Carousel swan by
unidentified maker, found in New England, circa late Nineteenth
to early Twentieth Century. Wood with metal with
polychrome.
By Laura Beach
NEW YORK CITY -- The most succinct and visible expression of
change in the field of American folk art may be the American Folk
Art Museum itself, which opened its small but dazzling new
headquarters last December. Not a scrap of gingham is to be found
in this sleek boutique of an art palace; no lingering trace of
the "country-style" movement that three decades ago launched a
craze for quilts and baskets, weathervanes and whirligigs. The
new American Folk Art Museum prizes geometry, revels in texture
and the innovative use of materials, and is impeccably
well-versed in the ways of the academy. It is "insider"
architecture at its best.
Visitors occasionally assume that the American Folk Art Museum is
an extension of its next-door neighbor, the Museum of Modern Art.
The impression is not correct, but not entirely far-fetched,
either. In 1932, Holger Cahill, MoMA's acting director, organized
"American Folk Art: Art of the Common Man, 1750-1900." MoMA has
been questioning the meaning of "high" versus "low," elite versus
popular, progressive versus traditional ever since.
Neither the proximity of the two museums, nor the decades-old
dialectic between their contents, satisfies Frank Maresca and
Roger Ricco, whose new book, : New Discoveries in Folk,
Self-Taught, and Outsider Sculpture, gages change in the folk
art field over the past two decades. Insisting on equal
opportunity for nonacademic art, the authors write, "It has been
comfortable for dealers, critics and collectors to champion this
work under constricting labels, almost solely according to
concepts of primitivism and authenticity. They set up a simple --
and, we believe, spurious -- opposition between vernacular and
mainstream art."
For most of their careers as dealers, Frank Maresca and Roger
Ricco have played the taut, uneasy line between the vernacular
and the mainstream. It is a balance they negotiate daily at the
Ricco/Maresca Gallery, which occupies the entire third floor of a
nondescript former warehouse on West 20th Street in Chelsea, the
new center of the contemporary art world. A commercial zone
cluttered with the dreary remnants of taxi garages and a dingy
view of the West Side Highway, it is not a block the uninitiated
would venture down with much enthusiasm, but looks are deceiving.
The building, No. 529, has 23 tenants, most of them art
galleries, some with big names like Feigen and ACA. There is a
suitable rawness about the Ricco/Maresca Gallery, which uses
poured concrete, exposed beams and gray industrial carpeting to
set off boldly lettered trade signs, powerful carvings and vivid
African American quilts of purely abstract design.
"Shake Hands with Uncle Sam" strength tester made by the Howard
Machine Manufacturing Co., New England, circa 1890. Cast iron
with polychrome.
Experts have debated the definition of folk art for decades.
After the publication of Roger Cardinal's book Outsider
Art in 1972, the discussion became even more complex. Today,
folk, self-taught and outsider art are generally understood to
represent points along a continuum of work created without the
benefit of academic training. Twenty years ago, notes Lyle Rexer,
who wrote the brief but thoughtful chapter introductions for ,
"self-taught was everything untutored, and outsider was the
eccentric, alienated fringe." The situation is considerably more
complex today, Rexer observes: "From Jean-Michel Basquiat and
Keith Haring to Susan Rothenberg and Jim Nutt -- not to mention
the host of German artists who sought to resurrect expressionism
-- [artists] deliberately adopted imagery and methods that recast
the idea of 'outsider' and 'primitive.'"
As imprecise as the definitions are, the market has a way of
creating its own categories, pragmatically based on price and
audience. Anonymous, Nineteenth Century figures of animals,
decoys, canes, carnival and circus figures, weathervanes and
whirligigs -- all chapters in American Vernacular
-- are typically treated as folk art. Twentieth Century
self-taught and outsider art, often signed or attributed, are
regarded as something else.
Sometimes objects slip the confines of their labels. "Crossover,"
the phenomenon of folk, self-taught and outsider art achieving
recognition in the fine arts mainstream, "is the most exciting
development in our field in years," says Maresca. When crossover
occurs, it is often reflected in the market. In 1999, Christie's
put up for sale Morris Hirschfield's "Girl With Her Dog," a
self-taught painting of 1943 that had been illustrated in
Hemphill and Weissman's pioneering volume, Twentieth
Century American Folk Art and Artists. Estimated at
$10/15,000, the canvas sold for an astounding $563,500, almost
certainly not to a collector of quilts and baskets.
At Ricco/Maresca Gallery, the distinctions between fine and folk
art have ceased to have much meaning. "Gaggles, Flocks and
Covies: Further Exhalations and Murders," Ricco/Maresca's summer
show, was a democratic assemblage of painting, sculpture,
photography and mixed-media pieces chosen by members of the
gallery's 11-person staff. Included were works by Joel Peter
Witkin, who, having been recently honored by the Guggenheim
Museum with a retrospective, is very much an insider. The
well-known photographer and mixed-media artist, who admires
visionary art and sometimes incorporates elements of it in his
own work, left the powerhouse Pace Gallery, where he had been for
19 years, to come to Ricco/Maresca Gallery because he admires the
dealers' sensibilities.
Frank Maresca was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1948. Robert Bernet,
the high school teacher to whom is dedicated, introduced him to
photography, which Maresca says he was "good at, maybe partly out
of fear that I wasn't good at anything else." Bernet, who died a
few years later, encouraged Maresca to see the world around him
in a new way. He also reassured the budding artist's alarmed
parents, "who didn't get it at all."
Bernet took Maresca to his first jazz club. "I was 17, couldn't
drink, and there I was, sitting with my high school teacher,
listening to Mabel Mercer." Profoundly affected by the
experience, Maresca considers it his first introduction to "the
world of self-taught, to African American tradition."
Maresca went on to study at the Fashion Institute of Technology
and Pratt Institute. He taught photography at New York's School
of Visual Arts and became a successful fashion photographer
before eventually discovering American primitive art. His
business partner, Roger Ricco, followed a similar path, studying
painting at the University of Wisconsin before winning the
prestigious Prix de Rome. Ricco was living in New York,
supplementing his earnings as an artist by working as a restorer,
when Bert Hemphill ambled into his studio one day.
Many consider Hemphill, a founder of the American Folk Art Museum
whose collection went to the Smithsonian before his death, as the
father of Twentieth Century American folk art. Ricco and
Maresca's pantheon of greats also includes Adele Earnest, Gerald
Kornblau, Ed Fuller and James Kronen, all dealers who saw rare
beauty in the humble artifacts of everyday life. "Sidney Janis is
one of my all-time heroes. I've tried to model myself after him,"
adds Maresca, with a nod to the New York fine arts dealer who
championed Morris Hirschfield and Patrick Sullivan, among others.
Ricco and Maresca became dealers in 1979. Since then, through
books and exhibitions, they have promoted a broad range of
visionary artists, from Thornton Dial and William Hawkins to Bill
Traylor, Henry Darger and Judith Scott. Upcoming books include
Chance, a visual essay on found objects that is intended
to be an inspirational guide for artists and designers. "There is
so much about the concept of chance and surface that relates, in
particular, to folk art," says Maresca.
Maresca's collection of vernacular photography, which he donated
to the Newark Museum, is to be the subject of a traveling
exhibition and catalog at the New Jersey institution. The dealer
is also interested in producing a definitive book on African
American art. He considers Black Folk Art in America,
1930-1980, published by the Corcoran Gallery in 1982, one of
the most influential volumes in the folk art literature. "It was
softcover and black and white, but it very much changed things
for me," says the dealer, who envisions an expanded sequel to the
classic.
Roger Ricco and Frank Maresca have not changed much in two
decades, not in their appearance, demeanor or in their contagious
enthusiasm for self-taught art. At lunch recently at a
refurbished parking garage on 10th Avenue at 17th Street, Ricco
picks up a pen and begins doodling on the paper tablecloth.
Maresca, peering through round, black spectacles that would be at
home on the nose of architect Philip Johnson, fixes his gaze and
begins to speak.
" is about loving something and wanting to communicate it to
others," he says. "It is not meant to be an academic survey. It's
our own take. Virtually all the material in it is previously
unpublished. We've tried to push forward into the modern and
contemporary arena."
Anyone who knows Ricco and Maresca know their taste for objects
that are overtly sculptural and covertly psychological, often
disturbing in some subtle way. Dismissing the idea that they are
old-style connoisseurs of formal virtuosity, Maresca explains,
"We look for magic, mystery and design. An Alessi teapot by
Michael Graves stands on its own but it is not art. Art has to
take you to another place."
"Our interest has much more to do with an artist's impulse," adds
Ricco, who continues to sketch as he speaks. "We don't care about
factory weathervanes. We do care that someone took the time to
make something that he considered beautiful, something glorious
and tangible, something with a little ego even."
Maresca and Ricco bring a decidedly artistic sensibility to the
presentation of folk art, both in their gallery and in their
books. Recognizing that context -- from the way pieces are
labeled to how and where they are shown -- has everything to do
with how art is perceived, they have envisioned as a kind of fine
arts gallery within a dust jacket. There are minimalist overtones
in the black cover and smooth, oversized white pages that are as
stark as sheets. It is crossover on the printed page.
is collage art along the lines of Joseph Cornell; a fascinating,
highly telling composition created by the juxtaposition of
curiously compelling objects. On the title pages, for instance, a
folk carving of a horse, its saddle cheerfully decorated with a
heart, faces an outsider doll by Judith Scott, a mentally
disabled artist with the intensity of Anselm Kiefer. The
comparison is an itinerary for the next 300 pages. An optician's
trade sign faces the first page of text. The sign is a non-verbal
invitation to consider what follows with an open eye; it may even
be a rebus for Maresca himself, the seer who leads others. On the
book's back cover is an American flag trade sign, made
incandescent by dozens of light bulbs. Folk art fits happily into
the American myth, we discover. As Rexer explains, "American
eccentricity, withdrawal from community and extreme individualism
segue naturally into outsiderness, especially when physical
isolation give them a push."
Companion essays, nicely symmetrical in their content, by Margit
Rowell and Joseph Jacobs preface what is otherwise a
well-designed picture book. Rowell's high-art credentials are
impeccable. An independent curator living in New York and Paris,
she worked at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Centre
Pompidou in Paris, and as chief curator of prints and drawings at
the Museum of Modern Art. She was unfamiliar with American
self-taught and outsider art until she accepted an invitation to
visit the gallery from Maresca, who promptly converted her.
Rowell's essay, "Familiar, Yet Somehow Unfamiliar...," tackles
the theoretical assumptions that have kept folk art out of the
fine arts museum, noting that the works themselves "resist most
organized attempts to contextualize them" and present "serious
obstacles to scientific study, conservation and connoisseurship."
In his well-written essay, "Folk Art and the Fine Art Museum,"
Newark Museum Curator Joseph Jacobs provides a useful historical
overview, beginning with the Ogunquit art colony's discovery of
American folk art and concluding with the recent collecting
activities of institutions like the High Museum of Art and the
Milwaukee Art Museum. Jacobs offers some interesting details. He
speculates, for instance, that MoMA's preoccupation with
Surrealism accounted for its mounting a solo show of the
Nashville self-taught sculptor William Edmondson in 1937. He
adds, "Dorothy Miller, the show's curator, was likely attracted
to Edmondson's sculpture because formalistically it was a tour de
force. But it is hard to believe that the museum staff, following
the racial stereotyping of the time, was not equally drawn to the
work because it had been made by a self-taught artist who was
also a little-educated African American." For those who are
especially interested in the conjunction of folk art and
Modernism, "Drawing on America's Past: Folk Art and the Index of
American Design," opening December 1 at the National Gallery of
Art in Washington, will expound on the theme.
To the dealers' credit, includes objects from nearly 90 public
and private collections (more than 750 pieces were photographed
over four years.) About 25 percent of the objects illustrated
passed through Ricco/Maresca Gallery; only one, a John Scholl
snowflake, is currently for sale. The dealers have pointedly
included competitors' material. While the list of contributors
makes fascinating reading (everyone from Robert and Katherine
Booth to Susan and Jerry Lauren and Julia Louis-Dreyfus is named)
it is disappointing that only with great effort can a reader
determine who owns what. The streamlined photo captions no doubt
flatter the page, but they disregard the importance of provenance
in an emerging category of collecting.
laments that folk, self-taught and outsider art are too often
excluded from serious consideration by the fine arts community,
which treats untutored work as fine art's illiterate relation.
One could just as easily argue that parity has already been
achieved; that fine and folk art are two halves of the compelling
whole that broadly constitutes American art. After all, without
outsiders there could be no insiders.
: New Discoveries in Folk, Self-Taught, and Outsider
Sculpture by Frank Maresca and Roger Ricco. Introduction by
Margit Rowell. Bulfinch Press, 2002, 304 pages, 450 color
illustrations, $75 hardcover.
