January 10 to March 29, 2002 Exhibited at the Archives’ New York Research Center
The definition of American folk art is notoriously difficult to pin down. In the twentieth century “folk art” has embraced everything from Pennsylvania German frakturs to eccentric architectural environments.
Holger Cahill in his landmark 1932 exhibition American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America, for the Museum of Modern Art, looked to the pre-industrial past for “the simple and unaffected childlike expression of men and women who had little or no school training in art, and who did not even know that they were producing art.” In the 1940s, art critic and collector Jean Lipman pointed to folk art as the product of a great democracy. It was spontaneous, home-grown, non-derivative, and non-academic. Three decades later, Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr., and Julia Weissman in their book Twentieth Century American Folk Art and Artists, expanded the scope to include living artists, and asserted that &ldqou;the vision of the folk artist is a private one, a personal universe, a world of his own making,” unaffected by the mainstream art world.
The Archives of American Art has collected a wealth of primary sources documenting the contested terrain of American folk art. In celebration of the opening of the American Folk Art Museum’s new building at 45 West 53rd Street, the Archives presents selected documents from the papers of the tastemakers who advanced the aesthetic appreciation of these individual expressions.
View Items from This Exhibition
American Traditions: A Taste for Folk Art
Sister Sarah braiding a chair, ca. 1936
Photograph of Sister Sarah braiding a chair. Part of a press package to promote the exhibition “New Horizons in American Art” at the Museum of Modern Art. Photograph by Vincenti-Herlick.
Edith Halpert's American Folk Art Gallery, incorporated on October 9, 1931, was located on the second floor above the Downtown Gallery at 113 West 13th Street in New York.
Painter Charles Sheeler (b. 1883 d. 1965) and his dealer Edith Halpert, 1953. Sheeler had a first-rate collection of folk art and particularly Shaker objects, which he sometimes included in his paintings. Photograph by Musya S. Sheeler.
Catalogue of weather vanes manufactured by L.W. Cushing and Sons, 1883
Creator: L.W. Cushing and Sons
Edith Halpert collected wood and iron weathervane molds produced by this firm, and in 1954 reproduced six of the most aesthetically desirable models, each in a limited edition of fifty.
David Goldsmith’s (b. 1901 d. 1980) Tin Man, ca. 1930, in the window of Goldsmith’s West End Sheet Metal and Roofing Works in Long Island City, now in the collection of the American Folk Art Museum. Photographer unknown.
