About Karen Bottle Capps

Karen “Bottle” Capps was born in an alley behind the Malvern, Arkansas Tastee Freeze (home also to fellow freak luminary Billy Bob Thornton) to Colleen Cumie and Buddy Capps, a telephone operator and a truck driver. Raised in trailer court day care by a chainsmoker named Lurlene, she learned how to say her ABC’s, eat mayonnaise sandwiches, and who the principal characters of Days of Our Lives were by the age of seven.

She was raised in the Jones Mill Snake Handling Church of Jesus Christ, but fortunately she was never bitten by the poisonous ones. Since her single-wide Brigadier trailer was constantly littered with Miller High Life bottle caps, transforming these caps into birdhouses, guitars and full-size mock-ups of Michaelangelo’s David became her raison d’etre.

After dropping out of junior high due to a bad case of unrequited lust for her English teacher, Mrs. Betty Sue Smith Jones, she jumped trains and perfected the art of dumpster diving while a youth. She has personally drunk tequila with Howard Finster, L.V. Hull, and Reverend H.D. Dennis.

Her customized tee-shirts have caused lawsuits (that would be the popular “Dyke...just do her” model), her hangover mirrors have caused divorces, and her little dirty white poodle has been voted “Bad Dog of the Year” for five years running. When not making folk art, she lives, delivers newspapers, and paints in the sketchy side of the Cooper-Young neighborhood in Memphis, Tennessee.