American Traditions:
A Taste for Folk Art

1285 Avenue of the Americas
January 10 - March 29, 2002

David Goldsmith (1901–1980) 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. Howard W. and Jean Lipman Papers.

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 exhibition American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America, for the Museum of Modern Art in 1932, 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 asserting that "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 (AAA) 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, AAA presents selected documents from the papers of the tastemakers who advanced the aesthetic appreciation of these individual expressions.