The Akron Art Museum, a Knight Arts grantee, has a one of a kind exhibit going on with a one of a kind artist. The exhibition, “Butch Anthony: Vita Post Mortum,” which is on display through January 25, will feed your art-loving imagination.

It’s a fascinating exhibition, and one not to be missed. The display is in the old portion of AAM to the left as you enter the building. At the top of the stairs leading into the gallery display is a short film on Butch Anthony. Be sure to sit (or stand) and watch it. The film reveals much about the artist and how he works, but also much about the man himself. For one thing, you get to see his old automobile – a big black car with his unique x-ray kind of look on it, with sculptures sitting on top of the roof. He calls the vehicle “The Alabama Mamma Jamma.”

Anthony seems to be a very affable, good-natured, happy man, very much at ease with himself and his art. At one point in the film he is asked about commissioned works. He says he has been asked but would rather just do what he likes to do – his own “intertwangleism.”

Butch Anthony, “Homemade Biscuits.” Photo courtesy of the Museum of Wonder, Seale, Alabama, and Black Rat Projects, London

Museum personnel say of him that Anthony is a self-taught artist, builder and picker of things. The picker notion gets at the stuff of Anthony’s art and his odd method of working. Anthony walks all over his 80-acre family farmstead in Seale, Ala., and finds things – bleached out cows’ heads or dead bird carcasses, pieces of wood, or maybe prehistoric embedded life forms from a creek bed. As an example, his “Bird Brain” depicts a found bird carcass astride a human skull. Anthony calls the result a “recombobulated sculpture” (a use of language that shows his down-home fascination with it).

Beyond that, the artist will stop along the road, looking at other people’s discards (and pick from that) or roam through flea markets or antiques stores and buy up stuff.

Anthony then begins arranging things and overlaying his particular art – the aforementioned “intertwangleism.” According to him, it has been reported, his aesthetic is to look at people and break them down to their “primordial beginnings.”

One way the artist does this is clearly reflected in the pieces hanging in AAM (which is giving the artist his first solo museum exhibition). For the pieces in “Vita Post Mortum,” Anthony purchased antique portraits from thrift stores and flea markets. Some pieces date back to the mid-19th century. Anthony gives them a kind of story – or life as the exhibit title suggests – by superimposing bone imagery and text. The figures look as though they were in x-ray, as though the artist – and the museum viewer – were looking through them to their bare essence.

Butch Anthony, “Disassemble.” Photo courtesy of the Museum of Wonder, Seale, Alabama, and Black Rat Projects, London

Additional personality for the stiff-looking photographed sitters comes from text. Anthony takes words and expressions that he has heard in his life and puts them to his artistic purposes – like “Monkey See Monkey Do,” “You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine,” “Go Down Kicking and Scratching.”

Take his “Polycephaly,” a work which is a vintage charcoal portrait of a stiffly-posed man. Anthony presents his version of the man’s bone structure, including a skeletal-like representation of his hands. Above the man’s head he has what appears to be the outlines of a brain (and thereby an allusion to the title of the work, for the artist wrote the term across the brain image). In other text, he simply writes “born with two heads.” The work, aside from the old charcoal portrait, uses acrylic, pastel and snake skin (probably something else he found wandering through his family farm).

Anthony runs a junk auction house called Possum Trot and his own museum called The Museum of Wonder – both on his Alabama property. The museum has what he calls a barn full of oddities, like the world’s largest gallbladder, a stuffed chicken and more of Anthony’s own art. Moreover, the artist built his own house from scraps of lumber taken from a deserted cotton mill.

The Museum of Wonder. Photo courtesy of Robert Rausch

He’s an unusual kind of guy with unusual art. Go learn about him and see some of his fascinating creations.

“Butch Anthony: Vita Post Mortum” will be on display 11 a.m. -5 p.m. Wednesdays-Sundays (with extended hours until 9 p.m. Thursdays) through January 25 at the Akron Art Museum, One South High St., Akron; 330-376-9185; www.akronartmuseum.org. Tickets are $7 ($5 for students and seniors).