: The American Folk Art Museum is presenting a selection of recent
gifts in all media and forms dating from the early Nineteenth
Century to the present day for the first time in an installation
that opened recently on the fifth floor.
Highlighting the diversity of the museum's growing collection,
the exhibition "Recent Gifts to the American Folk Art Museum: A
Collection Sampler" explores both the traditional and
unconventional facets of folk art and the work of self-taught
artists.
Organized by Stacy C. Hollander, senior curator and Brooke Davis
Anderson, curator and director of the museum's Contemporary
Center, the exhibition reflects the expanding mission and
collecting interests of the museum.
"A Collection Sampler" includes a nearly life-size mid-Nineteenth
Century portrait by Joseph Whiting Stock that shows a young boy
on the edges of childhood. He is standing next to a
cornucopia-shaped vase on a side table filled with flowers,
hinting at the fruitful life ahead. This incidental motif
initiates a dialogue with another work, the three-dimensional
allegorical figure of "Flora," whose cornucopia spilling over
with flowers converses in the installation with a rare and early
bridal quilt, stenciled with images of flower-filled urns.
Additionally, the curvaceous female form of Flora also relates to
Eugene Von Bruenchenhein's lush circa 1940s photographs of his
beloved wife, Marie, sensuously posed against a dense floral
wallpaper background.
A Nineteenth Century child's horsedrawn chariot shares a sense of
youth with several other objects in the exhibition - the school
girl silk embroidery of "Aurora" racing through the sky in a
star-studded chariot and the tiny portrait of the 18-month-old
child William Chandler pushing a very large wheelbarrow with a
prancing horse depicted on its side. An unknown Twentieth Century
artist fashioned whimsical insect and animal toys out of tin
cans, beads, plastic baubles and paint.
The massive fabric wrapped sculptures by Judith Scott, a
contemporary California artist, stand in monumental contrast with
seven small-scale enigmatic works by the Philadelphia wireman; a
1930s circular rug composed entirely of folded plastic Wonder
Bread wrappers connects in its use of found materials to an
elaborately carved mid-Twentieth Century tramp art shelf.
Earnest Nineteenth Century portraits by New Englanders Stock and
Erastus Salisbury Field yield to the swirling romanticism of
figures by Aloise Corbaz, an early Twentieth Century Swiss
artist. Her double-sided painting of couples embracing is
composed of crayon, pencil and flower juice. It contrasts with
the robust depictions of the boxers "Abe. - Kane" and preacher
"Rev Cathit" painted on tin and wood by the South Carolina artist
Sam Doyle.
A stoneware cooler is emblazoned with the blue figure of an eagle
and shield, and a five-foot-high barbershop trade figure of
"Dapper Dan" proudly sports patriotic red and white striped
pants.
The iconic figure of "St Tammany," a 9-foot-high Indian
weathervane that soars in the grand staircase of the museum from
the third to the fourth floor, now has a female companion, an
elaborately hooked rug with the initials D. of P. (degree of
Pocahontas).
In furtherance of the museum's ongoing commitment to exhibit the
work of the reclusive Chicago artist Henry Darger, a 1999
gift/purchase, a presentation of watercolors and archival
material that explores his Catholicism has been selected by
Gerard C. Wertkin, the museum's director.
The American Folk Art Museum is at 45 West 53 Street. For
information, 212-265-1040 or www.folkartmuseum.org.
