HOWL Sunday News-Press Cover Feature

Freaks and geeks: Fort Myers gallery showcases circus, carnival art exhibit

HOWL Gallery's circus exhibit features photos of performers, oddball artifacts and colorful banners by renowned artist Johnny Meah.

Johnny Meah has spent a lifetime hanging around people with names like “The Human Cannonball,” “The Frog Boy” and “The Man With Two Faces.”

He even has a fancy carnival stage name himself: “The Czar of the Bizarre.”

But look past the deformities and the names, Meah says, and you’ll find that these carnival performers weren’t just “human oddities.”

They were people.

And many of them were also Meah’s friends.

“People would ask me, ‘How is it being around the freaks?’” says Meah (pronounced MEE-ah), who displays several of his carnival and circus sideshow banners this month at HOWL Gallery. “And the first time you see them, that’s all you notice are their deformities and their peculiarities.

“But the rest of the time, you develop a feel for the person. The peculiarity, the thing that made them attractions, you just don’t see it anymore…. They’re just people.”

Then again, audiences didn’t go to sideshows to see “just people.”

They went to see “freaks.”

And that’s where Meah came in. The Safety Harbor man’s colorful banners helped draw people into carnival and circus sideshows during the second half of the 20th century.

To do that, of course, Meah downplayed the humanity and accentuated the oddity.

So you have The Cobra Girl with a human face peering from atop the body of a slithering snake. And Poobah the Iron Tongued Pygmy lifting a barbell with a chain attached to his tongue. And the 689-pound “Heather Hill” ballet dancing in a tutu. And other acts with names such as Lionel the Lion-Faced Man, Voltara, Priscilla the Ape Girl and The Two-Headed Princess.

The weirder, the better.

“The only two things that sell a carnival act are sex and violence — period,” says Meah, 75. “You’re not going to sell Hansel and Gretel out there. You’ve got to appeal to the baser instinct in people.”

Meah’s renowned banner art appears at HOWL Gallery alongside a collection of sideshow-related art, historic photos, signs and artifacts from a local collector, who wants to remain anonymous. The exhibit continues through Jan. 31.

The collection is billed as the third-largest private collection of circus sideshow art and memorabilia in the world. Items on display include original photos of performers from the 1850s to the 1980s, the skull of a two-headed calf, a shoe belonging to The World’s Tallest Man and a rare “Fiji mermaid” (a hoax involving a monkey’s head and torso attached to the tail of a fish).

These artifacts reflect a time before TV and the Internet, when traveling shows were often the only entertainment in town, says gallery co-owner Andy Howl. Meah is one of the last living connections to that era — an era with strong ties to Florida. Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus is based in Sarasota.

“He’s like a living relic,” Howl says. “He’s just one of a kind, at this point.

“Sideshows are pretty much dead now. They’re gone. It’s a piece of American history.”

Meah fell in love with the circus after meeting Hugo Zacchinni — the original “Human Cannonball” — when a circus came to his Connecticut hometown. In 1951, at age 14, he spent his summer vacation traveling with Zacchinni and the King Bros. and Cristiani Circus.

Meah was hooked.

After a brief stint in art school, he returned to the circus for good. Over the coming decades, he did everything from sword swallowing and fire eating to juggling and clowning.

Still, Meah is best known for his banners that would hang above the circus or carnival entrance and elsewhere. He painted his first banner in 1957.

Meah is one of the last of his kind in a dying industry. “There are at least six well-known banner artists,” he says, “and I’m the last one alive.”

The average banner stretched about 100 feet long and typically lasted seven to eight years before needing to be replaced. They were designed to grab your attention with their bold colors, striking images and a strong sense of the macabre.

So what if the banners didn’t exactly match the show inside the tent? False advertising was the norm.

“These are some good acts,” Meah says and laughs. “But the acts were far less exciting than the picture was.

“All the banners were a little bit deceptive. If all the girls in the show were as pretty as the banner… Well, you get where I’m going with this.”

The idea was to stop you in your tracks and get you to open your wallet, buy a ticket and step inside the side show.

“It’s something that looks so ominous or so beautiful,” Meah says, “that you can’t resist seeing it.”

 http://www.news-press.com/article/20131215/ENT/312150014/Freaks-geeks-Fort-Myers-gallery-showcases-circus-carnival-art-exhibit