Large yellow signs that say Rat-o-Rama ’95 adorn the fence in front of Diane Wheat’s Bucktown bungalow. A lifelike shark protrudes from the second-floor window. More yellow signs scream “Read This!” and direct your attention to large white boards containing poems and facts about rats and sharks. In back of the coach house, facing the alley, an even larger sign proclaims “Better Rats Than Sharks!”
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“Ideas just pop into my head,” says Wheat. She sits in her coach house work space, where she restores art and refinishes furniture, gesturing as she speaks. She’s just as likely to cite Noam Chomsky as the movie Jaws. Across from her is Hedin, a soft-spoken freelance writer.
A longtime admirer of outsider art, Wheat has decided that she doesn’t need a holiday to decorate. At the start of the summer Wheat posted the first yellow signs for Rat-o-Rama, and since then there have been weekly additions to her yard, including symbols, poems, and pamphlets. But what’s the point?
Hedin says that the two would sit for hours, thinking of ideas until they got wilder and wilder. “At one point Diane wanted me to drive around with a six-foot rat on the top of my car,” says Hedin, laughing. Wheat says, “If we’d put all the ideas into practice, we’d be into it for another five years.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Photo/Nathan Mandell.
