Jesse Howard was born in 1885 in Shamrock, Missouri, the youngest, along with his twin sister, of ten children. After roaming the West for a few years, he spent most of his life in nearby Fulton, where he made his living doing odd jobs and manual labor.
In the 1950s, Howard began filling his property with hand-painted signs and objects that expressed his views on the contemporary world. Despite local disdain for the site, which Howard called Sorehead Hill, it attracted widespread acclaim. In 1968 Howard’s signs were featured in artist Gregg Blasdel’s influential Art in America essay, “The Grass-Roots Artist,” and later, in exhibitions at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Philadelphia
College of Art. In the 1970s, the Kansas City Art Institute purchased a major collection of works by Howard and became the steward of his signs after his death in 1983.
In 2016 the Kansas City Art Institute in partnership with Kohler Foundation, Inc., transferred 187 objects from its collection to the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. The eighty signs, six sculptures, and over fifty archival documents joined twelve signs already in the collection... see pictures
