmatic for those labels. Clarence himself always called them “bears.” The most common configuration of these figures sport twin protrusions from the head, call them bunny ears or alien antennae. It appears that bottle caps for the Woolseys were a way to connect with their community. They required the help of their family and neighbors to gather the caps, and they shared their work with the public. The first time was a one-day exhibit in 1967 with an admission charge to benefit the “Crippled Children’s Fund.” The second, in 1971, was the couple’s “World’s Largest Pioneer Caparena,” in which they showed the material in volume over several months in a large building in Lincoln, Iowa, and charged admission (reportedly 25 cents).  Clarence hoped to create a real tourist attraction, so rather than selling pieces, the plan was to make a living showing them at their permanent attraction, Caparena.  A farm couple with a bottle-cap hoard and time on their hands sounds like the stuff of folkart legend, and in Clarence and Grace Woolsey it was a pretty great one. - Excerpts from an article by William Swislow on InterestingIdeas.com