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Rare Visions & Roadside Revelations

Launched in 1995, Rare Visions & Roadside Revelations sought out a hidden world of outsider artists and, in a traveling show format, brought their eclectic work to the viewers of public television. The series followed Randy Mason, Mike Murphy and Don the Camera Guy as they loaded up their cramped minivan and hit the road to document grassroots arts environments and offbeat attractions of all kinds, exploring human creativity across 47 states and four time zones. Along the way, the crew mixed in the odd and the unusual — roadside attractions that they liked to say "your father would never stop the car for." 

Rare Visions & Roadside Revelations became a serious repository of interviews and photographic documentation of a large number of these sites, many of which have been torn down in the years since the episodes were filmed. The show’s legacy was cemented when The Kohler Foundation, a philanthropic organization known for art preservation, accessioned show footage into its collection as an archive of the life’s work of many of the artists featured in the series. 

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Roll of a Lifetime

In 1982 Randy and Don made a pilgrimage to Cawker City, Kansas to see the Big Ball of Twine smack dab in the middle of town. Inspired by this trip the boys decided to create a record-holder of their own, using something they had plenty of - 3/4" videotape.In 1995, the ball joined the "Rare Visions" crew on a jaunt across Kansas. The rest, as they say, is history…