About Vanadu Art House
A quiet residential street in Hyattsville suddenly appears to collide with an antique shop, a machine shop, and somebody’s extremely elaborate dream. Vanadu Art House is the home and evolving artwork of Clarke Bedford, who has covered the house, fence, yard, sculptures, and vehicles with an extraordinary density of salvaged objects.
Bedford trained in art conservation and worked for years preserving other people’s objects. His own work moves in the opposite direction. Instead of making individual pieces that sit neatly on pedestals, he bolts, welds, hangs, nests, and layers objects into larger assemblages. Horns, gears, lamps, insulators, globes, bits of metal, glass fragments, sculptures, old hardware, and antiques are packed together until the property seems to have grown a mechanical skin.
The cars may be the strangest part because several remain actual vehicles rather than stationary sculptures. Bedford has transformed cars and a van with the same obsessive approach used on the house. What looks like an impossible pile of metal, ornaments, lamps, horns, and found objects can pull away from the curb and head down the road.
Vanadu is also a private residence, not a conventional walk-in museum. The exterior can be appreciated respectfully from the public street, and visitors should never enter the property, touch the art, or approach the house unless invited by the owner. That boundary does nothing to weaken the spectacle. A perfectly normal Maryland neighborhood still contains a house that looks like it survived an industrial apocalypse and decided to decorate afterward.