MUSEUM OF INTERNATIONAL FOLK ART

Super Summer Event

Folk Art Flea

Saturday, June 11 | 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Santa Fe County Fairgrounds

After a two-year hiatus, the Friends of Folk Art are excited to present the 11th Annual Folk Art Flea. The event returns in a spacious new location at the Santa Fe County Fairgrounds, 3229 Rodeo Road.

This year’s Flea will be the largest and most diverse in its history with a rare assortment of international folk art. Event proceeds benefit educational programs and exhibitions at the Museum of International Folk Art.

Admission is free to the public from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Friends of Folk Art members enjoy early admission from 9 to 10 a.m.

To join Friends of Folk Art, call 505.216.0829. A Foundation membership is required. Friends membership is $100 per individual or $150 for two people.

Design in Mind

A Season of Inviting Public Programs

As summer lights up Museum Hill, the season kicks off a steady stream of public events at the Museum of International Folk Art.

There’s the Family Mornings at Folk Art program on June 5, featuring stories, activities and gallery explorations. Visitors can celebrate Midsummer on June 18 with a flower crown making workshop and an evening cocktail party on Museum Hill on June 21. July 24 marks Bailes, in which attendees learn traditional New Mexico dances. On July 26 and 28, the museum welcomes back Arts Alive!, its popular multigenerational art-making workshop.

These and other events dovetail with current exhibitions, including Dressing with Purpose: Belonging and Resistance in Scandinavia and Música Buena: Hispano Folk Music of New Mexico. But it is the rebirth of the Museum of International Folk Art’s Design Council—a member group focused on bringing awareness to the design aspects of the museum’s global folk art

Steve Cantrell, Design Council coordinator. Photo by Saro Calewarts.

collection—that has Steve Cantrell, the Design Council’s volunteer coordinator, truly jazzed about what’s to come.

Cantrell, who launched the Design Council in 2019 while working as the Museum of New Mexico Foundation director of leadership giving for the folk art museum, says the original idea behind the group was to showcase the natural connections between folk art and other truly extraordinary masterpieces of design.

“I was seeing the exact same faces at the museum,” Cantrell recalls. He worried that the folk art designation precluded the opportunity to draw fans of more contemporary art and design to the museum.

The timing coincided with the museum’s debut of a traveling exhibition, Alexander Girard: A Designer’s Universe, from Germany’s Vitra Design Museum. Cantrell sought to expand a pool of potential donors with the goal of raising funds for the exhibition and related public programming. The thennewly created Design Council reached out to a group of architects, fashion and furniture designers to create programming for this new art crowd.

“We had a couple lectures, a couple tours,” remembers Cantrell, who left the Foundation in 2020, but couldn’t shake his devotion to the museum. “The turnout was really good for a nascent organization.”

The exhibition, which emphasized Girard as both a modern designer and a folk art collector, was a huge success. But then, COVID-19 hit. Suddenly, the Design Council was dormant.

This spring, the museum’s former executive director, Khristaan Villela, and Laura Addison, curator of European and American folk art collections, prevailed upon Cantrell to revive the group for a Sunday lecture. In late March, 50 people showed up to hear noted design critic and author Alexandra Lange discuss Girard’s work in the context of other mid-century designers who created toys and play spaces.

“Obviously it remains an interest,” says Cantrell. “MOIFA has a high profile in the community anyway, and it’s not rocket science when you’re building off its fame. But there are very strong design elements there.”

More Design Council programming is planned, including a September talk by color forecaster Keith Recker on his new book, Deep Color: The Shades That Shape Our Souls. Cantrell also has set his sights on an annual design lecture with its roots in the 10,000-object exhibition Multiple Visions: A Common Bond, which will celebrate its 40th anniversary in December 2022 and highlights the global folk art collection gifted to the museum by Girard and his wife Susan.

“It’s really taking on a life of its own,” says Cantrell, speaking to the goals of any museum collection—and now, to the rebirth of the Design Council.

A member views a mid-century textile display featured in the 2019 exhibition, Alexander Girard: A Designer’s Universe. Photo © Andrew Kastner.

To support exhibitions and public programs at the Museum of International Folk Art, contact Laura Sullivan at 505.216.0829 or Laura@museumfoundation.org.