Creativity Quote by Howard Finster

It’s the kind of line that sounds like a scheduling note until you remember who’s speaking: Howard Finster, the folk-preacher artist who treated the everyday as a switchboard to the divine. “I had a call” lands with deliberate double meaning. In plain terms, it’s a phone call. In Finster’s idiom, it’s vocation - the same “call” that sends a preacher into the world. That ambiguity is the engine of the quote: a mundane institution (the University of Miami) becomes just another waypoint on a spiritual circuit.

The phrase “run a revival” sharpens the picture. Finster isn’t saying he lectured, performed, or exhibited; he ran a revival, as if the campus were simply another tent in the long American tradition of pop-up salvation. The date, 1950, matters. Postwar America is busy building confidence - suburbs, universities, a sleek future - while the older evangelical rhythms keep pulsing underneath. Finster places himself at the seam between those worlds: credentialed space meets uncredentialed charisma.

Subtext: he’s asserting legitimacy without asking permission. No résumé padding, no art-world language, just testimony. The sentence also carries Finster’s signature flattening of hierarchies: a university and a roadside church are both stages for the same project, which for him would later become visual - text-heavy paintings that read like sermons nailed to plywood. In one spare recollection, he frames his life as a continuous broadcast: the message moves, the venues change, the call stays the same.