Smithsonian American Art Museum

This guide to the Smithsonian American Art Museum follows James Hampton, a night janitor in federal buildings who spent fourteen years secretly building an elaborate foil-wrapped altar in a rented garage, believing it would welcome heaven to earth. It traces the mythology he built around the piece, calling himself Saint James, director of special projects for the state of eternity, and the churches and reporters who turned down a look at what he had made. Alongside the piece he kept a private notebook of over a hundred pages, written in a script nobody has ever decoded.