Pearl Fryar: A Cut Above

Written by Polly Laffitte
(and excerpted from a book proposal about Pearl and his garden.)

It’s a well-known fact that we Southerners embrace the eccentric, the idiosyncratic, and celebrate, or at least tolerate, unusual forms of public self-expression. We possess a passion for individualism in its many manifestations and most of us can tell you a story about a neighborhood “character” whose eccentric actions or obsessive qualities gave our community a bit of local color, a unique sense of place. It should be no surprise then that the Southeast as a region is home to more than its share of self-made environments built by individuals whose creative energy and output are outside the norm -- extraordinarily gifted individuals who are fueled by a drive to make something out of the ordinary -- literally, for in many cases these creators take the most everyday materials and transform them into something most extra-ordinary. This is certainly true of Pearl Fryar and his Topiary Garden.

Take the Bishopville, SC exit off Interstate 20. Turn towards town. Pass the gas stations and fast food joints that look just like any other exit along any superhighway in America. Nothing special or out of the ordinary you think. Until a bit of landscaping in front of the Waffle House catches your eye. This is not what you would expect to find, especially not in front of such a typical American roadside icon. Why would someone take the time and creative effort to twist and prune branches of ordinary scrubs into such unusual configurations? Who would have ever thought to put them out in front of the Waffle House? You’ll soon find out this is just a teaser, a bit of advance advertising for what waits to be discovered less than a mile further down the road, in the garden of Pearl Fryar.

There you encounter a fantastical world of trimmed and twisted trees, a sort of Dr. Seuss meets Edward Scissorhands, on a 3 acre lot surrounding a brick rancher. This is the garden that Pearl cut. A topiary trophy unlike any other, where pure, unbridled creativity was let loose on such unassuming scrubs as common boxwood and compacted holly, and the results are anything but commonplace.

Since 1984 Pearl Fryar has been cutting up all the plants in the first yard he ever owned. He started with a few bushes around his front door. The results pleased him, so next he cut out of plants the number 145 to mark his street address. His neighbors began to take notice. Pearl was soon spending every spare moment with his hedge trimmer, cutting abstract shapes that filled his yard. People stopped to talk with him, cars circled back to admire the progress. Pearl became inspired that his message of peace, love and goodwill, his point of view expressed in subtle ways in nearly every plant he cuts, could reach a large, diverse audience. Soon there were topiary trees cut in all his neighbors’ yards too. The end of the road was expanded as a turn-around for tour buses and Pearl’s garden became a destination point for visitors from all points of the globe. Pearl put Bishopville on the map and his garden began to bind together his community.

Pearl says it all started when he decided to try to win the yard of the month award. He lived outside the city limits, in a “black” neighborhood, and the city garden club didn’t give the award to outsiders. But Pearl just couldn’t help himself – he had to use his limitless energy, and his drive to be more than average, to do something that would give him the recognition and attention which he craved and could not get from his regular job at the aluminum can factory. This was his motivation. He knew he had to do something different, something a cut above average, to attract the judges, not only those of the yard of the month competition, but those who had judged him by the color of his skin and had assumed he “wouldn’t keep up his yard.”

Who knows why he chose topiary? Pearl tells a wonderful story about how he took a $2 plant that had been on the discarded pile at the local nursery, and with the help of a 5 minute lesson on trimming provided by the nursery owner, he began to create sculpture. Sure he didn’t call it sculpture, he didn’t even know there was a term for it, he had never read about or seen topiary. And he had never considered himself an artist. But he knew he could push plants to do things they weren’t meant to do. He knew his imagination could take form in the shapes he created. And he knew the more he did, the more he liked the results, and the more attention he received for those efforts.

First it was his local newspaper, then the larger gardening community. The attention multiplied and he began to have major garden design magazines featuring his place in their glossy photographs. He was invited to present at garden shows around the country. He became a regular on television -- local, PBS, HGTV, Turner South, the works. Then the art world began to take notice. Artists and curators became captivated by the man and his work. It was no coincidence that this interest in Pearl coincided with a growing national interest in self-taught artists and their self-made environments.

“The Outsiders Are In” read the title of a Newsweek magazine article on Christmas Day, 1989. It went on to talk about a major shake-up in the traditional art market as contemporary folk-art, variously labeled as “outsider,” “self-taught,” “visionary,” moved into the world of money and fame. Record auction sales and growing gallery representation signaled the shift as collectors became obsessed with the work of the untutored, often marginalized artists being “discovered” in many rural areas of the South. Major museum exhibitions and newly created magazines devoted to the topic brought “outsider art” into the public consciousness. The work touched an emotional nerve, as any good art is supposed to do. It filled a need for many who were looking for the experience of art that was real. The last decade of the 20th century was indeed the time the outsiders made it in, and made it big, and Pearl Fryar was one of the biggest in South Carolina.

At the height of all this activity, the State Museum in Columbia was organizing an exhibition focusing on self-taught artists and their role within their communities, with special emphasis on efforts to preserve these self-made environments. Pearl was invited to be a part of it all. He donated and moved a 30’ Leland cypress to the museum grounds. He was commissioned to create a garden there. He was invited to participate in a site-specific public sculpture exhibition in Charleston, for Spoleto USA. To the envy of many academically trained visual artists, his work was featured in Art in America and his exhibition record grew impressively. He was sought after as a speaker, addressing audiences as diverse as a garden club at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the local elementary school in Bishopville. Tour buses began arriving by the dozens and a parking lot was created from a vacant lot across the street. And all this time Pearl worked 4-10s at the can plant and carved his plants at night, by the light of a street light the local power company installed to help him out.

Pearl has now retired from his regular job. Yet the pruning and cutting is not a job one can leave. Pearl continues to work. Lest one believes he could ever be content or still, that those big hands and vivid imagination could become idle, consider his newest adventure into metal sculpture he calls his “junque art.” Scattered through-out his garden are more than a dozen pieces, some painted, some left raw, each with an aesthetic sensibility akin to the work in topiary – elegant abstract lines and forms which possess within them carefully placed symbols of love.

It was a visit to New York City, to the Whitney Museum of American Art, where a chance encounter with the work of Alexander Calder’s motorized, kinetic sculpture and his “Circus” made of wire inspired Pearl to move in this new direction. He began to collect discarded metal from the can factory and to weld these cast-offs into 3-dimensional works of art. Many he designed to serve as garden fountains, figuring out on his own the mechanics of pumps and water flow. He speaks of the inspiration of Calder’s work, “This was the first time I had seen that art could actually do something.”

Pearl’s art has done “something” for his community. He has given Bishopville a true sense of place -- of individuality -- made it a destination spot considerably more interesting than before, and helped to bridge a racial gap that has caused suffering for many, including Pearl. His place is “worth keeping” and plans need to be formulated now that guarantee the garden will live on after Pearl. His was a personal, passionate labor of love, which has made his community special. Pearl Fryar’s Topiary Garden needs to stay a part of the social and cultural fabric of Bishopville and remain within the community as the sign which welcomes everyone.