Folk Art

Where old pressure lines of region, race, ethnicity, and class have cracked, searchers for authenticity go looking, in hollows of Appalachia, expanses of the Navajo reservation, slums of Miami and Chicago. These have come to seem the most culturally fertile locales of all, glades where bureaucratic rule and calculation have not yet scorched the earth. The very harshness of such places has vouched for the creative works made within them - here, one might fantasize, is art pure, without the dulling nurturance of training or the complicity of an intention. This widespread dream gave rise to twentieth-century folk art.

Not just folk art but all art depends on a condition of distance, some estranging display: the difference between a tiger and "The Tyger," between death on the battlefield and the Fallen Warrior of Aegina, decorously braced on his marble shield. According to this rule, folk art would seem to offer a kind of aesthetic shortcut, since its very designation is in fact based on an apprehension of social distinctions. "We make art, they make folk art," or, conversely, as I have heard some contemporary carvers say, "They make art, we just make folk art." In either case, it is this acknowledgment of distance that both names folk art and makes an immediate provision for its appeal. Like the antique, folk art purports an aesthetic claim straightaway, based not on how it looks but what it is. Yet unlike antiques, distanced in time, folk art is immediately aesthetic owing to social distance. It is strange because the people who made it are strangers.

During the 1970s folk art seemed immune from the contagions of normalcy then threatening the arts: a runaway market, the expansion of arts education, stylistic pluralism, and government patronage. While fine artists strove for corporate commissions, folk artists appeared naive - at least they were still poor. While urban artists plied their resumes, working up the line of reputable galleries, folk artists like Tolson had no telephones, lived on rocky hillsides, at the ends of mountain roads. As master of fine arts programs and new art journals proliferated throughout the 1970s, rural folk artists appeared ever more exceptional in their noncompliance with an increasingly dense cultural system.

Joining forces with collector Herbert W. Hemphill Jr., a founder of the Museum of American Folk Art in New York , Michael and Julie Hall directed attention to self-taught artists of the South and Midwest , collecting all the way. They challenged the Northeast's monopoly on "heritage" and argued with increasing conviction that folk art was indeed alive in the twentieth century. From 1970 through 1985, the Halls and Hemphill incorporated Tolson's woodcarvings into large personal collections of paintings, trade signs, and pottery made by other nonacademic artists, and as their collections toured to museums across the United States , they built an art world reputation for Tolson and his unschooled art contemporaries, legitimating twentieth-century folk art as whole. Now there are some 135 U.S. galleries specializing in current-day folk and outsider art, with more opening each season.