Best Showcase For Unschooled Artists: Garde Rail Gallery  "For
me, this is culturally representative of where I grew up," says
Garde Rail Gallery co-owner and Georgia native Karen Light-Piña.
As a proprietor of the Northwest's only gallery for folk and
outsider art, Light-Piña has spent the past 10 years bringing
elements of her native region, the American South, to Seattle.
In the Pioneer Square gallery she owns with her husband Marcus,
you'll find paintings and sculptures from the likes of folk-art
icons Jimmy Lee Sudduth, Buddy Snipes, Mose Tolliver, and the
now-legendary Howard Finster (folks familiar with R.E.M. and
Talking Heads lore will recognize his name for doing some of the
bands' album covers). To the untrained eye, the pieces Light-
Piña specializes in are crude, childlike, and lacking in skill.
But fans of the work see them as examples of pure, uninhibited
expression. It's as if the excitement of creating art is lost
when the artists are rigorously trained and educated.
Oftentimes, they are simpl