The Reverend Howard Finster once said that God commissioned him to create his “Paradise Garden,” a roadside attraction gone wild with angels and devils in a style that’s intricate and childlike at the same time. The outsider artist’s work is currently on view at the Akron Art Museum, a Knight Arts grantee, alongside a new exhibition by Ray Turner.

Last Friday, artist/curator Glen C. Davies talked about how the Georgia preacher came to create his 46,991 works of art, each carefully numbered on canvases jammed with stylized figures, glittering ornamentation and Finster’s painstakingly hand-lettered commentaries about the road to salvation.

Finster grew up among tent revivals and “preaching diagrams” – moral lessons taught with imagery. Religion dominates his work. But a piece like “The Crowded World (Ten Thousandth Piece) (10,000)” is compelling as social commentary.

Using his favorite tractor enamel paint, Finster imagines a landscape crammed full of rush-hour highways and equally claustrophobic skies, populated by vehicles of all sorts. Next to the roads, piles of gray pumpkin-like heads are mounded up like discarded tires, as if the cemeteries were too crowded for them.

Finster had a way of moving between worlds, resisting classification. Alongside the art on exhibit, Akron Art Museum-goers can watch a video featuring Finster (now deceased) playing banjo and chatting up Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show.” On Friday, live bluegrass music in the museum’s lobby set the tone at a reception that also celebrated the opening of “Ray Turner: Population.”

“Ray Turner: Population”

When Pasadena, Calif. artist Turner visited Akron last September, Carol Murphy, chief of staff at University Park Alliance (a Knight Arts grantee), helped him identify subjects to paint. Many of them are people who might not usually be publicly recognized, like Marques Sales, whose Style-N-Grace Barber and Beauty House offers free and discounted grooming services to residents of the University Park neighborhood in Akron’s core.

Turner took photographs of his 22 Akron subjects, using hard light to create high contrast. Then, he painted each portrait on its own colored glass square. The Akron portraits are the center row of three long rows of squares. The background colors gradually change from one to another — like a riffling deck of Pantone color swatches. Akron’s faces, painted in stronger hues than the rest, stand out from the predominantly pastel images.

The paint is generously heaped on, with thick brushstrokes. Turner has a sure eye for the telling characteristic. The direct gaze of each subject engages with the observer, creating an arresting connection.

Turner told the audience for a gallery talk that he wanted to capture each subject’s character, noting, “First it has to be a good painting. If it’s just a likeness, then it’s a bad painting.’’