Maria Reidelbach: Biography
Maria Reidelbach is an artist and author focusing on the intersection of folk and pop culture. She spends most of her time in the small upstate New York town of Accord, where she shares a home with songwriter Chris Butler. Nearby is Homegrown Mini-Golf, an art-garden on an ancient farm, which she created and maintains.
The Reidelbachs were American military family; Maria was conceived in Germany, born in Fort Monmouth, NJ in 1956 and lived in three states by school age. When her father retired her family settled in the beautiful Allegheny Mountains of western Pennsylvania, where her maternal grandparents had once farmed, famous for their strawberries.
After surviving Catholic school, she left home at 17, traveled a bit, then fell in love with the rusty industrialism of Akron, Ohio. She put herself through college at the University of Akron, graduating Magna cum laude in 1981 with a B.F.A. in Painting.
Maria served an internship at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. She joined the staff from 1981 to 1983 as a preparator and as coordinator of activities for a high-level donor group, spending half her time in overalls and the other half in a cocktail dress, and becoming acquainted with the New York contemporary art world from many perspectives.
During the 1980s Maria became a private art registrar and developed some of the first software used for cataloging fine art. As personal computers became more common, the demand for her cataloging software led her create a business developing custom applications for artists, estates, art historian and collectors through the 1990s. She also curated and co-curated several art exhibitions, including Alfred Jensen Paintings and Works on Paper at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1985.
In 1987, pursuing an interest in roadside Americana, Maria co-authored Miniature Golf, a social history of the game (with Nina Garfinkel and John Margolies). Her next book, published in 1991, Completely MAD: A History of the Comic Book and Magazine, chronicled another quirky cultural back-alley, and was a best seller. Also during this time she wrote several desk reference books on popular software applications.
In the late 1990s, Maria realized that rather than merely writing about popular culture, she needed to create it. This led to several projects including The Totally Kid Carousel as project manager for Milo Mottola, the Needlepoint Museum, and Goofy Garden Golf, in collaboration with artist Ken Brown. In 2002 she joined the staff of Manhattan Youth, becoming the Lower Manhattan community group's art director and helping launch the Downtown Community Center, the neighborhood's first.
In 2006 Maria began work on her most recent large-scale project, Homegrown Mini-Golf on Kelder's Farm. A roadside attraction with a farm theme, it is landscaped entirely in edible plants and is populated with chickens, ducks, geese and whimsical statuary. All are watched over by the World's Largest Garden Gnome, known as Chomsky, for which she received a Guinness World Record in 2007. She designed a line of locally made products and souvenirs made from locally sourced materials that is available in the farm's market. Homegrown Mini-Golf is open to the public from May through October, and like all gardens, it is continuously a work in progress.