Folk Art and Crafts

Folk Art and Crafts. References to “folk art and crafts” arose in the early twentieth century to describe traditional handwork that stood in contrast to modern industrial systems of mass production. Divergent meanings of the term reflected alternative visions of American society. As used in the urban art world, the term referred to an American tradition rooted in the white Protestant foundations of the Colonial Era and the era of the Early Republic. In the 1920s, art‐world curators and writers began describing folk art as preindustrial painting and sculpture, often executed by anonymous artisans. New York City galleries frequently celebrated folk crafts associated with early New England. This “Americana,” as it was sometimes called, suggested continuity from the founding of the nation to urban, industrial America of the twentieth century. In the freedom of expression and vernacular spirit of this work, art‐world critics found both the source of a vernacular American culture and a precedent, indeed inspiration, for the abstraction of modernist art. Art‐world curators and writers such as Holger Cahill, Jean Lipman, and Edith Halpert, influenced by the wealthy patronage of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and Electra Havemeyer Webb, organized and publicized influential folk art exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Newark Museum during the 1930s. After World War II, private collections of such folk‐art patrons developed into major centers for the permanent exhibition of early American folk art and crafts at Williamsburg, Virginia (Rockefeller); Cooperstown, New York (Lipman); and Shelburne, Vermont (Webb). Around the time of the U.S. bicentennial in 1976, many exhibitions used preindustrial folk art and crafts to celebrate the “common man” and national vernacular aesthetic in American history. The largest of these exhibitions, entitled The Flowering of American Folk Art, opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974.

Even when twentieth‐century materials began to be called folk art by art‐world critics after World War II, the examples often conveyed a nostalgia for a preindustrial past. Perhaps most notable was the fame of Anna Mary “Grandma” Moses during the 1950s for her memory paintings of rural New York life. The art world's use of folk art to emphasize a vernacular individuality continued with a movement in the 1980s to extend the definition of folk art to “outsider” art, the unusual creations of individuals working without deference to community or artistic conventions. The exhibition of Herbert Hemphill's major collection of twentieth‐century folk art at the Smithsonian Institution in 1990 legitimized the association of such works with American tradition.

Meanwhile, an alternative concept of folk art and crafts had unfolded as sociologists and folklorists viewed such works as evidence of America's ethnic and regional diversity and of the persistence of varied folk cultures in an era of modernization. Growing out of an anthropological concern for the communal arts and crafts of aboriginal and peasant groups, this interpretation emphasized persistent forms of social folklife within industrialized societies that did not necessarily blend into a dominant national culture. Distinctive traditions of groups within the United States that formed regional‐ethnic cultures, such as the Mennonites and Amish in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, Scots‐Irish in Appalachia, African Americans in the Mississippi Delta, and French Acadians in Louisiana, offered examples of cultural persistence. Such long‐standing subcultures could still be observed in contemporary life, helping to solidify community, rather than national, identity. Those who hold this view of folk art and crafts emphasize their function of preserving communal tradition and transmitting skills in everyday life, rather than the aesthetic and stylistic emphasis characteristic of the art‐world view.

The opposing visions of folk art and crafts especially came into conflict during the 1920s debate over immigration restriction. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, bemoaning the decline of an American aesthetic because of the diverse ethnic groups that had recently emigrated from eastern and southern Europe, in 1924, established an American Wing to show the virtue of American decorative arts produced mostly by colonial New England artisans.

Jane Addams at Hull House and Allen Eaton at the Russell Sage Foundation meanwhile established exhibitions of living immigrant folk art and crafts, many combining Old World peasant traditions with American themes and materials. Their purpose, as the title of Eaton's 1932 book made clear, was to celebrate “Immigrant Gifts to American Life”. Folk art and craft production, in this view, reflected a continuing, living tradition in an America of plural communities. The exhibition that Eaton organized, “Arts and Crafts of the Homelands,” attracted unprecedented numbers of visitors at various sites in the Northeast from 1919 through the early 1930s. Rather than insisting upon a single dominant American colonial aesthetic, Eaton arranged his exhibition by social groups, each with its distinctive and enduring traditions. Eaton followed these exhibitions with folk art and craft displays that featured the living crafts of contemporary rural life (many from Appalachia) and art produced in World War II Japanese internment camps. Other social categories whose living folk art would later receive attention included women, children, old people, and members of diverse occupational and religious groups. In contrast, many in the art world continued to view folk art as a relic tradition associated with the preindustrial era out of which a unique and homogeneous American culture had emerged.

Exhibitions such as those organized by Allen Eaton often sought to encourage the revival and marketing of folk art and crafts, to enable residents of folk‐culture regions threatened with displacement to remain in their ancestral homes and occupations. Festivals and programs in Appalachia and Pennsylvania during the 1950s stimulated interest in traditional handmade goods. In addition to providing opportunities for traditional artists and craftspeople to continue their work, such events offered authentic skills and experiences that provided emotional and spiritual renewal within an increasingly dominant mass culture. After World War II, the cultural conservationist enterprise became incorporated into state and federal programs including state folk‐art offices. The first one was established in 1948 in Pennsylvania and spread to over forty states by the 1980s. Programs included apprenticeships, grants to artists and craftsworkers, exhibitions, publications, folk artists in the schools, and archives. At the federal level, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) included a folk‐art program, and an American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress was established as part of the Folklife Preservation Act of 1976. Beginning in 1967, the Smithsonian Institution featured folk art and crafts of American ethnic‐regional groups on the Mall in Washington, D.C., at its annual Festival of American Folklife held around Independence Day. The NEA awarded national “Heritage” fellowships to recognize traditional folk artists representing American cultural diversity, including African‐American blacksmith Philip Simmons and Mexican‐American Santos carver George Lopez.

As a new wave of immigration from Asia, South America, and the Caribbean reached the United States in the 1980s, programs reminiscent of Allen Eaton's efforts to recognize the contributions of various ethnic cultures during the 1920s became evident. While folk art and crafts had previously been associated with transplanted European skills, community life in ethnic‐regional cultures, or Native American crafts, new forms appeared as part of the American scene, especially in changing cities populated by mixtures of black, Hispanic, and Asian groups with their different legacies and complex interrelationships. Among the Hmong (from Laos), new forms of “story cloths” emerged based on an old textile tradition but now containing images of their Vietnam War experiences. Among Puerto Ricans in New York City, home‐built casitas (small houses) in abandoned urban lots sprang up to recreate the garden life of a community amid decaying apartment projects. As such productions came to be seen as a part of American folk art and crafts, students of folk culture recognized the value of ethnic and communal difference in a “multicultural” society. In this view, folk art and crafts appear not so much as relics of the Colonial Era, but as the material manifestations of an ongoing process of popular cultural expression that has been interpreted differently in various periods of American history.
See also Asian Americans; Cultural Pluralism; Folklore; Hispanic Americans; Immigration Law; Indian History and Culture; Industrialization; Modernist Culture; Museums: Museums of Art; Music: Traditional Music; National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities; Painting: To 1945; Puerto Rico; Race and Ethnicity; Regionalism; Settlement Houses.

Bibliography

Jean Lipman and and Alice Winchester , Flowering of American Folk Art, 1776–1876, 1974.
Kenneth L. Ames , Beyond Necessity: Art in the Folk Tradition, 1977.
Ian M.G. Quimby and Scott T. Swank, eds., Perspectives on American Folk Art, 1980.
Charles Camp, ed., Traditional Craftsmanship in America, 1983.
Simon J. Bronner , Grasping Things: Folk Material Culture and Mass Society in America, 1986.
John Michael Vlach and Simon J. Bronner, eds., Folk Art and Art Worlds, 1986.
Michael Owen Jones , Exploring Folk Art, 1987.
John Michael Vlach , Plain Painters: Making Sense of American Folk Art, 1988.
Steve Siporin , American Folk Masters: The National Heritage Fellows, 1992.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich , The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth, 2001.

Simon J. Bronner