"Miracle at midnight" Oil and wood, 1974.

Around his 50th birthday in 1974 Albert Wagner's life foundered against sin. At that time he might have gone downhill into a life of crime and degradation, but instead something wonderful happened. He has told different parts of his conversion story at different times, but the mighty fact of the change in his life from that moment forward was clear for all to see. He became a man with two missions, like a tree with a crooked trunk and giant, embracing branches. Those who encountered the new man were introduced to the Rev. Albert Wagner, the minister of his own church called the People Love People House of God. They also came to know him as a prolific self-taught artist who chronicled his life and faith in the course of making thousands of paintings and found-object sculptures.

"Come Home Ethiopia Jesus Loves You" is the message inscribed in big black letters over the front porch at the entrance to the duplex just off Euclid Avenue in East Cleveland. For 32 years the brick house has served as both the meeting place for Wagner's congregation and as the Albert Wagner Museum, crammed with his art from the basement to the attic rafters. You can't miss it; it's painted deep blue with red and white trim.

The Rev. Albert, as he was generally called, went all the way home in the late summer of 2006, dying at the age of 82. Since then a lot has happened. Although he had written a will it turned out not to be a legal document. The house and its contents were held in probate for a year, while the church continued on in the capable hands of its assistant pastor, Wagner's daughter Bonita, who conducted services at her own home.

Nor was he forgotten by the artists and writers, collectors and gallerists who befriended him during the years after he began painting. Beginning in 2005, Santa Fe-based producer Nancy Dickenson set to work on a biographical film. Directed by Tom Miller and titled One Bad Cat, the 80-minute documentary will premier March 13 at the Cleveland International Film Festival. For those who have known Wagner or known about him over the past three decades, One Bad Cat answers some questions, filling in a few of the blanks about the behavior that led up to the years 1973-74 and the events that caused him to change his life. Narrated in part by well-known actor Delroy Lindo (Spike Lee's Clockers), the story begins in Arkansas where Wagner was born in 1924, the son of sharecroppers. Wagner says, "Wasn't much different than what I heard about slavery time." The camera pans across a scroll-like Wagner painting depicting black children standing in the mud while whites pass by on the sidewalk.

But despite long years of bitter experiences, the need to humbly accept God's will is Wagner's central credo. This is a message not always popular in the black community because Wagner also affirms the age-old justification for slavery that racists find in the book of Genesis, where Noah curses his son Ham. For the Rev. Albert, the passage has explanatory force, giving God's reason for slavery in the past and degradation in the present. One Bad Cat shows his friend, the noted African-American artist and educator Johnny Coleman, bringing members of his Oberlin College class into the house to experience the art and the man at first hand. Later, a class discussion focuses on issues of stereotyping and self-loathing in the black community. And yet there can be no doubt Wagner ultimately delivered a strong message of hope as well, extolling the power of personal responsibility. He said, "Be yourself, whatever you do, come to know yourself. To not be afraid of who you are is the greatest victory you'll ever see."

The Rev. Albert Wagner: Photo by Abe Frajndlich.

One Bad Cat goes on to sketch a classic story of the early 1940s, as the Wagner family became part of a great migration of black workers from the impoverished South up to the industrial North. The growing wartime economy signaled the end of the Great Depression, and Cleveland was booming when Wagner brought his brothers and sisters there in 1941. His new job as dishwasher downtown at the Mayflower Coffee Shop paid more money than he'd ever seen.

While still young he married his wife Magnolia and together they had 16 children. But Magnolia and her children weren't enough. "I was a plain whore," he croons sadly. At one time, at the height of his success in the furniture-moving business, he had another identity, four houses and four more children. His two mistresses sit close to each other as they tell their stories to the camera.

At the heart of the Rev. Albert Wagner saga is the image of a gifted little boy without so much as a crayon and a piece of cardboard, who carried buckets of water to his mother as she worked in the cotton fields. When he was almost 50 he met the little boy again, found him within himself on a hot summer day, and they began making pictures together. Bonita tells me, "When he was working, he was in that time. The 5-year-old boy and the old man would work together." He started making art like a man in a dream, but then he had to make peace with his sex addiction and his religious convictions. One night as he prepared for his 50th birthday, he pulled an old board out from behind the refrigerator. He'd stored paint cans on it and dark paint dripped down it. "God talked to me through that board," he says. "I began to deal with peoples on a different level." He found faces coming to him for the first time from the surface of that work, which he called "Miracle at Midnight." He went on to rediscover all the complex realities of his own life, one by one, mixed with biblical scenes, as they spoke to him from every imaginable material, and from deep in his own mind.

"God and art saved the Rev. Albert," he says after explaining the significance of "Miracle at Midnight," his rough voice flowing over the key word like shallow water around a muddy stone. "It started with an old paint board."

An exhibit of the Rev. Albert's paintings will be on view at Convivium Gallery in the Josaphat Arts Hall (1433 E. 33rd St.) through April 13, with an opening reception from 6 to 9 p.m. Friday, March 13. On Friday there will also be a book signing celebrating the publication of The Waterboy, a collection of paintings, stories and essays by the Reverend and others, compiled and edited over a period of 15 years by his friends Gene and Linda Kangas. And don't miss the preview at Convivum 33 today, Wednesday, March 12, featuring a special 7 p.m. mass conducted by Sister Bonita.