FOLK ART ROAD TRIP

FOLK ART ROAD TRIP: TRAVELS WITH MODERNISM’S UTILITY INFIELDER

In three successive eras of modern art history, different definitions of folk art have come into the American art conversation. This exhibition seeks to juxtapose vanguard and vernacular art in a historical narrative, wherein modern Americans have repeatedly found and invented political, aesthetic, and spiritual utility for the art of folk and self-taught artists.

In response to the massive cultural destabilizations that attended the first decades of the 20th century, many Americans longed for a world in which art was just itself. Certain modern artists discovered straightforward styles of art, that they called “folk art,” in the simple handmade tools, toys, stitchery pictures, landscape paintings, and trade signs produced in frontier America. Among these artists, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Charles Sheeler, and Elie Nadelman found the formal simplicity and distinctive American style of their nation’s pre-industrial folk art to be an inspiration for their own vanguard modernism.

Throughout the middle decades of the 20th century, folk art produced by anonymous frontier craftsmen no longer excited the art world. Instead, the work of contemporary, self-taught artists came to symbolize the regional and ethnic vitality of a pluralist America newly seeing itself more as a tossed salad than as a melting pot. Modern artists, ranging from Doris Lee in the 1940s to Andy Warhol in the 1970s, collected the work of living, self-taught, folk artists whose creativity spoke to them about the vitality of work-a-day modern America.

As the 21st century approached, American modernists identified yet another body of non-academic art that became the folk art for their time. This genre was comprised of idiosyncratic art gestures produced by “outsiders” (incarcerated prisoners, women, ethnic minorities, and others) seeking a place in an increasingly diverse society challenged by its own historic passion for individualism. Today, contemporary artists like Luis Tapia, Michael Noland, and Lee Garrett have been inspired by marginalized self-taught artists seeking identity in modern American life.

Connecting the dots in the story of folk art to some of the many familiar dots in the epic of modernism, this exhibition presents the CMA folk art collection in a direct conversation with the vanguard artists that have been its champions for over a century.

Top image: Mary Borkowski, The Crash (1968). Silk on silk. Gift of Michael D. Hall and Pat Glascock (in Memory of Herbert W. Hemphill, Jr.). Bottom image: Doris Lee, Schwab’s Drug Store (1945). Gouache on illustration board. Museum Purchase, Howald and Derby Fund.