Folk Art The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture Volume 23

FOLK ART OF THE AMERICAN SOUTH

When readers of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture pick up the volumes called Geography or History or Literature, they can anticipate what kind of information they will find. The Folk Art volume, on the other hand, discusses art and artists whose connections to each other are far from obvious. Despite continuous proposals of alternate terms, including the more current “self-taught,” “American folk art” remains the most common name for the art of ordinary people with little or no academic training in art. This umbrella term preserves a notion of lasting cultural significance—that “the unconventional side of the American tradition in the fine arts” somehow captures the very essence of national identity. Understanding “southern folk art” requires attention to the artistic nationalism embraced by historians, intellectuals, and artists during the first half of the 20th century, to the South’s own regional patriotism, and to the South’s complex relationship to national patterns.

The concept of folk art as expression of national identities did not originate in the United States but had its roots in 19th-century Europe. Although ordinary folk have always made art—in all places and in all times—the term “folk art” first appears in print in 1845. Even then the term was invested with political meaning. Writing to promote German nationalism, the author of an essay on German wood carving praised peasant art—Volkskunst—as being a holy art, “rooted in the soil of the fatherland.” In 1894 Austrian art historian Alois Riegl’s Volkskunst, Hausfleiss und Hausindustrie proposed folk art as both the expression of a cultural essence of a people and a preserver of regional and national identities during periods of social change.

Traditional American Folk Art. The writers, artists, art dealers, and collectors of modern art who “discovered” American folk art during the 1910s and 1920s embraced artistic nationalism, seized upon untrained artists as narrators of a homemade American identity, and claimed folk art as the native precedent for their own work. The abstraction of form, exaggeration, linearity, saturated blocks of color, limited palette, and immediacy that stemmed from folk artists’ individual solutions to the challenges of representation paralleled modernist aesthetics; for the discoverers’ quirky portraits of well-appointed gentlemen and prim New England ladies in outlandish headgear, improbably faux-grained furniture, bombastic ships’ figure heads, exaggerated cigar-store figures, elegantly stylized decoys, earnest girlhood samplers, and other such work revealed the remarkable resourcefulness of folk artists who followed their own paths. This myth of the independent artist in a democratic society was, of course, a version of the myth of the self-made man whose self-reliance and self-discipline served himself, his family, and his nation.

Interpretations of American history that emphasize commonalities and gloss over conflict have been a mainstay of American thought. Every schoolchild learned that European settlers who arrived in search of liberty could easily become self-made men enjoying a “comfortable sufficiency.” For the discoverers of folk art, New England folk portraits, surely the most common examples of 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century folk art, became icons of American self-determination. The discoverers relished the self-taught artists’ careful renderings of conventional signs of prosperity, such as jewelry, property, or dress, as well as their penetrating representations of character. They likewise admired self-taught artists’ idealized landscapes of New England’s cultivated fields and pleasant towns and embraced these and other New England creations as emblems of a simpler, bygone era free of war, economic insecurity, and social unrest.

During the first decades of the 20th century, a number of modernist artists became collectors and devotees of American folk art. Sculptor Elie Nadelman amassed a considerable collection of American folk art and in 1926 established a short-lived folk art museum on his property in Riverdale, in Bronx County, N.Y. Other modernists who sought out folk art were Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth, whose own works include images of folk art and demonstrate their appreciation of folk art’s spare renderings of the American scene. Perhaps more significant in introducing folk art to the New York art world were artists Marsden Hartley, Bernard Karfiol, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Robert Laurent, and William and Marguerite Zorach, who came under folk art’s spell in Ogunquit, Me. There, collector and artist Hamilton Easter Field decorated cabins he rented to summering artists with inexpensive homemade objects and paintings he had picked up at auctions and in antique stores. Excited by reports from the modernist artists working in Ogunquit, Holger Cahill, a freelance journalist, publicist, and Newark Museum staff member, and Edith Gregor Halpert, a dealer of modern art, were also visitors. These two soon traveled back roads in pursuit of folk art treasures. Halpert, who represented many of the Ogunquit artists as well as Sheeler and Demuth at her Downtown Gallery in New York’s Greenwich Village, established in 1931 the American Folk Art Gallery, the first commercial gallery dedicated to American folk art. Cahill, who served as Halpert’s adviser, introduced folk ark to the museum world.

Cahill, who had served as the publicity director for Henri’s Society of Independent Artists and who had visited open-air museums of folk culture in Sweden, Norway, and Germany, was an ideal advocate for American folk art. The catalogs that accompanied Cahill’s three seminal exhibitions remain classics. The first two exhibitions, which Cahill organized for the Newark Museum, American Primitives: An Exhibit of the Paintings of Nineteenth Century Folk Artists (1930) and American Folk Sculpture: The Work of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Craftsmen (1931), adopt conventional fine art categories “painting” and “sculpture” and demonstrate Cahill’s definition of folk art as “the unconventional side of the American tradition in the fine arts.” For Cahill, American folk art could never be the equivalent of European folk art, defined as the community-based crafts or material culture of discrete peasant groups, each with its own shared ethnicity, religion, construction techniques, and decorative conventions. In American narratives, there were no peasants. In fact, only a few American groups have created folk art in the European sense, like the Moravians, who established their own communities in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, interrelated families of potters who developed distinct local styles passed on through generations, or groups like Alabama’s Gee’s Bend quilters, whose remarkable vocabulary of form resulted from geographic isolation. Emphasizing formal qualities over cultural context, Cahill excluded the utilitarian work of craftsmen—by which he meant the “makers of furniture, pottery, textiles, glass, and silverware”—but included the inventive, idiosyncratic creations of “the rare craftsman who is an artist by nature if not training.” Cahill’s so-called folk artists were not members of a well-defined community but ordinary Americans: tradesmen, farmers, schoolteachers, dance instructors, physicians, housewives, middle-class schoolgirls, slaves and former slaves, sailors, and an assortment of others who made exceptional art.

Cahill was certainly aware that his novel, specifically American, definitions of folk art and folk artists were problematic. The titles of his first two catalogs label the creators both as “folk artists” and as “craftsmen.” In the texts of those two catalogs Cahill employs almost interchangeably such terms as “primitive,” “naive,” and “folk.” In the catalog to his third and final folk art exhibition, American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man, 1750–1900 (1932), Cahill, who had joined the staff of the Museum of Modern Art, speaks directly to difficulties of giving a single name to the diverse art made by American artists with little or no academic training: “The work of these men is folk art because it is the expression of the common people, made by them and intended for their use and enjoyment. It is not the expression of professional artists made for a small cultured class, and it has little to do with the fashionable art of its period.”

“Folk art” became the most durable name for this art not only because Cahill was a fluent writer and well-known art world figure but also because Cahill and Edith Gregor Halpert had become advisers to Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. A founder of the Museum of Modern Art and a prominent collector of modern art, Rockefeller had begun collecting folk art during the 1920s. While Rockefeller valued the art’s historical character, she was smitten, above all, by its aesthetic similarities to modernist art. Rockefeller’s collection of more than 400 works, almost all from the Northeast, continues to exemplify the traditional art of the United States. The 173 artworks featured in Cahill’s Museum of Modern Art 1932 exhibition American Folk Art: Art of the Common Man, 1750–1900 came from Rockefeller’s collection. Although the Museum of Modern Art’s sponsorship of this exhibition might have seemed unlikely to some enthusiasts of modern art, the exhibition was a runaway success, appealing to both the art world and the casual museumgoer. It featured two- and three-dimensional works, toured to six additional venues between 1933 and 1934, and thus introduced the work and term “American folk art” to a wide audience. Rockefeller’s subsequent 1939 donation of the bulk of her collection to Colonial Williamsburg resulted in further national recognition of folk art.

Cahill’s argument for the term “American folk art” and its adoption by prominent members of New York’s art world did not, however, enshrine the term. The urge to define folk art according to both aesthetic qualities and the artist’s social status led inexorably to the continuing dispute. The “term warfare,” as writer, editor, and collector Didi Barrett wittily named the continuing rancorous debates about terminology, began soon after Cahill’s important publications.

The term “provincial painting” interprets American folk paintings as less polished versions of English paintings and draws attention to the artists’ lack of mastery. This use of “provincial,” implying that all colonists immigrated from England and that American artists followed the specific aesthetic norms of a school of English painters, is clearly incorrect. “Provincial” cannot describe all of the artists Cahill, Rockefeller, and others called “folk.” The term “provincial,” however, does have some limited use, as it correctly describes the training and practice of some important southern artists like José Francisco Xavier de Salazar y Mendoza, Louisiana’s foremost painter during the Spanish colonial period, who arrived in New Orleans in 1782 from Mérida in Yucatán. Although details of Salazar’s training are unknown, his portraits reveal his familiarity with Mexican provincial styles and Spanish painting conventions probably learned in Mexico, a Spanish province.

Unlike “provincial,” the term “primitive” has become obsolete. The concept of “primitive art” emerged at the end of the 19th century as a label for all non-Western artistic traditions. Museums lumped together in single departments such subjects as Japanese, African, Oceanic, and Pre-Columbian art; some museums maintained this nomenclature and organization until the beginning of the 21st century, when recognition of the term’s ethnocentricity and outdated notions of racial and cultural inferiority made the term unacceptable. Inevitably, “primitive” implies that the artist himself or herself is ignorant and that the art is defective; applied to American folk art, the term perpetuates the notion of deficiency.

“Naive” is another troublesome label. This term entered the modernist lexicon as a description of the idiosyncratic works of artists like Henri Rousseau, whose lack of academic training gives their attempts at naturalism a childlike quality. Like “primitive,” “naive” is often an expression of racial, religious, and class bias. “Naive” has further connotations antithetic to genuine understanding of the art by self-taught artists: the association of “naive” with words like “cute” and “quaint” has allowed cynical makers of merchandise to reduce folk art to a style of décor.

The discovery of 20th-century self-taught artists during the 1960s and 1970s renewed term warfare. While many collectors, scholars, and museum professionals committed to traditional American folk art were happy to trace continuities between the newly discovered work and pre-20th-century genres such as quilts, weathervanes, and trade figures, other enthusiasts preferred to view the work of 20th-century self-taught artists in relationship to mainstream contemporary art. Museums, especially, bore the burden of redefining “folk art” or coming up with new terms for art created by 20th-century artists with little or no formal training. Herbert W. Hemphill Jr., a founder and first curator of the Museum of American Folk Art, now the American Folk Art Museum, after much consideration settled on “contemporary folk art” because, like Holger Cahill, he felt that “folk art” was still the most recognizable name. Hemphill and Julia Weissman’s 1974 Twentieth-Century Folk Art and Artists gave currency to the name. Robert Bishop, the Museum of American Folk Art’s director from 1977 until 1991, followed suit when he included contemporary artists in his 1979 book Folk Painters of America.

Since the 1970s, members of the folk art world have proposed new labels. Some have advanced portmanteau names to replace the general term “folk art,” while others have tried to formulate names for specific subgroups of artists or types of creation. “Visionary,” an attempt to describe the remarkable individualism of artists unbound by academic convention, may also convey the impression that a visionary is given to wild enthusiasms or delusions. Although inappropriate for the field as a whole, the term “visionary” does recognize the religious or visionary experiences that artists, frequently southern artists, recall as the stimulus to their art making. Visionary may also describe artists who envision new worlds.

Rarely applied to traditional folk art, except in the case of “faux folk,” is the especially pernicious term “outsider.” An infelicitous translation of art brut, originally proposed as a label for the art made by artists whose mental states freed them from cultural art norms, “outsider” is now employed indiscriminately not only to describe the work of artists with atypical mental states or makers of highly individualistic art but also to describe the art of poor people, black people, children, and makers who simply choose to call themselves “outsiders” or produce materials for an “outsider” market. The pathology and otherness implied by “outsider” renders the term untenable.

On the other hand, “vernacular,” a recent characterization of the work of black artists, is a precise and necessary term, as it acknowledges a distinctive visual vocabulary shared by African Americans. “Vernacular” confronts a once-dominant assumption that the experience of slavery erased connections to the religions, worldviews, and artistic cultures brought to America by those captured in Africa and enslaved in the Americas. Beginning in the 1920s, Melville J. Herskovits, the father of African American anthropology, undertook extensive fieldwork in Africa and the Americas and documented continuities of African cultures in the Americas in scholarly and popular magazines. This insight did not meet with wide acceptance until the 1960s and 1970s, when Africanists like art historian Robert Farris Thompson, with expertise in African art and culture, further documented African philosophical and visual continuities in the New World. The “discovery” of living black folk artists in the South during the late 1960s and 1970s and the groundbreaking 1982 Corcoran Gallery of Art exhibition Black Folk Art in America, 1930–1980 made African American and southern visual and cultural traditions a focus of national attention.

More recently, the two-volume Souls Grown Deep, published in 2000 and 2001, and edited by William Arnett and Paul Arnett, along with other books published by Tinwood Books, have provided access to critical evaluation and superb photographs of the work of 20th- and 21st-century African American artists of the American South, including African American artists who took southern culture with them as they migrated elsewhere. These publications have also drawn attention to 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century African American pottery, textiles, and sculpture. Archaeologists excavating 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century African American settlements have unearthed numerous material examples that demonstrate continuities between African creative traditions and 20th-century art making in the New World. Such discoveries as Colono ware, marked with the Kongo cosmogram, having survived the passage of time, the depredations of the southern climate, and hard use, document spiritual and aesthetic continuities. Research also reveals the interactions of European American and African American makers and paves the way for further inquiries into the traditional folk art of the South.

Although Holger Cahill’s “folk art” remains the most recognized name for institutions and a general audience, most advocates now prefer “self-taught.” Like “folk,” “self-taught” can describe artists from the 16th to the 21st centuries. Furthermore, “self-taught,” a term without class and racial connotations, explains why scholars, museums, dealers, and collectors display self-taught art from all centuries of American history side by side: the makers are all artists with little or no training in art. However, though “self-taught” is clearer and more inclusive than “folk,” it too requires amplification. Art school graduates do not only learn in classrooms but also teach themselves through making art.

Many self-taught artists have had no craft or artistic training; others have adapted technical skills learned at the side of a master craftsman or in a workplace to create individualistic art. A few painters and sculptors who acquired brief, haphazard educations in art or studied with local, sketchily educated or other self-taught artists simply had to trust in their own devices. Many, like colonial portraitist William Dering, have no doubt derived compositional and pictorial formulas from print sources; in Dering’s bombastic and comical circa 1740 portrait of George Booth, the young boy, dressed in wig and stylish clothing, stands between stone plinths holding busts of generously endowed naked women. Researchers have not found any version of such sculpture in colonial Virginia.

Other artists’ careers demonstrate further qualifications of the term “self-taught.” Some painters, both immigrants and native born, may have staked claims to educations or accomplishments they had not truly achieved. Although New Orleans portraitist Julien Hudson claimed to have received a complete education in miniature painting in Paris, France, his folky style owes little to academic conventions. Many less accomplished immigrant portraitists, who settled in America hoping to find success among unsophisticated patrons, soon taught themselves the simplified styles that American patrons often preferred. The itinerant artist known as Dupue or the Guilford Limner, thought to be an immigrant from France, employed a linear and simplified New England style for the watercolor portraits he painted for patrons in North Carolina and Kentucky during the 1820s. These portraits repeat the conventions of middle-class New England portraiture during the colonial and early national periods, lending clarity to the subjects’ presentations of self by using emblems of piety, success, and refinement.

Like their middle-class patrons, American self-taught artists can derive special satisfaction in being self-made, independent Americans. Joshua Johnson, for example, thought to be the nation’s first African American professional artist, may have enjoyed some exposure to works of the Peale family of Philadelphia and Baltimore or some brief, unrecorded training. In 1798, however, the Baltimore portraitist proudly advertised himself as a “self-taught genius deriving from nature and industry his knowledge of the Art; and having experienced many insuperable obstacles in the pursuit of his studies.” Johnson’s use of “self-taught” is the earliest known application of the term to art making, but the term was commonly used during the 1830s to describe any number of self-made men. English visitor Frances Trollope’s 1832 Domestic Manners of the Americans recounts her amusement at the phrase “self-taught,” which she reports “had met me at every corner from the time I first entered the country.”

At this point, after nearly 100 years of term warfare, no one has hit upon a term pleasing to all; but “folk art” still carries more meaning to more people than does any other label. Academics, institutions, and collectors know what they mean by the name; and while some new museum visitors may expect to see only traditional forms like quilts, more and more visitors expect to see a full range of works by self-taught artists. The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, opened in 1957 as the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center, collects 20th- and 21st-century work but still honors its major donor with the name she preferred. The American Folk Art Museum has retained “folk art” in its name through two changes. Established in 1961 as the Museum of Early American Folk Arts, a name that limited folk art to a period of creation and seemed to concentrate on utilitarian decorative arts, the institution became the Museum of American Folk Art in 1966. In 2001 the museum adopted the name American Folk Art Museum to indicate more clearly its mission to display American art from all centuries as well as art made outside the United States. Major generalist museums also continue to refer to works in their collections as folk art, even as they define folk art as the art of self-taught artists. Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, a leader in the folk art field, is the only generalist American museum with a curator of folk art; its department of folk art provides a dynamic model for other institutions. Most heartening is the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s recent establishment of the position of curator of folk and self-taught art.

Joshua Johnson, The Westwood Children, ca. 1807, oil on canvas, 41⅛″ × 46″ (Courtesy the National Gallery of Art)

The concept of folk art has, obviously, expanded tremendously since its formulation in the early 20th-century Northeast. This expansion has allowed scholars to claim new bodies of work and to refine perceptions of traditional folk art. Careful research into the art making of ethnic groups, into artists working in specific locales, and into reciprocal influences has also expanded the concept of folk art. Scholarship in traditional folk art has flourished; sophisticated, intellectually, and visually pleasing exhibitions and publications address artists’ aesthetic choices and elucidate cultural contexts that confirm Cahill’s assertion that folk art is a living form of unconventional expression. The explosion of interest in folk art that followed the discovery of living folk artists in the 20th century expanded the self-taught art world in previously unimaginable directions. During the 1970s and 1980s, art dealers, institutions, and collectors sought out and celebrated new artists. Not only did scholars, dealers, and collectors meet with artists, but they also had the opportunity to hear artists’ descriptions of their art, lives, and ideas. Intellectuals and experts in many academic disciplines contributed to a deeper understanding and appreciation of self-taught artists past and present. The extraordinary creativity of living African American artists made clear the contributions of both self-taught and academically trained black artists to American art. Interest in self-taught American artists naturally led to interest in self-taught art as a global phenomenon.

Remarkably, however, many people and institutions still define traditional American folk art as the 19th-century art of New England. To be sure, the early discoverers of “folk art” found most of their treasures in New England, New York, and Pennsylvania and patronized dealers in the region. Succeeding generations of folk art collectors from the Northeast sought out additional examples from folk art’s golden age before mass production. As these collectors, in turn, have become donors to major museums, the exhibitions and catalogs published by these museums tend to keep the focus on New England. And, despite an almost instinctual impulse to hail American folk art as a portrait of the entire nation, few have asked where the traditional folk art of the South might be.

Why is it so difficult to learn about—or even see—the portraits, quilts, weathervanes, samplers, and other forms of traditional folk art created in the South? A student of folk art today is more likely to be more familiar with the details of the careers and art-making practices of 20th- and 21st-century masters and southerners like Thornton Dial and William Edmondson than with the makers of the South’s masterpieces of traditional folk art: among many others, the singular, deservedly iconic portrait, circa 1815, of Jean Baptiste Wiltz, a duck-hunting Louisiana gentleman blacksmith, now in the Louisiana State Museum; lovely portraits of Louisiana’s free persons of color, including the exquisite self-portrait of free man of color Julien Hudson; the circa 1865 sampler stitched by Salem, N.C., schoolgirl Mary Lou Hawkes, whose depiction of high-stepping former slaves, based on stereotypical prints of Jim Crow, reveals this young girl’s reaction to abolition; colorful and beautifully proportioned 19th-century chests from Virginia, the Carolinas, and Tennessee; or Texas artist Samuel Chamberlain’s watercolor depictions of his dalliances with voluptuous Mexican maidens, vivid accounts of the Mexican American War, and other scenes of 19th-century frontier life. We have to ask why early dealers and collectors did not scour the South for additions to their collections. Were there no southern collectors? Why is there no museum devoted to the traditional folk art of the South? In short, we still have to ask, where is the traditional folk art of the South?

Where Is the South’s Traditional Folk Art? The history of southern folk art begins in the 16th century during the Age of Discovery, when European explorers arrived in and began to document New World scenes and colonial settlements. Because scholars identify the art making of Native Americans as fine art or simply as art, the South’s first folk artists were European men, some engineers or architects with training in technical drawing, some with no known training. Their paintings and drawings became part of a historical record held in colonial archives or sent back to Europe to satisfy curiosity about strange lands. These early works did not receive the attention of art historians for centuries. The obscurity of a colony’s early works is not uncommon; recognition comes only when writers and collectors decide that a region or nation requires a historical survey of its art. The works of self-taught artists often remain in the shadows, as chroniclers with nationalistic purpose almost always lionize accomplishments in the so-called fine arts. Fashions in art making, however, change from time to time; the modernist artists living in proximity to New York during the first decades of the 20th century who discovered American folk art happily rejected the academic American art previously put forth as America’s finest achievements in order to celebrate direct and appealing works of folk art. But the craze for folk art did not take immediate root in the South. Appreciation of the art made by ordinary citizens of the South still lags because of the South’s peculiar history and mythmaking. The history of the South’s traditional folk art is one missed opportunity for recognition after another.

During the 1920s and 1930s, the South held little attraction for advocates of folk art. Hot summers and poor roads discouraged collecting trips, as did newspaper reports of racial violence. The resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, accounts of the 1925 Scopes Trial, and memories of the 1915 Georgia lynching of Leo Frank portrayed a benighted South. H. L. Mencken’s 1920 essay “The Sahara of the Bozart” did not paint a particularly welcoming picture either. W. J. Cash’s influential 1941 book Mind of the South again painted a dark picture of the region’s racism, violence, and old-time tribal religion. Images of crushing poverty published in popular magazines enforced an assumption that southern culture was itself impoverished. The explicitly democratic assumptions of American folk art simply could not find firm footing in the South. Early collectors outside the South saw the region as “a negation of America.” As historian James C. Cobb further explains, Americans were supposed to be tolerant, peaceful, rational, enlightened, cosmopolitan, ingenious, moral, just, pragmatic, and prosperous. For the early discoverers of American folk art and others who have emphasized consensus history, the South was outside the national patriotic narrative of “independence and freedom.”

Although the certainty that ordinary people have made art everywhere and in all times was the first article of faith for folk art advocates like Holger Cahill, Cahill had included only a handful of southern objects in his three exhibitions of folk art, and his aesthetic and ahistorical approach had allowed him to avoid mention of the burden of southern history that must engage southern historians. Cahill was delighted to display an Edgefield, S.C., face jug, but he did not draw attention to African American artists or to southern racism. Cahill had little information about many of the objects labeled southern in his three folk art exhibitions and catalogs. Indeed, Cahill became an advocate for southern folk art only by accident.

In 1934 Abby Aldrich Rockefeller offered to lend part of her folk art collection to Colonial Williamsburg, whose restoration was supported by her husband, John D. Rockefeller Jr. Encouraged to save the decrepit colonial buildings of the former Virginia capital, Rockefeller had bought land and numerous colonial buildings, which he then moved to a tract stretching from the colonial governor’s mansion to the Virginia House of Burgesses. Officials of Williamsburg Restoration, Inc., charged with obtaining furniture, art, and other décor from Virginia’s colonial period, questioned the propriety of exhibiting Rockefeller’s 19th-century materials, almost all from the Northeast. Rockefeller called upon her old friend and adviser Holger Cahill to negotiate the loan. Cahill argued that the art of resourceful, self-reliant Americans was an important adjunct to Williamsburg’s mission. This argument mollified officials, but they suggested that, even so, a collection with few examples of southern folk art was not desirable. Rockefeller quickly agreed to send Cahill in search of southern folk art.

In 1934 and 1935, Cahill made hurried and haphazard collecting journeys throughout the South. Lighting down in Charleston, Savannah, St. Augustine, Miami, New Orleans, Nashville, and many stops in between, Cahill sought equivalents to the New England portraits, landscapes, weathervanes, trade signs, and other such creations he had named folk art. Cahill visited museums and historical societies whose holdings might give pointers on what art he might find. He visited antique shops, junk shops, and private collections. In Charleston, a center of southern culture in the 18th century, Cahill visited the Charleston Museum and the Gibbes Memorial Art Gallery, now named the Gibbes Museum of Art, where, among other things, he saw portraits by Jeremiah Theus and Henrietta Johnson, miniatures, ceramics, and embroideries. He found that graveyards in Charleston offered “a regular picture gallery,” with stones that equaled stones he had admired in the Northeast. Cahill wrote that he had gotten “a real haul” in Charleston. In Winston-Salem, N.C., he visited the Salem Academy, where he saw embroideries and memorial paintings made by Moravian schoolgirls, and the Wachovia Historical Society, where he learned of Frederick Kemmelmeyer. In Salem, he purchased four “school-girl type” works. During a visit to Richmond, where the Virginia Museum of Fine Art was under construction, Cahill became excited by the possibility of future collaborations but found little to purchase. Cahill saw colonial portraits in Florida and Louisiana institutions but had no luck in locating colonial art for purchase.

On his second trip to Columbia, S.C., a scout for antiques dealers took Cahill to visit Mary Earle Lyles, who was persuaded to sell The Old Plantation, one of the icons of American art history. He was delighted that he had managed to acquire the work for a mere $20. A rare depiction of the private lives of slaves, the painting by slave owner John Rose provides a detailed image of enslaved Africans performing a dance immediately understood as African derived. Since the 1970s, The Old Plantation has served to illustrate the presence of African cultural traditions in the Americas.

Cahill, however, like many who have since attempted to find traditional folk art in the South, was at times stymied by the scarcity of works on the antiques market and by owners who were not willing to sell. In notes prepared for Rockefeller, for example, he reports his difficulties in obtaining even one weathervane. The sellers of a number of works of art had little information about makers. The fine face jug Cahill bought in Nashville, Tenn., differs from jugs made in Edgefield, S.C., but cannot with any certainty be attributed to a Tennessee maker.

Although Rockefeller’s southern works, originally exhibited in the restored 18th-century Lowell-Paradise House at Williamsburg, impressed many viewers, including prominent southern museum professionals, Cahill had little time or inclination to draw attention to the work. He did not publish a catalog on the southern art he had collected, and the lost opportunity to challenge the common assumption that folk art was a creation of New England’s preindustrial golden age has undoubtedly had long-term effects.

Cahill’s close involvement with Colonial Williamsburg came to an end in March 1935. In August of that year, he became National Director of the Works Project Administration’s Federal Art Project, where he remained until 1943, when the program came to an end. The Federal Art Project, a relief program designed to provide work for artists who could not earn livelihoods during the Great Depression, established art centers in more than 100 towns and cities, engaged artists to produce murals highlighting local scenes for post offices, and created the Index of American Design, whose artists produced nearly 18,000 watercolor depictions of traditional arts and crafts that ordinary Americans had produced prior to circa 1890. These images of America’s material culture, undertaken to encourage a greater understanding of American iconographic imagery and the quality and variety of objects produced by American artists and artisans, were allocated to the National Gallery of Art. In 1950, The Index of American Design, edited by the index’s curator Erwin O. Christensen and with an introduction by Holger Cahill, made a selection of the illustrations available to the public. This book contained images of Hispanic art but gave scant attention to the folk creations of the South. Cahill realized this shortcoming. He explained that fewer artists lived in the South and that Federal Art Project fieldworkers in the South had enjoyed more success with offering art and theater activities at community art centers. He noted that, despite intentions to represent objects from all sections of the country, the index project had been most active in the Northeast. Thus, this publication made for another lost opportunity.

Southerners, of course, had created folk art for centuries, and many southern contemporaries of the early collectors of northeastern material and their successors cherished the works of self-taught artists. Southern collectors of works made before the 20th century, however, sought “antiques” such as quilts, portraits, and landscapes that might buttress the myth of an aristocratic past and assert their own claims to gentility and accomplishment. The legend of the Lost Cause, which celebrated the backward-looking romanticization of the Old South and the Confederacy, dominated generations of southern lives. Mention of racial conflict was taboo, and white supremacy became deeply entrenched in a racially segregated culture creating a society distrustful of critical thought and departures from traditional ways. Class differences in the region were taken for granted; and many southerners, black and white, could not aspire to middle-class status. Elite southerners feared the “common man” and turned a blind eye to the lives—and art making—of those living on the other side of class and racial divides. The collecting pattern that arose from racism and class prejudice favored decorative sentimental landscapes, still lifes, and portraits—preferably old portraits of ancestors. A tendency to hold onto family objects—even those with obvious aesthetic shortcomings—has greatly hindered the establishment of public collections of southern folk art and continues to frustrate scholars who cannot easily locate art or make judgments of quality. While the southern art collectors, academics, and artists who discovered 20th-century self-taught artists William Edmondson and Bill Traylor saw these artists through the lens of modernism, many southerners did not respond to the aesthetics of modernism. Their definition of art certainly did not include unconventional art made by ordinary folk.

Some collectors of “antiques,” however, sidestepped Lost Cause myths and instead devoted themselves to the discovery and recognition of creations made in narrowly defined locales. Indeed, a local-history approach was compelling; the South as we know it is a mosaic of areas settled at different times by diverse peoples. In geographic terms, the South expanded enormously between the late colonial period and the middle of the 19th century, the three centuries that early folk art devotees had proclaimed as the golden age of traditional American folk art. Between the colonial period and the mid-19th century, the South redefined itself continuously. In fact, defining the term “the South” is as challenging as defining “folk art.” In art-historical terms, for example, Maryland was a key southern landscape from the colonial period to the middle of the 19th century, when Maryland was more attuned to the South’s culture than to the Northeast’s. Artists practicing in Maryland exerted their influence in Virginia and the coastal South, and they helped establish the expectations of southern patrons.

During the golden age of American folk art, some sections of today’s South were neither English colonies nor possessions nor states of the United States. Louisiana, Florida, and sections of other southern states did not look to England or to former English colonies for artistic models but to the European nations that had claimed and settled them. After years of uprisings and military actions, Texas declared its independence from Mexico only in 1836 and did not enter the union until 1845. Thus, Texas, like Louisiana, inherited Mexican provincial artistic traditions. After soliciting white settlers from Europe, 19th-century Texas added European traditions to its artistic resources. In Texas and elsewhere, ethnic groups, for example, German-speaking immigrants to Virginia and North Carolina, brought Germanic visual conventions to communities they established. Twentieth-century scholars and collectors who approach “the South” in terms of today’s geography may not be familiar with Spanish, French, Mexican, or German artistic conventions and, thus, easily ignore or misread the provincial folk art of these regions.

From the 16th to the 19th century, large sections of the South were the country’s always-changing western frontier. In the territories granted statehood during the 19th century, an aspiring middle class with the means to acquire goods or commission portraits grew slowly. Some rural and small-town southern patrons, particularly in river and coastal cities, relied on itinerant artists. Opportunities for southern self-taught portraitists were limited, though, by the mid-19th-century introduction of photography. Makers of regional furniture and pottery found that their creations were replaced by industrially produced goods. Some portrait painters took up photography, while others, straining to replicate the naturalism of photography, produced stiff, strangely detailed portraits that did little to reveal the personality of the sitter. Some artists colored photographs with paint or collaged photographed heads onto painted bodies. These awkward portraits, which can give the impression that the 19th-century South was a haven for talentless artists, demonstrate the impact of social and economic conditions on southern art making, and especially on portrait painting in the mid-19th-century South. The frontier heritage of the South’s inland areas and the brief careers of artists made redundant by photographic processes discouraged the formulation of an all-embracing southern portrait style.

Pride in locale, however, has fostered intensive research as well as the founding of museums and historical societies with a local, state, or regional focus. This antiquarian approach has preserved art and gathered information about the lives and times of art makers. For folk art historians, an antiquarian approach has been felicitous, as works of art that did not adhere to fine art principles in fashion when collected or those that referred to social problems were nonetheless seen as valuable documents. The antiquarian approach also meant that collectors and institutions often brought together local furniture, pottery, textiles, birth certificates, and many other creations called “folk art” in northeastern collections as integral elements of a particular cultural context. Southern scholars steeped in cultural context and respectful of the intents and achievements of ordinary folk also recognized the aesthetic qualities of works of art originally collected for their historical meanings. These experts in local history and culture became the discoverers and pioneer collectors of traditional southern folk—even if they did not adopt the term “folk art.”

Although not the first collector/scholar to identify regional styles, Paul H. Burroughs, who published Southern Antiques in 1931, was one of the first serious writers to consider the South as a context for creative expression. Dealing only with furniture, Burroughs traced European roots of colonial furniture, furniture forms and styles brought to the South by later immigrants, and the emergence of stylistic types of furniture peculiar to the southern locales. Other major advocates for recognition of the South’s artistic achievements were antique dealers Theo Taliaferro (Theodosia Horton) and her son Frank L. Horton, who had begun to collect southern furniture during the 1940s. Horton redoubled his efforts after hearing of remarks made by Joseph Downs, curator of the Metropolitan Museum’s American Wing, at Colonial Williamsburg’s first Antiques Forum in 1949. Speaking on regional furniture styles, Downs had declared that “little of artistic merit was made south of Baltimore.” This declaration, indicating how little impressions of southern art making had changed since Mencken’s description of the South as “the Sahara of the Bozart,” became a challenge to collectors, dealers, and museum professionals. Horton and Taliaferro became founders of the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Art (MESDA), dedicated solely to collecting, exhibiting, and researching pre-1820 decorative arts in the South. Founded in 1965 in Salem, N.C., MESDA displays the art making of the Moravians who established Salem and showcases more than 2,500 objects made by artists and artisans working in Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

Other collectors and influential museum donors were Colonel Edgar William Garbisch and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, who began collecting folk art to furnish Pokety, the Cambridge, Md., hunting lodge they inherited after the death in 1940 of Mrs. Garbisch’s father, car maker Walter P. Chrysler. The Garbisches, who had furnished their New York apartment with French antiques and impressionist and postimpressionist paintings, decided that folk art would be more appropriate for the country house they were restoring. The couple collected voraciously, amassing some 2,500 examples of folk art, both masterpieces and less important works. The Garbisches acquired most of their collection from art and antique dealers in the Northeast but also patronized dealers in Maryland and Virginia. Taking the aesthetic approach established by the early collectors, the Garbisches did not always record provenances or information about the works they collected, and identifications of artists and circumstances of creation still require unraveling. While much of the Garbisch collection consisted of art made in the Northeast, the collection also contained exceptional works by such southern artists as Frederick Kemmelmeyer, Gustavus Hesselius, John Hesselius, Justus Engelhardt Kühn, and Joshua Johnson. In 1953 the Garbisches donated a large part of their collection to the National Gallery of Art, which refers to the art as “naive.” The couple also donated to 21 additional museums. The Garbisches’ donations to the Metropolitan Museum of Art form the core of that museum’s folk art holdings; among those holdings is their southern masterpiece, The Plantation, painted circa 1825, a marvelously stylized landscape with plantation house and shipping docks—all within a frame of grapes and leaves. Little is known about this work, one of the most celebrated of all American folk paintings.

Emphasis on local traditions also characterizes the research into southern folkways and crafts undertaken by anthropologists and folklorists. The study of folklore and the study of folk art both grew out of a desire to investigate the creations of ordinary people. Allen H. Eaton, a key figure in directing attention to Appalachian folk art as well as to folk traditions of ethnic immigrant groups, began a long association with the Russell Sage Foundation in 1920. Six years later he created the foundation’s Department of Arts and Social Work “to study the influence of art in everyday life.” In 1930 Eaton helped found the Southern Highland Handicraft Guild to promote Appalachian crafts—wood carving, textiles, pottery, furniture, and other domestic products—in order to provide income for families hard hit by the Depression. In 1934 Eaton organized an exhibition of crafts made by guild members for the first National Folk Festival. Eaton’s seminal book, Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands (1937), was the first major study of Appalachian crafts. Eaton’s interest in crafts made by living makers established the anthropological and folkloristic approach to the study of utilitarian handmade products.

For decades, folk art historians and folklorists have contested the meaning of the term “folk art,” each group passionately rejecting the other group’s interpretation. Folklorists define “folk” not as the common man or woman—writ large as “we the people”—but as members of a community defined by locale, ethnicity, or tradition. They define “art” as Eaton did—the communally shared manner of making rather than the aesthetically pleasing, exceptional creations produced by an artist with an individualistic vocabulary of form. One can say that folklorists emphasize “folk” while participants in the art world associated with dealers, collectors, art professionals, museums, and individual artists emphasize “art.” Participants in the folk art world define art as a transformative aesthetic experience and differentiate “art” from “craft.” In this art-historical view, skillfully made, attractive craft objects are nonetheless examples of goods made in multiples according to community expectations and therefore the antithesis of art. In recent years, the two groups have enjoyed some convergence; the notion of a continuum linking folk art and folk craft respects the skills and inventiveness of craftsmen as well as individual artists’ transformations of communal forms. Folklorists have begun to appreciate makers’ aesthetic intents and to recognize that aesthetic choices are in themselves meaningful. Charles G. Zug III has reported that many potters have seen no reason to make pottery with ornamentation or artistic profiles, whereas other potters have consciously created utilitarian pots with remarkable glazes and sculptural grace even though aesthetic considerations lower productivity and income. At the same time, the art world has come to appreciate the value of the field study that gives folklorists a depth of information about the work and communities they observe. Folk art historians can thank folklorists for the preservation of many creations ignored or unknown to past generations of folk art enthusiasts. Folklorists such as John A. Burrison have not only donated their extensive and exquisite collections to museums and study centers but have also expanded our understanding of “artfulness.” Zug’s appreciation of Brown family pottery with its exceptional height, fluid profiles, and refined sculptural presence argues for its inclusion in folk art museums and collections. Currently, folk art historians and folklorists share the conviction that art and craft are tied to broad cultural, historical, social, and political contexts.

Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, southern and national institutions added to their collections of traditional southern folk art and directed resources to their research programs. Among museums with local or regional emphasis and strong folk art holdings are the Historic New Orleans Collection, with a focus on New Orleans and the Gulf South, and the Louisiana State Museum, which holds many traditional paintings and other genres as well as works by 20th- and 21st-century artists. The Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library, formerly the family home of Henry Francis du Pont in Winterthur, Del., has a preeminent collection of American antiques and art, including extraordinary examples of traditional southern folk art.

No institution with a significant collection of southern material, however, was ready to respond to the remarkable surge of interest in traditional folk art occasioned by the 1976 celebration of the nation’s bicentennial. Southern museums had not yet taken on the task of producing guides to the study of traditional folk art in the South or organizing exhibitions that would gather excellent work from a number of institutions. Indeed, major efforts to highlight the folk art of the South came to fruition in New York. Publishing executive Robert Morton’s 1976 Southern Antiques and Folk Art was the first illustrated survey of decorative arts, folk art, and ornamented machine-made objects in common use in the pre-20th-century South. Morton’s volume with many color illustrations, however, did not accompany an exhibition or receive as much attention as it might have if issued by a major publisher. Robert Bishop’s pioneering Folk Paintings of America, published in 1979, was the first book to consider regional folk art within a national context; his chapter on the South contains 75 illustrations of paintings beginning with Jacques Le Moyne’s 1564 oil on canvas Indians of Florida Collecting Gold in the Streams. The book contains works by such painters as colonial pastelist Henrietta Johnson and 19th-century portrait artist Joshua Johnson and concludes with works by 20th-century self-taught artists, including Howard Finster and Mose Tolliver. Bishop’s book, which alluded to the biracial context of southern folk art, like Morton’s, did not accompany an exhibition and had less impact than it deserved.

Two well-publicized and well-attended exhibitions of traditional folk art held during the years surrounding America’s bicentennial and their lavishly produced large-format catalogs may also have drawn attention away from southern folk art. The 1974 exhibition The Flowering of American Folk Art, 1776–1876, organized by Jean Lipman and Alice Winchester for the Whitney Museum of American Art, showcased 239 objects from public and private collections across the country, and the catalog for the exhibition presented 410 illustrations selected from some 10,000 examples. But less than 5 percent of the works illustrated in the catalog came from the South, and the organizers had made little attempt to locate work held by smaller museums or private collectors. The distinctive portraits of middle-class southerners do not appear in this pivotal exhibition or in classic books on folk art, even though they share the intents and aesthetics of New England. The art of areas not colonized by the English and any mention of race did not fit into this bicentennial narrative. The Whitney’s second bicentennial era folk art exhibition, entitled American Folk Painters of Three Centuries, presented the works of individual folk artists chosen to represent the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. This 1980 exhibition, organized by Lipman and Tom Armstrong, presented the work of only one artist who worked in the South—Pennsylvanian Lewis Miller, who painted lively watercolors that record his visits to Virginia. Though never intended as textbooks, The Flowering of American Folk Art and American Folk Painters of Three Centuries have served this purpose. As a result, these two books, widely available in libraries and in used book stores, continue to perpetuate the New England bias.

Missing Pieces: Georgia Folk Art, 1776–1976, another exhibition inspired by the celebration of the U.S. bicentennial, was the first major exhibition on both traditional and contemporary self-taught artists working in a southern state. The exhibition transformed conceptions of southern folk art. Accompanied by a catalog written by Anna Wadsworth as well as a film, the exhibition traveled in 1977 to the Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences in Savannah and then to the Columbus Museum of Arts and Crafts in Columbus, Ga. In 1978 the American Folklife Center, under the direction of Alan Jabbour, brought the exhibition to the Library of Congress (where First Lady Rosalyn Carter and daughter Amy helped open the show). Sparked by the bicentennial and its celebration of the country’s heritage, shows like Missing Pieces expanded national consciousness of the folk art traditions of the South.

The first exhibition exclusively devoted to the traditional folk art produced throughout the South took place only in 1985. Organized by Cynthia Elyce Rubin for the Museum of American Folk Art, Southern Folk Art presented works illustrated in Bishop’s American Folk Painting as well as many remarkable works borrowed from institutions and private collections. Rubin’s catalog, with images of numerous works of art never before located or illustrated, remains the most significant presentation of the South’s 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century folk art. However, the ground-breaking exhibition did not receive the attention it deserved. The small museum, now the American Folk Art Museum, still receives fewer visitors than it should; and the catalog, offering description rather than cultural analysis, was less informative than it might have been. The exhibition did not travel. The museum’s pioneering attempt to introduce pre-20th-century southern material into American folk art discourse had little impact.

Southern Folk Art was not only the first exhibition presenting the South’s traditional folk art but the last. Still, since 1985, traditional southern folk art has received considerable attention. Fine monographs on southern artists have appeared, and institutions have worked to gather information on southern art making. MESDA supports an active research program, photographing and describing objects identified as southern and made prior to 1820. MESDA’s Object Database, a collection of approximately 20,000 images of southern-made objects, and the MESDA Craftsman Database, a collection of primary source information on nearly 80,000 artisans working in 127 different trades, are valuable resources for scholars of southern folk art. MESDA’s publications, including the Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts, have illustrated its holdings and encouraged inclusion of southern work in considerations of American folk art. Colonial Williamsburg’s Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum (AARFAM) has produced many well-researched publications, a remarkable EMuseum online catalog that reproduces and examines the folk art in its collection, and many exhibitions that present southern folk art within contexts of time and place as well as in the context of American folk art history. Winterthur, MESDA, and AARFAM also sponsor frequent seminars on specific aspects of southern folk art. The Magazine Antiques, with both general and academic audiences, has published numerous articles on the South’s folk artists; the now-defunct Folk Art Magazine, a publication of the American Folk Art Museum, published many articles with insights into southern art.

Books devoted to the history of southern art almost always include traditional folk art. Jessie Poesch’s The Art of the Old South: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, and the Products of Craftsmen, 1560–1860 (1983) and Painting in the South, 1564–1980 (1983) with essays by eminent scholars are invaluable. The exhibition Painting in the South traveled to six museums in Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Louisiana, and New York. Several well-produced volumes devoted to the art of specific states have made important contributions. Patti Carr Black’s Art in Mississippi, 1720–1980 (1998) includes both traditional and contemporary folk artists. Another fine study with excellent color plates and many scholarly essays is Benjamin H. Caldwell Jr., Robert Hicks, and Mark W. Scala’s Art of Tennessee (2003). In addition to state books, southern states, such as Texas and Georgia, have published online encyclopedias that discuss the work of folk artists. Numerous books on folk or backcountry furniture, pottery, painting, gravestones, needlework, quilting, and other textiles have illustrated and examined the art making in individual states or specific regions of the South.

Scholars specializing in forms of folk art that demonstrate women’s participation in folk art making—quilting, embroidery, and other genres—have published a wealth of books that call special attention to the contributions of southern women; these well-illustrated scholarly books go a long way in correcting the assumption that the South produced little folk art. Under the direction of Shelly Zegart, Eleanor Bingham Miller, and Eunice Ray, the Kentucky Quilt Project, initiated in 1981, established a movement to document quilts across the country. Quilts, such as those that southern women created and raffled to support the health needs of Confederate soldiers, and quilts created to raise funds for the construction of Confederate gunships underline women’s involvement in political affairs. Surveys of needlework in printed books and online demonstrate pride in place and the special pride that women and girls took in their participation in the progress of education and refinement in established cities and in frontier territories.

Museums currently seek southern additions to their collections, closing gaps and refining conceptions of southern folk art. The High Museum of Art, for example, has added remarkable works of traditional folk art to its strong collection of contemporary self-taught art. More and more generalist museums call attention to the southern origins of their holdings in 16th-, 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century art.

Nonetheless, the traditional folk art of the South is underappreciated and offers many opportunities for research. Colonial Williamsburg decorative arts librarian Susan P. Shames’s 2010 The Old Plantation: The Artist Revealed, for example, provides an excellent model for the identification of unknown artists. A narrative account of her identification of South Carolina slave owner John Rose, the watercolorist who painted The Old Plantation, reveals this artist’s background and intents. Such investigations of original documents like censuses; birth, death, and probate records; and property deeds, undertaken for decades by scholars of Northeast and Eastern Seaboard folk art, are necessary to our understanding of the careers of southern painters. The compilations of portraits published by state chapters of the National Society of Colonial Dames of America as aids to genealogical research point the way to further identification of artists, their training, and practice. Recent compilations such as the survey of Tennessee portraits, now available online, document the large number of artists who worked in that state and reveal groups of portraits with strong stylistic similarities that suggest that they were produced by single or connected artists. Information about ownership gathered during the preparation of the Colonial Dames’ recent surveys further allow scholars to locate the many southern portraits held by local historical societies, historic houses, and individual owners.

The recognition of the South’s rich biracial culture has revolutionized the study of art making in the South. Black and white artists have pursued many of the same themes and reciprocal influences, now obvious, suggesting opportunities for future research. Folk art depictions of daily activities document the centrality of African Americans in southern life and are thus important resources in studying slavery. These paintings also call for investigations into artists’ experiences and intentions. A search for additional paintings of southern scenes and reexaminations of known work may further elucidate African continuities in southern folk art.

Anyone wishing to see the rich range of the South’s traditional folk art will travel widely. The South’s traditional folk art resides in museums located throughout the nation, museums with a local or regional focus, historical societies, genealogical societies, historic houses, churches, cemeteries, state archives, and private hands. We look forward to new discoveries and interpretations. We also look forward to a time when narratives of American folk art embrace the traditional folk art of the South and the South’s many complexities.

Contemporary Folk Art: Where Is the South Now? The concept of contemporary folk art entered the art discourse in the early 20th century in the work of three men—Holger Cahill, Sydney Janis, and Otto Kallir. In 1938, Cahill, the doyen of traditional folk art, organized the exhibition Masters of Popular Painting for the Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition surveyed the work of several contemporary self-taught artists, including John Kane, Joseph Pickett, Horace Pippin, and the lone southerner, Kentuckian Patrick Sullivan, alongside the art of 19th-century artists. In the show’s catalog, Alfred H. Barr Jr., MoMA’s director, described nonacademic art as one of the “major . . . movements of modern art,” on a par with cubism and surrealism. Cahill went on to argue that folk art did not belong only to the past but that “splendid examples of it are in existence, from the work of the earliest anonymous limners of 17th-century New England to the contemporary work displayed in this exhibition.”

In 1939 Otto Kallir, an exponent of German and Austrian modernism, who had escaped from Nazi-occupied Austria, established the Galerie St. Etienne in New York. Kallir, having a keen appreciation of folk art, soon became the dealer of the untutored artist Anna Mary “Grandma Moses” Robertson. The dealer arranged the 1940 exhibition The Farm Woman Painted, which was the elderly woman’s first public exhibition in New York, and launched Moses on her way to becoming an internationally known celebrity. In the 1940s and 1950s, Galerie St. Etienne gained a reputation for its inclusion of self-taught artists within the framework of modernism.

In 1942, Sydney Janis, an influential collector, dealer, and author, wrote They Taught Themselves: American Primitive Painters of the 20th Century, the first book to analyze the work of 20th-century self-taught artists. Many of the artists he showcased had been featured in Cahill’s 1938 exhibition Masters of Popular Painting, but there were some newcomers, including Moses and Morris Hirshfield, a retired president of the EZ Walk Slipper Manufacturing Company. Still hailed as a classic, the book established the foundation and parameters of the field of contemporary self-taught art.

Janis was, in fact, the first person to introduce the term “self-taught” in the conversation on modern art. Asserting that untrained artists could be found in every period of history, come from all walks of life, practice all kinds of vocations, and burn with creative zeal, he preferred the term “self-taught,” over “folk,” “primitive,” or “naive.” Because self-taught artists worked at a distance from academic norms, he argued that they were “spiritually independent” of the established art world. Janis also affirmed, just as Cahill had, that 20th-century self-taught artists were “worthy successors to our 18th- and 19th-century anonymous portraitists.”

In the late 1930s and in the early 1940s, everything seemed in place for a groundswell of support within the New York art world for the work of contemporary self-taught artists. Indeed, during this time two remarkable exhibitions of southern self-taught artists took place in New York. The earliest occurred in 1937 when sculptor William Edmondson received an invitation for a one-person show at MoMA. In 1935 Sidney Hirsch, who taught at the Peabody College for Teachers (now a component of Vanderbilt University) and had seen Edmondson’s carvings during walks around his neighborhood, introduced Edmondson’s work to the fashion photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe. Her wonderfully shot photographs of Edmondson, his work, and environs caught the eye of Alfred H. Barr Jr., MoMA’s director, who arranged for the display of 12 of Edmondson’s statues in the fall of 1937. This exhibition was the first one-person show featuring the work of an African American and a self-taught artist at MoMA. There was a good deal of press coverage, including articles in the New York Times and the New Yorker. Instead of drawing attention to his art, however, the reviews focused on Edmondson’s illiteracy and religious visions. In the following year, nonetheless, Barr showed Edmondson’s work in Trois siècles d’arts aux États-Unis at the Jeu de Paumes in Paris.

The second exhibition of a southern self-taught artist in New York presented the drawings of Alabama’s 87-year-old Bill Traylor. A former slave, Traylor created his drawings on the streets of Montgomery. In 1939 a local white artist, Charles Shannon, had befriended Traylor, providing him with art supplies and organizing an exhibit of his work at New South, a community arts center in Montgomery. Shannon photographed Traylor, collected his drawings, many on scraps of cardboard, and in 1941 took examples of his work to New York, where he showed them to Victor d’Amico, MoMA’s director of education. D’Amico organized a show for Traylor at the prestigious Fieldston School in the exclusive neighborhood of Riverdale in the Bronx. The press took no notice. D’Amico also showed the drawings to Barr, who chose several of them for MoMA’s collection and some for his own. However, Barr’s offer to pay Shannon only a dollar or two for each drawing outraged the southerner, who demanded the objects’ return. It would be more than 30 years before Shannon tried again to introduce Traylor’s work to the New York art world.

In the first half of the 20th century, the champions of nonacademic art—Cahill, Kallir, and Janis—were members of the art world’s elite. They made the work of untutored artists a focus of the American art world, identifying many major self-taught artists of the 20th century and laying down the basic framework of the field. Nonetheless, in the prewar art world of the 1940s, the window of opportunity for self-taught art soon closed. When Morris Hirshfield was given a retrospective at MoMA in 1943, critics scorned the exhibition, asserting that MoMA had passed over so-called legitimate artists in favor of a self-taught artist. In the scandal that followed, Barr lost his position as director. Many untrained masters of the 20th century slipped from memory. Only Grandma Moses, who was “relegated to a vast populist backwater” of greeting cards and calendars, remained in the public eye. The art world embraced abstract expressionism as America’s new form of creative expression. Contemporary folk art would have to wait for its rediscovery in the second half of the century.

In 1968 sculptor Michael Hall and art historian Julie Hall, living in Lexington, Ky., where Michael was a member of the University of Kentucky’s studio art faculty, finally tracked down carver Edgar Tolson. They already owned some of Tolson’s carvings, but they wanted to meet the backwoods preacher and mountain carver, who lived near the small town of Campton in eastern Kentucky. Later that year, when the couple was visiting New York City, they stumbled onto the Museum of American Folk Art, where they discovered an exhibition called Collector’s Choice. The two were immediately smitten with the show, and as they walked through the exhibition, they made a chance encounter with Herbert W. Hemphill Jr., the exhibition’s cocurator and one of the museum’s founding trustees. Hemphill asked if they would like to see more pieces. The Halls said yes and ended up in Hemphill’s apartment, which was full of artworks. The three spent hours talking about folk art and became fast friends. Michael returned the next day to show Hemphill photographs of Tolson’s carvings. Hemphill liked what he saw. He purchased his first Tolson—an Adam and Eve—in early 1969, and in the spring of 1970 Hemphill traveled with the Halls to Campton to meet Tolson. The work of self-taught artists was on the road to rediscovery.

Even before the Halls had met Tolson, the carver’s reputation had spread beyond Kentucky. Tolson, who had carved since childhood, began selling his works in 1967 through the Kentucky Grassroots Craftsmen, a cooperative that marketed local crafts. When, in November 1967, members of the Grassroots Craftsmen went to Washington, D.C., seeking ways to increase the coop’s profits, they visited the Smithsonian National Museum of History and Technology, now the National Museum of American History. There they met with Carl Fox, manager of the Smithsonian’s gift shop, and showed him Tolson’s work. Fox purchased the pieces outright, requested more, and in early December wrote the carver telling him the gift shop would like to mount a large sales exhibition of his work and inviting him to Washington. Tolson accepted, and in 1968 he went to the capital, bringing several works, including a tableau of Adam and Eve, a half-dozen dolls, and a large carved horse. He met with Smithsonian officials, appeared on television, and became the subject of an article in the Washington Post. Between 1968 and 1976, the museum showcased Tolson’s work and the carvings of Hispanic folk artist George Lopez of New Mexico in American Folk Craft Survivals.

Tolson’s visit to Washington was propitious. Folklorist Ralph Rinzler was just then organizing the second Smithsonian Folklife Festival, and he invited Tolson to participate in both the 1968 and 1969 festivals. In 1973, when the festival honored the state of Kentucky, Rinzler invited Tolson as a featured artist. The festival’s program carried a photograph of Tolson’s work. That same year—1973—Tolson was featured (along with Michael Hall) in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Biennial, an exhibition that presents artists whose work exemplifies the current state of American art.

Just at the time that artists, art collectors, and folklife scholars were discovering Tolson, Kansas painter Gregg Blasdell was scouring the countryside for what he called grass-roots artists. He was searching for a kind of art that “has no definition in art history: the term ‘grassroots’ is only the best of a number of inadequate classifications such as ‘primitive,’ ‘folk,’ and ‘naïve.’” Blasdell’s 1968 photo essay, which appeared in Art in America, pioneered the study of folk art environments and featured ones that would become fixtures of American contemporary folk art, such as Simon Rodia’s Watts Tower in Los Angeles and S. P. Dinsmoor’s Garden of Eden in Lucas, Kan. In the South, he documented Brother Joseph Zoettl’s Ave Maria Grotto in Cullman, Ala., and Stephen Sykes’s now defunct towering In-Curiosity near Aberdeen, Miss. In 1974 Blasdell’s research inspired Naïves and Visionaries, a landmark exhibition of environments at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which relied heavily on photographic documentation.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s commitment to contemporary self-taught art began in 1964 soon after the death of James Hampton, a reclusive, soft-spoken janitor, born the son of a black itinerant preacher in South Carolina. What James Hampton left behind in the Washington, D. C., garage he rented was a stunning, three-tiered assemblage, composed of foil-wrapped cast-off pieces of wood furniture, jelly jars, light bulbs, flower vases, desk blotters, mirror shards, strips of metal cut from coffee cans, as well as paper, plastic, cardboard, conduit, glue, tablets, tacks, and pins. Labeled The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly in Hampton’s own handwriting, the glittering gold and silver construction featured chairs, pedestals, and lecterns symmetrically disposed on either side of a majestic throne crowned with the words “Fear Not.” The garage owner, Meyer Wertlieb, discovered the assemblage after Hampton’s death, and, realizing the importance of Hampton’s radiant installation, contacted a newspaper reporter. The Washington Post announced the story on 15 December 1964, under the headline, “Tinsel, Mystery Are Sole Legacy of Lonely Man’s Strange Vision.” Soon thereafter, Harry Lowe, curator of exhibition and design at the National Collection of Fine Arts, visited the garage to see the astonishing assemblage.

The second momentous folk art event of 1970 was the New York exhibition Twentieth-Century American Folk Art and Artists. Curated by Herbert W. Hemphill Jr., the exhibition, shown at the Museum of American Folk Art, was composed of the work of 50 self-taught artists. The works of William Edmondson and artists discovered by Cahill, Kallir, and Janis—Grandma Moses, Morris Hirschfield, and Patrick Sullivan—shared the spotlight with 30 newly discovered artists, many of them southern: Eddie Arning, Minnie Evans, Theora Hamblett, Clementine Hunter, Sister Gertrude Morgan, and, of course, Edgar Tolson. The Kentucky artist was also featured in the introduction to Hemphill and coauthor Julia Weismann’s subsequent book Twentieth-Century American Folk Art and Artists, which expanded on the 1970 exhibition and featured 145 artists. Insisting that folk art was not a thing of the past, Hemphill’s ground-breaking work established contemporary folk art as a wide-ranging phenomenon, made its presence known in the broad context of the art world, and inspired countless folk art hunters to persevere.

The exhibition of Hemphill’s own folk art collection parlayed these pioneering efforts into a full-blown movement. Shown at 24 museums between 1973 and 1988, Hemphill’s collection geographically extended his vision. In 1976 the American Bicentennial Commission even sent it to Japan on a goodwill tour. Ultimately, the Smithsonian American Art Museum became the repository of more than 400 works from Hemphill’s collection, an acquisition marked by the 1990 exhibition and book Made with Passion: The Hemphill Folk Art Collection in the National Museum of American Art (1991).

Collectors, artists, and curators made the 1970s a decade of discovery. Hemphill crisscrossed the country making finds in West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama, the two Carolinas, and Georgia. Oftentimes, he traveled with Jeff Camp, a dealer who conducted folk-art-collecting marathons throughout the South. Indeed, the decade of the seventies was a whirlwind of folk art traffic as collectors and dealers scoured the South looking for art, as the terms “contemporary folk art” and the “South” were quickly becoming one and the same in many minds.

Michael and Jane Hall visited collections all over the nation, and Michael’s students, whom he often referred to as his “army,” became a corps of folk art finders. Another pair of influential collectors, lawyers Chuck and Jan Rosenak of Washington, D.C., saw Tolson’s work in Washington, drove to Kentucky to meet him, and began to amass a folk art collection. They met other collectors and remained especially close to their mentor, Robert Bishop, appointed director of the American Folk Art Museum in 1977 and serving there until his death in 1991. Growing out of their extensive focused collecting, the Rosenaks published two books and donated works from their collection to the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

In the White Cube: Aesthetics in Context, 1976–1990. In 1976 the Atlanta Historical Society hosted Missing Pieces: Georgia Folk Art, 1776–1976. Modeled on Hemphill’s Twentieth-Century American Folk Art and Artists, the exhibition Missing Pieces featured objects that ranged from colonial to contemporary times, seeking to serve, Wadsworth wrote, “as a first step toward discovering Southern pieces missing, until now, from the continuum of American Folk Art.” Objects ranged from portraiture, paintings, drawings, textiles, and quilts (including a Harriet Powers’s Bible Quilt) to carved figures, canes, stoneware jars, and face jugs. Most startling was the large number of contemporary self-taught artists, many previously unknown. Among them were Ulysses Davis, Howard Finster, Eddie Owens Martin, Mattie Lou O’Kelly, and Nellie Mae Rowe. Of these, Finster would soon become the best known. His astonishing creativity and larger-than-life persona would make him an icon of southern art.

Born in Alabama, Finster lived in northwest Georgia in the small town of Summerville. He retired from his career as a Baptist preacher in 1965 and worked at home as a repairman to support his family. After a vision in 1961 that instructed him to “get on the altar” and build a garden, he began construction on an outdoor display near his house. It gained its sobriquet Paradise Garden in 1975 from an article in Esquire. The garden was an ongoing labor of love, one that helped to define a major genre of southern folk art—yard gardens. Finster’s paintings with homey aphorisms were inspired by the famous 1976 vision in which God called the preacher to paint “sacred art.” Ultimately, Finster’s official website asserts, he created and numbered more than 46,000 works of art.

Howard Finster, Four Presidents, 1981, enamel on wood, 28″ × 48″, including wood-burned frame (Courtesy John and Susan Jerit)

Finster’s rise to national fame helped make the term “folk art” synonymous with the South. On Hemphill’s first visit to meet Finster, in 1976, he bought several paintings. By 1977 Jeff Camp had agreed to serve as Finster’s agent, and the preacher’s new career as a full-time artist accelerated. In 1982 he had a one-person show in New York at the New Museum of Contemporary Art; in 1983 his art appeared in 15 exhibitions across the country, and in 1984 he was invited to participate in the Venice Biennale, a prestigious international exhibition founded in 1895. As a guest on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, Finster played his banjo, sang, joked, and generally outperformed the host. By the 1990s he had appeared in all major media, become the subject of books, and, like Jesus, Martin Luther King Jr., and Coca-Cola, the stuff of southern legend. His work had traveled coast to coast, and his creations hung in some of the nation’s most prestigious institutions. In 1995 the High Museum of Art feted the reverend with an art exhibition and 70th birthday party, but the artist’s heyday was over. Finster had sold his first $20,000 artwork in 1988, but complaints soon appeared about high prices for his work and his use of family members in an “assembly line” approach to making art. His Paradise Garden fell into disrepair, and by the 1990s the phenomenon known as Finster, which had blazed like a meteor through the folk art skies, had burned out.

During the 1980s and 1990s, a flurry of exhibitions added a myriad of names to the roster of southern contemporary folk artists. Among such shows were the ground-breaking Black Folk Art in America, 1930–1980, curated by Jane Livingston and John Beardsley, which opened at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and traveled throughout the country; Baking in the Sun, a 1987 traveling exhibition with catalog essays by Maude Southwell Wahlman and Andy Nasisse; and the 1989 exhibition Signs and Wonders with a catalog written by Roger Manley. The year 1993 saw Passionate Visions of the American South, a traveling exhibition with catalog by Alice Rae Yelen, and in 1995, Pictured in My Mind, a traveling exhibition organized by the Birmingham Museum of Art.

Black Folk Art in America, a blockbuster exhibition that featured 391 works of art from 78 collections, was the most significant to the study of art making in the South. Traveling to six major museums throughout the country, Black Folk Art in America showcased 20 artists, of whom 19 were born in the South. Hailed for the aesthetic power of its astonishing works of art and its stunning installation, the exhibition was praised above all for revealing an enthralling body of art and a new chapter in American art history. James Hampton’s glistening foil-wrapped Throne was set against a brick wall to simulate the garage where the artist built it. Similarly, the bone-white walls of the space displaying the art of Sister Gertrude Morgan, a New Orleans street preacher, replicated the prayer room in her home.

Despite such success, Black Folk Art in America and its catalog also drew criticism. Faultfinders argued that the curators’ overemphasis on a formalist approach effectively divorced the art from the cultural context in which it was created. Some failed to see how the art could be categorized as being what its curators described as communally African American and yet highly individualized. Others believed that the catalog perpetuated, as one writer put it, “retrogressive myths about black people.”

Livingston and Beardsley’s stress on aesthetics in Black Folk Art in America demonstrated the abiding influence of Holger Cahill’s ideas about American folk art. His fine arts approach to folk art became in the 20th century an art-historical thread sewn into the very fabric of the field. From the 1970s onward, however, an increasing number of art historians and scholars began to examine folk art from a historical, political, social, and cultural perspective. In the forefront were scholars of African American art. Yale University art historian Robert Farris Thompson documented the transmission of Africa’s cultural heritage and its impact on the art of the Americas. Thompson’s 1969 essay “African Influences on the Art of the United States,” which appeared in Black Studies in the University: A Symposium, and his 1984 book Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy wielded a decisive influence on subsequent scholarship. Folklorist John Michael Vlach also contributed to the scholarly conversation about African continuities with his 1978 book Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts, which accompanied a nationally traveling exhibition organized for the Cleveland Museum of Art. Both exhibition and book focused on utilitarian artifacts and traditional crafts. Another Face of the Diamond: Pathways through the Black Atlantic South, an exhibition that appeared at INTAR Latin America Gallery in New York (1988) and curated by University of Georgia professor Judith McWillie, examined iconographic motifs, oral traditions, and spiritual beliefs to demonstrate a continuum between African and African American artistic traditions. Such an analysis amplified the understanding of African American art works, specifically the work of self-taught artists in terms of their makers’ life experiences and their African heritage.

Aesthetics and Changing Contexts: An Enduring Argument. Necessary discussions of how to balance formalism or artfulness with a variety of contexts continue to this day. In a field of art defined by the social situation of the maker as self-taught, discussions of biography are necessary but can assume primary focus. However, as biography consists of artists’ projections of self and writers’ own personal assumptions, analyzing art through biography alone is problematic. During the mid-1940s, Jean Dubuffet, the modernist French artist and collector, relied on biography to coin the term “art brut” or “raw art.” Dubuffet developed a profound interest in the drawings, paintings, and other creations of psychiatric patients, which he believed to be a spontaneous expressive outpouring from the inner self. Unsullied by cultural tradition and artistic precedent, this form of art was, according to Dubuffet, in its raw state, “uncooked” by culture and artistic tradition. Persuaded by the creative authenticity of the work produced by such schizophrenic and self-taught artists as Adolf Wölfli and Aloïse Corbaz, Dubuffet began to collect art brut, soon broadening the term to include the untutored work made by such trance mediums as Madge Gill and Jean Tripier and by people with little formal education who were often social and emotional outcasts. Ultimately, the artist amassed a collection of more than 5,000 pieces, the Collection de l’Art Brut, located today in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Eliminating the idea of beauty and, with it, the West’s concept of aesthetic standards, Dubuffet admired instead art brut’s expressive, transgressive, and mystical nature. Although modernist artists had traditionally been drawn to the work of self-taught artists by its formal qualities, such as its treatment of line, shape, color, light, and space, Dubuffet promoted the idea that art should be about the unimpeded, direct expression of feeling. Dubuffet’s emphasis on the psychological and the instinctual directed attention to biography and insisted that the creativity of these artists originated in their “otherness.” At the same time, Dubuffet’s approach and the current climate of modernism unintentionally encouraged a formalist appreciation of l’art brut.

Roger Cardinal’s 1972 book Outsider Art further popularlized and refined Dubuffet’s art theories in English-speaking countries with the effect in the United States of substituting the term “outsider art” for “art brut.” Chicago, Los Angeles, and Baltimore became centers for study and exhibition of outsider art, but as the term “outsider art” became progressively well known, the term’s meaning grew less and less distinct. Not only was the term ambiguous but also misleading and often offensive. Critics began to hurl other charges against the term, especially against its conception of the mad artist working within a hermetically sealed universe. In 1984 artist and collector Michael Hall criticized the argument that the artist outside was more privy to create authenticity than the trained artist and decried the formalist interpretation of self-taught art that often posed questions that the formalist dogma could not answer. Similar criticisms were offered not only by other members of the art world but also by folklorists, such as Daniel Wojcik, who indicated that the assumptions underlying the study of so-called outside art are “deeply problematic.” Wojcik observed how Finster has been called “crazy” and a “wacko” and his “classic outsider” status emphasized, yet his art is clearly a vernacular expression of southern evangelical Christianity.

The divide between the formalist appreciation of contemporary folk art and the contextualist concern to move beyond biography has found some resolution. Scholars are increasingly examining the creativity of artists within the broad contexts of history—local, regional, and national—class, economics, education, gender, politics, race, and religion. Particularly fruitful has been research into African American vernacular art in the South. The documentation and exhibition of African American artists throughout the Americas within the context of an African legacy owes a profound debt to the Atlanta collector William Arnett.

Arnett, who was born in Columbus, Ga., has been an obsessive collector from childhood. He compiled everything from an enormous set of marbles to a stockpile of rock and roll records, including 45s of Fats Domino and Chuck Berry. After graduating from the University of Georgia, Arnett traveled throughout Europe, returning to Columbus to become an art dealer. After relocating to Atlanta, Arnett spent several decades collecting Chinese, African, and Pre-Columbian art as well as the art of the Near East, India, and Southeast Asia. Introduced to the carving of the self-taught Florida artist Jesse Aaron in the 1970s, Arnett soon embraced the work of African American artists Sam Doyle from South Carolina, Alabama’s Mose Tolliver, and Mississippi’s Mary T. Smith. By the mid-1980s, Arnett’s road trips were taking him throughout the South as he found other black artists, including Alabama’s Charlie Lucas, Lonnie Holley, and Thornton Dial, and Tennessee’s Bessie Harvey and Joe Light. Arnett ultimately formed a huge collection of African American vernacular art and became increasingly confident that he had discovered a new generation of untrained artists active in the South. Unlike those featured in Black Folk Art in America, however, the artists Arnett uncovered were for the most part artists active after the Great Depression and flourishing in the wake of the civil rights movement. Their art bridges the 20th and 21st centuries. Even more importantly in Arnett’s mind, the work of these black self-taught artists was the equal—qualitatively, intellectually, and historically—of contemporary fine art.

By the early 1990s, Arnett had begun to introduce his discoveries to the art world. In 1993, while the American Folk Art Museum and the New Museum of Art were celebrating Thornton Dial’s work in a major New York exhibition, a controversial segment of the television show 60 Minutes interviewed Dial and other black self-taught artists. The program’s thesis that white collectors were exploiting black artists practically ruined both Arnett and Dial. Yet, the scholar Eugene W. Metcalf compares Arnett “and his four sons who work with him, to the renowned Lomax family who discovered, documented, and saved American indigenous music.”

In the heady days of the age of discovery during the 1970s and 1980s, some collectors, with nothing but good intentions, developed relationships with artists, became promoters, and sometimes became dealers. Some enthusiastic collectors, however—both southerners and nonsoutherners alike—were unaware of the South’s peculiar social and racial etiquette; they did not recognize the feigned acquiescence that African Americans have long used to avoid conflict and preserve their privacy nor the deference that poor people have paid to elite classes for the same reasons. Thus, some early collectors, misreading feigned acquiescence as innocence, purchased work cheaply from artists who felt that they could not demand higher prices or refuse offers of representation. Undoubtedly, a few collectors saw an opportunity to make some money for themselves. Luckily for the artists and for the folk art world, the age of discovery, and its unfortunate paternalistic assumptions about artists “who didn’t know they were artists,” is now over.

The dismal 60 Minutes affair did not keep Arnett from formulating an ambitious project to further legitimize African American vernacular art. He planned an art exhibition with lavishly illustrated publications. In collaboration with the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University, Arnett presented a show of 300 artworks by 20 African American vernacular artists living in the South. Souls Grown Deep was displayed in Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics and opened to rave reviews from critics around the country. A two-volume book followed: Souls Grown Deep received nearly universal praise and led to the founding of Tinwood Alliance, a nonprofit organization established by Arnett and actress Jane Fonda to further the study of African American vernacular art. Both volumes included numerous essays, authored by a group of diverse writers, including civil rights leaders, art historians, museum curators, and folklorists, as well as commentaries by the artists themselves, who presented not only artists’ biographies but also stylistic, thematic, and historical overviews crucial to an understanding of African American vernacular art. Both the exhibition and the two-volume work celebrated not only the extraordinary aesthetic nature of African American vernacular art but also its dual roots in Africa and America.

Arnett next focused his energies on exhibiting and writing about the quilts of Gee’s Bend, a tiny secluded, rural community in southern Alabama. Opening in 2002 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Quilts of Gee’s Bend moved to the Whitney Museum and then appeared at a dozen museums across the country. The exhibition closed in 2008, but by then two follow-up shows were touring the nation. Tinwood Alliance, now called the Soul’s Grown Deep Foundation, next organized a series of eye-opening exhibitions focused on the work of Thornton Dial Sr. The 2012 Creation Story: Gee’s Bend Quilts and the Art of Thornton Dial, organized by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts and the Soul’s Grown Deep Foundation, showcased the shared debt that the quilters and Dial owed to African American aesthetic traditions.

Like the volumes of Souls Grown Deep, the books that accompanied these exhibitions are richly illustrated for those who want to take pleasure in their aesthetic nature. For those who want to understand the art’s miraculous presence in the midst of 21st-century America, essayists investigate the artistic, historical, and social contexts in which these artists created. For those who desired both, aesthetics and context are uniquely married in these books, which set the standard for subsequent assessments of folk art in the South.

Scholars sharing Arnett’s passion for African American vernacular art include Howard Dodson Jr., former director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library. He was the curator of the traveling exhibition Testimony: Vernacular Art of the African-American South; The Ronald and June Shelp Collection, which showcased more than two dozen artists whose works bear witness to social injustice in the 20th-century South. Similarly illuminating are the publications of Grey Gundaker, a professor at the College of William and Mary, whose books Keep Your Head to the Sky: Interpreting African American Home Ground, edited with Tynes Cowan, and Signs of Diaspora / Diaspora of Signs: Literacies, Creolization, and Vernacular Practice in African America were published in 1998. Gundaker and Judith McWillie’s book No Space Hidden: The Spirit of African American Yard Work (2005) examines numerous examples of African American yard art to demonstrate a remarkable consistency of form and meaning. Equally committed to elucidating the context of vernacular art is Mechal Sobel, whose book Painting a Hidden Life: The Art of Bill Traylor (2005) challenges scholars to reexamine Traylor’s work in light of his experiences and art making in the Jim Crow South. In particular, Sobel asserts that Traylor’s covert imagery both masks and expresses his anguish at the murder or lynching of his son Will.

Other exhibitions, often accompanied by catalogs and books, demonstrate the nature of approaches to the study of contemporary self-taught art in the South. The range of exhibitions has included the American Folk Art Museum, the High Museum of Art, the Cheekwood Botanical Garden and Museum of Art, the University of Richmond Museums, the Mennolo Museum, Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outside Art, the Georgia Museum of Art, the Krannert Art Museum of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, the Art Museum of the University of Memphis, the Montgomery Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Numerous exhibitions looking at specific genres of southern folk art also demonstrate advances in folk art scholarship and appreciation. The International Quilts Study Center and Museum at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln became the repository of Helen and Robert Cargo’s African American quilts, which were featured in the 2003 traveling exhibition, African American Quilts from the Helen and Robert Cargo Collection, organized by the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C. The International Quilts Study Center and Museum also organized in 2011 an exhibition called Yvonne Wells: Quilted Messages. Quilts are a favorite form of folk art, and numerous museums have featured quilt exhibitions, most focusing on the quilts of individual states.

Scholars and collectors have made southern folk pottery a hot topic. The Mc-Kissick Museum at the University of South Carolina and the Mint Museum in Charlotte, N.C., have both organized striking exhibitions with well-illustrated catalogs. The McKissick’s Cross Roads of Clay: The Southern Alkaline-Glazed Stoneware Tradition, which opened in Columbia, S.C., traveled throughout the South in 1990–91. Other trailblazing pottery exhibitions organized by the Mc-Kissick include Great and Noble Jar: Traditional Stoneware of South Carolina (1993) and the traveling exhibition I Made This Jar: Life and Works of the Enslaved African American Potter Dave (1998). The Mint Museum has organized notable exhibitions on North Carolina pottery, such as North Carolina Pottery from the Kohn Collection (2006) and A Thriving Tradition: 75 Years of North Carolina Pottery (2011). The Potter’s Eye: Art and Tradition in North Carolina Pottery (2005) by Mark Hewitt and Nancy Sweezy is a catalog of the folk pottery that appeared in a special exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of Art in 2005–6. In 2008 the Museum for African Art in New York organized Grassroots: African Origins of an American Art, an exhibition about sweet grass baskets. The 1995 exhibition and accompanying catalog A Portion of the People: Three Hundred Years of Southern Jewish Life, which was the product of a seven-year collaboration among the Jewish Historical Society of South Carolina, McKissick Museum of the University of South Carolina, and the College of Charleston, offers scholars a stellar model for future studies.

Nearly 100 years after its discovery, however, American folk art has yet to find a secure place in American art history. While a few major generalist museums have integrated the work of self-taught artists into their chronological permanent installations of American art, most generalist museums define their missions as presenters of American fine art, European fine art, and world art. Even those generalist museums with collections of self-taught art may display it only in rare exhibitions that treat American self-taught art as a separate expression of creation, a mere adjunct to American art history. Museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and other recipients of stellar donations of traditional folk art collected before the discovery of 20th-century folk art, have not made significant additions to their holdings. Folk art museums and enthusiasts of this work even today must actively advocate for the art they prize.

Advocates of traditional folk art argue most frequently for the inclusion of folk art within installations that purport to interpret the whole of American art history before the 20th century, whereas advocates for contemporary self-taught art often argue fervently for the inclusion of contemporary self-taught artists within the framework of contemporary art. Comparisons of the work of 20th- and 21st-century self-taught to the work of the quasi-official mainstream art world, however, reveal sharp differences in markets, patronage, and collecting patterns. Participants in the art world concerned with self-taught art have to ask if equal aesthetic quality should result in equal prices and if evaluations of quality depend on pricing. These questions, which could not have been asked during the 1970s or 1980s, arise from the special history of folk art collecting. While the works of masters such as Bill Traylor and William Edmonson can be priced in the $100,000s and the works of other prominent artists like Howard Finster can fetch prices in the $10,000s, collectors and dealers of southern self-taught art have, for the most part, paid considerably lower prices for the work they admire. Indeed, many collectors of self-taught art are drawn to the art not just for the art’s aesthetic directness but also by the fact that the art is affordable. In the South, however, the collecting of contemporary self-taught art, bound inextricably with racial and economic difference, has from time to time invited charges of exploitation.

The makers of contemporary self-taught art in the South have fashioned works of art that capture the imagination of people everywhere. From Patrick Sullivan’s mention in They Taught Themselves to the feisty mixed-media creations of southern preachers, the yard show displays of African Americans, and the work of newly arrived immigrant artists, such as Cuban American Felipe Consalvos, southern folk art has forged a singular reputation as an authentic form of aesthetic expression entwined with everyday life. Because of the growing scholarly interest in folk art, the work of collectors, gallery owners, and museum professionals who espouse the significance of education, the growing presence of immigrant communities within the South, and art teachers at every level who incorporate folk art’s study into their classrooms, southern self-taught art has become, in many ways, the field’s best-known face in America. Coupled with the elemental role of folk art in modernist art, the exhibition and educational programming of a growing number of museums, the burgeoning numbers of folk art festivals and fairs, and collaborative projects that involve art, history, social studies, and technology, postsecondary classrooms’ increasing recognition of art outside the mainstream assures that the South’s contemporary folk art tradition will thrive in the 21st century.

CHERYL RIVERS
Brooklyn, New York

CAROL CROWN
University of Memphis

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Ames, Common Ground / Uncommon Vision: The Michael and Julie Hall Collection of American Folk Art (1993); Josef Helfenstein and Roman Kurzmeyer, eds., Deep Blues: Bill Traylor, 1854–1949 (1999); Josef Helfenstein and Roxanne Stanulis, eds., Bill Traylor, William Edmondson, and the Modernist Impulse (2005); Herbert W. Hemphill Jr. and Julia Weismann, Twentieth-Century American Folk Art and Artists (1974); Robert Henri, The Craftsman (18 May 1910); Bernard L. Herman, ed., Thornton Dial: Thoughts on Paper (2012); Mark Hewitt and Nancy Sweezy, The Potter’s Eye: Art and Tradition in North Carolina Pottery (2005); Jack D. Holden, Furnishing Louisiana: Creole and Acadian Furniture, 1735–1835 (2010); Stacy Hollander, American Radiance: The Ralph Esmerian Gift to the American Folk Art Museum (2011); Stacy C. Hollander and Brooke Davis Anderson, American Anthem: Masterworks from the American Folk Art Museum (2022); Laurel Horton, Quiltmaking in America: Beyond the Myths (1994); Ronald Hurst and Jonathan Prown, Southern Furniture, 1680–1830: The Williamsburg Collection (1997); David Jaffee, A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America (2010); Mitchell D. Kahan, Heavenly Visions: The Art of Minnie Evans (1986); Norman L. Kleebatt and Gerard C. Wertkin, The Jewish Heritage in American Folk Art (1984); Lee Kogan, The Art of Nellie Mae Rowe: Ninety-Nine and a Half Won’t Do (1998); Donald B. Kuspit et al., Painting in the South, 1564–1980 (1983); Betty M. Kuyk, African Voices in the African American Heritage (2003); Ramona Lampell and Millard Lampell, with David Larkin, O Appalachia: Artists of the Southern Mountains (1989); Jean Lipman and Alice Winchester, The Flowering of American Folk Art, 1776–1876 (1974); Paula W. Locklair, Quilts, Coverlets, and Counterpanes: Bedcovering from the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts and Old Salem (1997); Elsa Longhauser and Harald Szeeman, eds., Self-Taught Artists of the 20th Century: An American Anthology (1998); McKissick Museum, Carolina Folk: The Cradle of a Southern Tradition (1986); Eugene Metcalf and Michael Hall, Folk Art in Contemporary American Culture: The Ties That Bind (1986); Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, Southern Perspective: A Sampling from the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (2005); Jessie Poesch, The Art of the Old South: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, and the Products of Craftsmen, 1560–1860 (1983); Bet Ramsey and Merikay Waldvogel, Southern Quilts: Surviving Relics of the Civil War (1998); Cynthia Elyce Rubin, ed., Southern Folk Art (1985); William Keyse Rudolph and Patricia Brady, In Search of Julien Hudson: Free Artist of Color in Pre-Civil War New Orleans (2011); Beatrix T. Rumford, American Folk Portraits: Paintings and Drawings from the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center (1988), American Folk Paintings: Paintings and Drawings Other Than Portraits from the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center (1989); Beatrix T. Rumford and Carolyn J. Weekley, Treasures of American Folk Art from the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center (1989); Charles Russell, ed., Self-Taught Art: The Culture and Aesthetics of American Vernacular Art (2001), Groundwaters: A Century of Art by Self-Taught and Outsider Artists (2011); Mark W. Scala, Creation Story: Gee’s Bend Quilts and the Art of Thornton Dial (2012); Lynne E. Spriggs, Local Heroes: Paintings and Sculpture by Sam Doyle (2000); Lynne E. Spriggs et al., Let It Shine: Self-Taught Art from the T. Marshall Hall Collection (2001); Mechal Sobel, Painting a Hidden Life: The Art of Bill Traylor (2005); Cecilia Steinfeldt, Art for History’s Sake: The Texas Collection of the Witte Museum (1993); Nancy Sweezy, Raised in Clay: The Southern Pottery Tradition (1995); Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (1984), The Art of William Edmondson (1999); Maurice Tuchman and Carol S. Eliel, eds., Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art (1992); John Turner, Howard Finster: Man of Visions (1989); Alvia J. Wardlaw, Black Art / Ancestral Legacy: The African Impulse in African American Art (1990); Elizabeth Warren, Quilts: Masterworks from the American Folk Art Museum (2010); Carolyn J. Weekley et al., Joshua Johnson: Freeman an Early American Portrait Painter (1987); Alice Rae Yelen, Passionate Visions of the American South: Self-Taught Artists from 1940 to the Present (1993); Charles G. Zug III, Turners and Burners: The Folk Potters of North Carolina (1990).

African American Expressions

Because Africans enslaved in America received only the basic necessities of life, many captives in antebellum America as well as free blacks had to improvise with whatever material they could find, relying, for the most part, on memories of their African pasts. A carved wooden spoon discovered in the 1930s in the Old Fort area of Savannah, Ga., and estimated to “be more than a century old,” demonstrates a strong association with African forms. Its anthropomorphized handle, especially its “hands akimbo,” recalls ancient wooden ceremonial ladles or scoops found among the Dan, Senufo, and Baule peoples of West Africa. Pottery fragments of the so-called Colono ware excavated from plantations in the South and dated to the late 17th and middle of the 18th centuries bear decorative motifs—crosses enclosed in circles and triangles—reminiscent of cosmograms from Kongo and Yombe cultures in present-day Democratic Republic of Congo. The diamond-shaped patterns, each with a banded background, a six-point star with tiny circles on each point, and denticulate lines found on 17th-century pipes excavated from sites in Virginia and Maryland, hint at an African connection as well. Strikingly similar patterns known as kwardata appear on pottery from Ghana and Nigeria—two areas from which many slaves were imported to Virginia in the 17th and 18th centuries. Equally important is the close resemblance between coiled baskets from South Carolina and baskets from different parts of the western Guinea Coast, especially among the Wollof, Serer, Mende, Kissi, Temne, and Gola. The similarity may be more than mere coincidence, since the South imported many blacks from this part of West Africa known as the “Rice Coast” in the slavery era to boost rice farming in the Carolina and Georgian Lowcountry. Recent research has revealed other African carryovers, or Africanisms, in musical instruments, dance styles, religious rituals, wood carving, blacksmithing, quilting, architecture, and graveyard decoration, most especially in the Deep South.

A review of these carryovers reveals a wide range of skills—from the highly professional to the amateurish—suggesting that the more accomplished works might have been made by slaves with previous training in Africa, and the lesser pieces, by novices. A wooden drum reportedly seized from slaves in 17th-century Virginia and remarkably similar to the atumpan talking-drums of the Akan of present-day Ghana and CÔte d’Ivoire suggests that its maker might have created similar ones in Africa before being enslaved. In Colonial Virginia, names such as “Quacko,” “Cuffy,” and “Quame” are no more than Anglicized versions of “Kwaku,” “Kofi,” and “Kwame”—Akan names for persons born on Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday. The influence of Kongo culture on the South is also extensive. The bulging kaolin eyes and bared teeth of the glazed “face vessels” produced in the mid-19th century by African slaves in Edgefield, S.C., recall the typical nkisi “power” figures of the Kongo. The stylistic similarity is not surprising, as large numbers of Kongo slaves lived in the antebellum South. Most of the last consignment of Kongo people, who arrived on the Wanderer in 1858, were sold to Edgefield planters. One Edgefield pottery factory ledger includes a potter called Romeo, aka Tahro, now thought to be one of the Kongo captives brought by the Wanderer. The same Romeo later built a Kongo-type house in Edgefield, thus suggesting that some carvers-turned-potters from Equatorial Africa created Edgefield face vessels.

While makers of the Virginia drum and the Edgefield face vessels might have had formal art training in Africa, they were not recognized as artists; Euro-American concepts of “fine arts” focused on naturalism—the opposite of the African emphasis on stylization, which the slave masters ridiculed as “primitive” attempts to imitate nature. However, the coexistence of stylized and realistic forms in African art from prehistoric times to the present suggests that disregard for naturalism was deliberate. The emphasis on stylization seems to arise from a belief in duality, necessitating artists to create a rationalized rather than a descriptive image to present reality as an interface of spirit and matter. The head dominates a typical African figure sculpture because of its perception as the “lord” of the body and the locus of the vital force that constitutes the sine qua non of life. The devaluation of African stylization during the slavery era impelled African American artists like Robert S. Duncanson, Edward M. Bannister, Mary E. Lewis, Henry O. Tanner, and others to disconnect from their African artistic heritage and acquire formal training in Euro-American aesthetics. Nonetheless, white patronage of black-made products such as basketry and quilts enabled some families to transmit African carryovers from one generation to another. At the same time, the circumstances of slavery and use of visual symbols for empowerment resulted in an exponential increase in the number of bricoleurs and self-taught black artists who continued African aesthetic carryovers. These artists also drew inspiration from specialists such as diviners, root doctors, and Vodun priests noted for their deep knowledge of the African past.

A walking stick now in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery carved by Henry Gudgell in 1867 so resembles wooden canes and staffs from Equatorial Africa that one might be led to assume that its carver came from that area. Yet Gudgell, born into slavery in Kentucky in 1826, apparently inherited aesthetic traditions from a carver who had produced similar canes in Africa. Mississippi-born carver Leon Rucker (b. 1894) tutored by his enslaved African-born grandfather Lewis Rucker, a herbalist, claimed that the inspiration for the reptile and bird motifs on his walking sticks came from a vision during which a strange voice spoke to him. Although self-taught artists still produce similar walking sticks in many parts of the South today, the exact meaning of the snake motif on them has since been forgotten. It is possible, however, that past generations may have chosen the motif because of its alleged magical, life-sustaining powers. For instance, in the African/Fon-derived Vodou religion, called Voodoo in New Orleans, the snake signifies the celestial serpent Damballah, the source of dynamic motion and regeneration. Because Gudgell gave the snake walking stick to John Bryan, who was badly wounded during the Civil War, Gudgell may well have had the healing power of Damballah in mind.

In short, the first batch of African captives laid the foundation of what we now identify as African American self-taught art, informally passing down their visual reminiscences to American-born descendants. The legacy has since been transformed through individual efforts into a mosaic; some aesthetic approaches are recognizably African, some are Euro-American. Other creations synthesize the African and American reflecting W. E. B. Du Bois’s “double-consciousness,” the twoness of the black experience in the United States.

Thanks to the influence of African and non-Western abstraction on modern art at the turn of the 20th century, the boundary formerly separating the conceptual approach of the self-taught artist from that of the formally taught artist virtually disappeared and, along with it, the bias that previously prevented art critics from recognizing self-taught artists’ inventiveness. Today, the works of the formally and informally trained artists hang side by side in major museums, attesting to the dawn of a new era in art production and appreciation not dependent on artists’ educational backgrounds.

Though found all over the United States, many self-taught black artists hail from the Deep South. Many of them did not complete primary or high school education before dropping out to satisfy their creative impulses or to take advantage of the growing market in self-taught art. Some became artists after retiring from a full-time job or as a result of a physical handicap. Others claimed to have had a vision during which a strange voice commanded them to draw, paint, or carve. The content of their works may be inspired by a variety of sources, such as creative family members, folklore, historical or topical events, found objects, the mass media, popular art, biblical stories, rituals, and dreams, as well as ancient and recent African influences. The images are characterized by schematized or highly simplified forms, sometimes with a touch of humor and a decorative use of color. There is less emphasis on technique and craftsmanship but more on improvisation and personalized and direct expression of feelings and ideas.

QUILTS AS COMFORTERS AND VISUAL METAPHORS. The “Do-It-Yourself” imperative of the slavery era found one of its most eloquent artistic expressions in quilts. African Americans tailored their own clothes, fashioning warm clothes from hand-me-downs and from plain cloth given them by owners. African captives did not have to build their own looms. Instead, weavers worked on European looms set to produce European-type textiles. As a result, it is very difficult today to distinguish between textiles woven or sewn by slaves and those created by Euro-American craftsmen, especially since slaves frequently worked under the supervision or in collaboration with slave mistresses or masters’ wives. However, slaves had more freedom when making personal quilts that reflected their taste and skills. Quilts for personal use also continued African textile design traditions—particularly, the use of colors and complex patterning with aesthetic, social, political, or spiritual implications. As Robert Thompson, Cuesta Benberry, Maude Southwell Wahlman, Carolyn Mazloomi, and many others have pointed out, African American quilts display both ancient and also more recent African influences not only in their emphasis on strip construction, large-scale designs, a wide array of colors, and asymmetrical, improvised/offbeat patterns but also in the use of designs as visual metaphors. Many quilters both consciously and unconsciously synthesized African with Euro-American elements, while other African American quilters were not aware of African aesthetic traditions or preferred other styles.

Students of African art recognize that many African-derived motifs such as the snake continue to appear as symbols or visual metaphors in African American art. A clear use of symbolism appears in Harriet Powers’s 1886 Bible Quilt. Although illustrating Old and New Testament events, Powers seems to have added African-derived symbols and folkloric references. Her figural forms, and indeed her use of appliqué, closely resemble the textile traditions of the Fon people of Dahomey, the present-day Benin Republic. However, Harriet Powers was born in Athens, Ga. Is this similarity fortuitous or the result of Powers’s direct or indirect contact with West African textiles or with the Fon culture, whose impact in the South is evident in the Voodoo religion of New Orleans?

The scholarly emphasis on symbolism, while fruitful, has in recent years led to assertions that well-known quilt patterns may have encoded messages that could lead escaping slaves to the Underground Railroad, a network of clandestine escape routes maintained by free blacks and abolitionists between the late 18th century and the end of the Civil War. This assertion is certainly appealing. However, scholars from many disciplines reject the theory, arguing that some patterns in the so-called Underground Railroad quilts were not current until much later and that the theory lacks documentation. Assertions that some African American quilts use African motifs and labyrinthine patterning to confuse evil spirits and so prevent them from harming their targets have more support. The hand motif, which African American folklore associates with mojo—a spell of African origin with powers to attract good luck or protect an individual from negative forces appears in many quilts. Incidentally, the African American term “mojo” may derive from mooyo, the Kongo word for the belly or cavity of an nkisi power figure in which the charm, or bilongo, for activating it is kept.

By and large, while contemporary African American quilts have become much more sophisticated in response to the dynamics of change and the availability of new materials, a lot of them still attempt to relate the past to the present. A recent exhibition of the works of 45 quilters (covering four generations) from Gee’s Bend, Ala., reflects this dynamic of continuity and change in the simplicity, complexity, and modernization of material and design, and the coexistence of the old and the new in form, style, and iconography.

YARD SHOWS, BOTTLE TREES, SITE-SPECIFIC INSTALLATIONS, AND GRAVEYARD DECORATION. The “picturesque” house or garden is a conspicuous aspect of the southern landscape. Black sites often draw attention by improvisational combinations of discarded articles such as auto parts, dolls, toys, assorted plastic objects, glassware, ceramics, pipes, and wooden cabinets strategically or randomly displayed among plants and flowers. The yard show, also described as an art environment, began in antebellum times when, in continuation of visual practice on the other side of the Atlantic, captives decorated their residences with odds and ends that fulfilled aesthetic, social, or spiritual customs. Since the end of the Civil War, the practice has become more complex: old symbols, such as plants, driftwood, particular colors, ideograms, sculptures, paintings, and texts, now mix with new ones such as castoff tires, wheels, clocks, and lamps to convey various messages. The recurrence of motifs such as hubcaps, pinwheels, whirligigs, and rotary blades has led art historian Robert F. Thompson to compare these motifs to the circular movement of the “ring shout” dance that entered Christian worship in the South. According to Thompson, the motifs, like the circles on Colono ware, might have evolved from the cosmograms of the Kongo, such as the dikenga—a cross within a circle alluding to the crossroads, cosmic motion, spiritual strength, and the eternal cycle of the soul. The reflective objects found in many yard shows have been compared to the mirrors on some Kongo nkisi “power” figures expected to monitor, repel, or deflect evil forces. Scholars have noted the presence of reflective and circular objects and monitory signage in the yard shows of such artists as Joe Minter, David Butler, Lonnie Holley, Dilmus Hall, Rev. Herman D. Dennis, Joe Light, Mary T. Smith, and Hawkins Bolden. In many parts of Africa, charms and bottlelike gourds may be suspended conspicuously on long poles or trees to protect one’s property or ward off negative forces. The attachment of glass and plastic bottles to trees or poles in African American yards for identical purposes continues this tradition, though some artists claim that their installations have purely aesthetic functions.

Black graveyards were easily identified in antebellum times by objects displayed on them including carved images. Mourners intended certain articles for the use in the afterlife. In some cases, plaster was used to stick coins, medals, shells, and other objects onto ceramic vessels, so-called memory jars, a tradition that continued into the early 20th century. In the Sunbury Baptist Church Cemetery in Liberty County, Ga., Cyrus Bowens decorated the circa 1920 graves of family members with stylized wooden sculptures (one resembling a serpent), concrete slabs adorned with mirrors, automobile headlights, glasses, and various bottles. Recent grave articles documented in other parts of the South include sewing machines, lamps, flashlights, medicine bottles, cutlery, dishes, peppershakers, saltcellars, piggy banks, plastic toys, glass pitchers, flowerpots, clocks, eyeglasses, and flashlights. Some sites may feature conch and oyster shells, which are deemed to have the spiritual power to guide souls back to the ancestral homeland via the sea. In the past, custom demanded that the items last used by the deceased also be displayed to prevent his or her soul from coming back to ask for them or from wandering about, harassing relatives. Nowadays, flowers frequently serve as symbolic substitutes for traditional articles.

IMAGING THE SACRED. Admittedly, contemporary African American belief in an afterlife has been heavily influenced by the book of Revelation’s prediction of an approaching “end of time,” after which the souls of the dead would be resurrected and judged according to their deeds on earth. Yet the idea that a soul can wander about or return to ask for previously used articles hints at a pre–Christian African ancestral notion of reality as an interface of spirit and matter. The notion stems from a popular myth that the body is a divinely inspired work of art empowered by a vital force or soul. An individual is alive so long as the soul resides in his or her body; death results when the soul leaves the body. However, death is not the end of existence but a separation of spirit from matter and the return of a soul to the hereafter, from where it may reincarnate as a newborn baby to begin another life on earth. In short, the belief that the body, as a work of art, manifests and mediates the spirit or soul on earth also explains the popularity of spirit possession in indigenous African religions. This phenomenon is often interpreted as the moment when a supernatural power takes over a medium’s body, using it as a mask for interacting with mortals. Consequently, the medium behaves differently, speaking in tongues. It is enough to say that the phenomenon has encouraged the use of stylized altar figures as functional substitutes for the body to facilitate communication between the physical and metaphysical worlds. And as several African cosmologies trace the origin of art and the body to supernatural beings (or a supreme deity), it is not surprising that the creative process is often ritualized to link the artist to the source of creation. Little wonder that many indigenous or traditionally trained African artists make offerings to their tools, frequently undergoing trances or spiritual guidance before or while executing important commissions.

There is ample evidence that much of this worldview survived the middle passage, even if in hybrid forms. For instance, eyewitness accounts of church services during the antebellum period described black worshipers as displaying gestures and movements that suggested possession. In the 1930s, Robert Pinckney, a former slave in his eighties recalled, in his interview with members of the Georgia Writers’ Project, occasions when African slaves produced clay figures and danced around them in remembrance of their ancestors. One of the figures holding a spear in his hand brings to mind the use of “sentinel” figures in different parts of Africa to honor deceased ancestors and at the same time implore them to protect the living. Chances are that some of the Edgefield face vessels, sometimes called voodoo pots, performed similar functions, though their original contexts remain obscure. Self-taught artists continue to create similar images for ritual purposes in many parts of the South, and in Santeria—the worship of Yoruba deities in the guise of Roman Catholic saints—introduced to the United States in the early 20th century by Afro-Cubans. Since then, Santeria has attracted hundreds of thousands of African American followers. The ancient African association of tree roots with herbal medicine and magic would seem to have survived in the African American tradition of using root sculptures for conjure and healing purposes.

Simply put, such was the interconnectedness of art, life, and religion in their homelands that African captives held on to it after the middle passage, despite their conversion to Christianity.

BABTUNDE LAWAL
Virginia Commonwealth University

Paul Arnett and William Arnett, eds., Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art of the South, vol. 1 (2000); William Arnett et al., Gee’s Bend: Architecture of the Quilt (2006); William Arnett and Paul Arnett, eds., Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art, vol. 2 (2001); Cinda K. Baldwin, American Visions: The Magazine of Afro-American Culture (1990); Cuesta Benberry, Always There: The African-American Presence in American Quilts (1992); Carol Crown, ed., Coming Home! Self-Taught Artists, the Bible, and the American South (2004); Georgia Writers’ Project, Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies among the Georgian Coastal Negroes (1940); Paul Harrison, Victor L. Walker, and Gus Edwards, eds., Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora (2002); Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, Made with Passion (1990); Joseph. E. Holloway, ed., Africanisms in American Culture (2005); Jane Livingston and John Beardsley, Black Folk Art in America, 1930–1980 (1982); Wyatt MacGaffey and Michael Harris, Astonishment and Power (1993); Geoffrey Parrinder, African Mythology (1967); Albert J. Raboteau, Canaan Land: A Religious History of African Americans (2001); Armstead L. Robinson et al., eds., Black Studies in the University (1969); Dale Rosengarten, Theodore Rosengarten, and Enid Schildkrout, Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art (2008); Theophilus H. Smith, Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America (1994); Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (1984); Robert Farris Thompson and Joseph Cornet, The Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds (1981); Robert Ferris Thompson, Don Mason Johnson, and Judith McWillie, Another Face of the Diamond: Pathways through the Black Atlantic South (1988); John M. Vlach, The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts (1990); Maude Southwell Wahlman, Signs and Symbols: African Images in African American Quilts (1993); Richard Westmacott, African American Gardens and Yards in the Rural South (1992).

African American Protective Arts

Although African Americans incorporated African beliefs into Christianity, the Vodun (or Vodou) religion did not openly fuse with Protestant Christianity but usually led an underground existence involving rituals to call up the power of spirits or ancestors for advice or protection. Recently deceased relatives were thought to be links between the world of the living and the realm of gods or ancestors. They could work for good or evil, and so must be wooed or protected against, sometimes with charms. “Haints” or “haunts” were troublesome ghosts, evil spirits of those ancestors who were not honored or were without descendants to help, protect, or heal.

To conjure is to call upon spiritual powers to activate a charm, cure a sickness, or heal an emotional or physical wound. African Americans with physical and spiritual talents are sometimes referred to as conjuremen, conjurewomen, root doctors, or hoodoo doctors—hoodoo being a derivation of Vodou. Born a slave in 1855, Sarah Colbert, who grew up in Kentucky, later told how slaves sometimes “went to one of the witchcrafters for a charm against cruel owners.” “Gullah Jack” (Jack Pritchard) came from Angola and lived in South Carolina in the 19th century. He “had his conjuring implements with him in a bag which he brought on board the ship and always retained them.” The 19th-century quilter Harriet Powers may have been a conjurewoman, as she was photographed wearing a ceremonial apron with appliquéd symbols for Christian, Fon, Kongo, and Masonic images. Images in contemporary paintings, such as Sam Doyle’s Doctor Buzzard, refer to root doctors or conjuremen. J. B. Murray and Nellie Mae Rowe also painted images of conjuremen and spirits.

Archaeological excavations have uncovered ritual artifacts used in African American healing and divination rituals. One protective cache, dated 1790–1800, included quartz crystals, bone disks, a ceramic fragment, and other artifacts, which have been interpreted as evidence of “root men and root women.” Quartz crystals are found in important Kongo charms, representing special ancestral simbi spirits, and perforated bone disks are worn to protect the circle of the soul.

Another collection, from a conjureman’s cabin in southern Texas, includes cast-iron-kettle bases, chalk fragments, bird skulls, weighing-scale fragments, an animal’s paw, medicine samples, seashells, bottles, doll parts, spoons, nails, knives, chert scrapers, and a flintlike rock. This collection recalls Kongo assemblages of medicines found in Minkisi charms and African Cuban artifacts used in association with a ritual pot, called a prenda, which is often marked with chalk crosses. Cowrie shell beads, a form of currency in West Africa, were later worn as symbols of wealth and as charms. Cowrie shells and colored glass beads have been found in Virginia, North Carolina, Louisiana, and Texas. Blue beads are thought to be particularly protective, a practice that may relate to the Muslim belief that a single blue bead worn or sewn on clothing protects one against “the evil eye.” Five of the slave women photographed in 1862 at the Drayton Plantation on Hilton Head Island, S.C., wear beaded necklaces, probably “charm strings,” designed to bring good luck to the wearer. In Huckleberry Finn, “Jim always kept that five-center piece around his neck with a string and said it was the charm the devil give to him with his own hand and told him he could cure anybody with it and fetch witches when ever he wanted to, just by saying something to it.” The flash of the round silver nickel could protect his spirit and bring him money.

An African American amulet is often called a “mojo” or an “and,” as in “helping hand.” Two brass charms, each stamped with a clenched fist and dated to 1820, were found in African American housing at the Hermitage, home of Andrew Jackson near Nashville, Tenn. The hand-shaped charms of African-oriented spiritualist societies were widely used from at least 1850. Hands often appear in paintings by Nellie Mae Rowe. Dilmus Hall made a protective cement house charm with two blue hands.

Most African American cloth charms, also called “mojo” or “hand,” are worn around the neck or carried in a pocket, even by people who profess not to believe in Vodou. Charles Joyner writes, “slaves wore herbs in pouches as a preventative.” In South Carolina, the Gullah people have several terms (conjure bag, goofa bag, hand, mojo, and wanga) for their cloth charms. Hair is considered a powerful ingredient to include in a charm, because it grows near the brain, and “a hand made of hair can sure affect the brain.” Conjurers “mixed hair, nails, thimbles, and needles in a ‘conjure bag’ or ‘a little bottle’ and have roots and water in it and sulpher.” A Mystic Mojo Love Sachet is thought to make one popular, successful, and happy. An African American from Florida recalled that an “old witch doctor, he want ten dollars for a piece of string, what he say some kinds words over. . . . I didn’t have no ten dollars so he ifen I git up five dollar he make me a hand—you know what colored folks call a jack. Dat be a charm what will keep witches away. I knows how to make em, but day donan do no good thout de magic words, and I doan know dem.”

Zora Neale Hurston found the magic words for how to make a “hand” charm:

Take a piece of the fig leaf, sycamore bark, John de Conquer root, John de Conquer vine, three paradise seeds. Take a piece of paper and draw a square and let the party write his wishes. Begin, “I want to be successful in all my undertakings.” Then cut the paper from around the square and let him tear it up fine and throw it in front of the business place or house or wherever he wants. Put the square in the “hand” and sew all up in red flannel. Sew with a strong thread and when seams are closed, pass the thread back and forth through the bag ’til all the thread is used up. To pour on “hand”: oil of anise, oil of rose geranium, violet perfume, oil of lavender, verbena, bay rum. “Hand must be renewed every six months.”

A gnarled and twisted root, or a black snakeroot, known as “High John the Conqueror,” may be ground into powder, carved, or left in its natural state.

Contemporary African American artists carry on Kongo root traditions. Jesse Aaron protected his home by carving his trees to create living charms. He used roots and found wood to create his protective animal forms. Dilmus Hall made protective house charms from roots. Mose Tolliver recalled that as a child he gathered and painted roots. The root and stick sculptures of Bessie Harvey and Steve Ashby may derive from Kongo twisted root charms. Hawkins Bolden used roots consistently, as did Archie Byron. Joe Light said, “I like to attach certain things to my pictures. . . . Place mats, toys, reflectors, roots.” Thornton Dial’s sculptures and assemblages, such as The Refugees, incorporate roots. Dial says, “Roots symbolize the oldest things, all those things that come to be part of a man’s life.”

African American graves are also charms, often decorated with clocks, glass, lamps, headlights, mirrors, white objects, tinfoil, shells, and containers that probably refer to the watery realm of African Kongo ancestors. A 1943 reference to African American graves in Georgia reads “sometimes they carved rude wooden figures like images or idols, and sometimes a patchwork quilt was laid upon the grave.” Clocks on graves may refer to the Kongo cosmogram that maps the circle of life or the hourglass that marks the passing (death in African American lingo) into another world.

Trees are symbols of the vertical link between the living and ancestors. The graves in Siras Bowen’s family burial ground in Sunbury, Ga., incorporated writing as well as calligraphic forms created from crooked trees and twisted roots. Wooden sculptures crafted from roots were adapted to create a circle and a cross. A yellow clay marker honoring Rachel Bowen is incised with her name, the date 1937, some indecipherable signs, and “the outline of an open hand with a small mirror glittering in the palm.” The mirror may represent water, ancestral power, or the flash of a spirit. The hand may represent the person herself or a helping hand.

Numerous African American graves are also decorated with shells, a recurring motif that refers to the watery realm of the ancestors. In Sam Doyle’s paintings of Dr. Buzzard, the Gullah root doctor holds a conch shell to his ear as he listens to ancestral voices. Large shells decorate some graves even in northern Alabama, a long way from the coast. Lamps also guide the deceased to the ancestors. A white lamp on an Alabama grave may be a symbol of the light needed to guide one’s soul. The color refers to white kaolin clay found under the water, site of ancestral power in Kongo religion. Graveyard dust, a key ingredient in mojo charms, activates ancestral power.

Like graves, spirit jugs or memory bottles are embellished with magical substances to ensure the safe passage of the deceased. Such jugs were sometimes placed on African American graves. However, many ethnic groups made such objects during (and, in some cases, before) the Victorian era, and so it is difficult to know who invented the idea. One is tempted to credit African Americans, because these objects fall so nicely in the African American tradition of accumulating “medicines” inside or outside a form, as charms. They are another way of honoring an ancestral spirit and calling on its power for insight, guidance, luck, protection, and healing. An anonymous and seemingly innocent household object, a 1920 African American sewing box from North Carolina, was transformed with additional symbolic elements into a charm box. It was probably made by a woman, who added pearls, beads, shells, and water-worn pebbles around a stuffed center, originally a pincushion.

In Africa and in the Americas, ceramic pots with faces were made to commemorate the dead and protect the grave. The face sculptures of Dilmus Hall, Nellie Mae Rowe, James “Son Ford” Thomas, and Lonnie Holley are key links in a long chain of protective clay charms. Some examples, notably those by Thomas, who worked as gravedigger, grew consciously from the funerary tradition.

Numerous devices protect African American homes and yards. Lights, porch mirrors, door jars, moving wheels and fans, protective herbs, rock boundaries, root sculpture, signs, scripts, tree sculptures, and bottle trees function as visual medicines. Porch mirrors “keep certain forces at a distance,” and pots placed near a doorway “send back evil to its sources.” The yard constructions of David Butler, Lonnie Holley, Hawkins Bolden, Joe Minter, and George Kornegay continue to reinvent these protective traditions. Mardi Gras beaded costumes may also serve as a link to African textiles that protect, heal, and encode ideas. The New Orleans vodou doll probably originated in Kongo traditions brought to the United States by enslaved Africans and later by Haitian emigrants. One also sees spirit figures in contemporary African American vernacular art. Clementine Hunter made a charm doll from a calabash with secret compartments for magical, protective substances. The painter Nellie Mae Rowe made red cloth dolls. Quilters Sarah Mary Taylor and her mother, Pearlie Posey, appliquéd designs with red figures reminiscent of vodou dolls. Taylor’s Mermaid quilt with appliquéd vodou dolls, red squares, and blue hands demonstrates the persistence of African traditions.

MAUDE SOUTHWELL WAHLMAN
University of Missouri at Kansas City

Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (1983); Maude Southwell Wahlman, in Self-Taught Art: The Culture and Aesthetics of American Vernacular Art, ed. Charles Russell (1997).

Art Cars

Part expression of freedom, part public art, part personal altar, and part self-promotion device, “art cars” have become lasting icons of American individualism and spirit. Referring to any road-worthy vehicle that has been transformed into a unique creation, art cars convert our most recognizable mass-produced commodities into moving sculpture.

A phenomenon linked most closely with California car culture, art cars have variegated roots. Although customizing and racing automobiles began in the 1920s, America’s passion for cars burgeoned after the end of World War II, when the American dream of owning a new car became reality for the average family. The automobile became a highly visible and mobile front upon which individuals could declare their personas. In the urban areas of California and Texas in particular, Anglo Americans and Mexican Americans, or Chicanos, took the customizing of cars in opposing directions, making vehicles the very embodiment of cultural affiliation.

Mechanically inclined Anglo American youths, often called greasers, focused largely on souped-up engines and the flashy paint jobs that would characterize “hot rods.” The pachucos, a subculture of Chicano youth, were more intrigued with style, class, and over-the-top decoration. “Lowriders,” named for modified suspensions that brought the car extremely low to the ground, were not tricked out for racing but for a slow, flamboyant cruise.

Both hotrods and lowriders were streams that fed that greater American imagination. Also in Los Angeles, Russian immigrant Nudie Cohn (Nutya Kotlyrenko) would become famous not only for his over-the-top western wear but also as an early maker of art cars. Life magazine ran a feature story on Cohn and his customized 1950 Pontiac Hudson, prompting Pontiac to give Cohn a new car to decorate every year; the previous year’s models were ceremoniously passed on to various Nashville and Texas musicians, sprinkling the outrageous creations throughout the country. In 1971 Pontiac ended the promotion, and Cohn purchased a Cadillac El Dorado, which he encrusted in silver dollars, detailed with a hand-tooled leather interior, outfitted with door handles shaped like pistols, and crowned with his signature steer horns on the hood. When driving, Cohn played at high volume an eight-track tape recording of horses neighing and cows lowing.

Rooted perhaps in equal measure to lowriders, hotrods, and the American entrepreneurial spirit, art cars celebrate not the speed with which you arrive, but the panache with which you do it. Texas has become particularly associated with art cars ever since the Orange Show Foundation for Visionary Art in Houston auctioned off a donated art car in 1984. The winner in turn donated the “Fruit Mobile” back to the Orange Show, where it became an automotive ambassador for this organization dedicated to celebrating individual vision in art. Some years later the Orange Show organized a traveling show of art cars and established an annual art car parade that draws tourists and art lovers to Houston. Filmmaker Harrod Blank of California furthered the fan appeal of art cars in his 1992 documentary Wild Wheels. Also in Houston is the Art Car Museum, which opened in 1998.

LESLIE UMBERGER
Smithsonian American Art Museum

Jeffrey Kastner, Raw Vision (Summer 1993).

Art Education

Folk art—both traditional and contemporary—plays an important role in elementary, secondary, and university art education programs throughout the South. Whether integrated in comprehensive art lessons taught by arts specialists or cotaught with folk artists in school residencies or intergenerational community initiatives, folk art in education provides meaningful curricula and addresses state and national academic standards. In many rural and urban areas of the South with limited access to museums, integrating folk art into the curriculum also provides access to real works of art that are culturally significant. Moreover, the study of folk art, which is a remarkably accessible aesthetic form, offers significant ways to study cultural traditions and community celebrations. In classrooms across the South, students research and discuss the narrative work of Clementine Hunter and learn about life on a southern plantation. Students learn about cultural heritages and the contexts in which folk art is created, and they are encouraged to tell their own stories and find their own voices to communicate social issues and cultural traditions.

The emergence of folk art in education can be traced to the 1920s, when it was common practice for art education periodicals to feature folk traditions. Educators such as John Dewey embraced a child-centered approach to teaching that emphasized respect for diversity. Although folk art entered the curriculum, it remained a discretionary supplement for many years. In the 1970s, curricula that included folk art became more common as grants allowed state and local agencies to hire folk artists who increasingly served as artists in residence or speakers at whole-school assemblies. In the 1980s many southern art agencies, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, engaged in an evaluation of art education programs with wide repercussions for the inclusion of folk art in the curriculum. The results demonstrated a strong desire to develop authentic programming that focused on the unique characteristics of individual communities rather than the traditional touring programs that bore no direct relation to regional cultural heritage. As a result, in Mississippi, for example, a collaborative program called Artists Build Communities was developed in 1993 to provide professional development for artists and educators and the publication of folk art handbooks and Web-based communication tools. Similar collaborative programs began to emerge in other southern states. Folk arts became an integral part of arts education curricula.

Since the turn of the century, programs such as Goals 2000 and the subsequent No Child Left Behind legislation have required art education to focus on academic standards and assessment. Despite this emphasis on assessment and accountability, as well as increased funding challenges, meaningful folk arts education continues to be widespread in the South. For example, the Louisiana Voices Folklife in Education Program and the Georgia Folk Program provide opportunities to explore community traditions through curriculum resources and professional development for teachers. Many southern states, such as Georgia and Alabama, offer apprenticeship programs for preserving southern folk art. The University of Central Florida (UCF) Cultural Heritage Alliance, under the direction of Kristin Congdon and Natalie Underberg, provides projects, research, and networking opportunities for folk arts education. This alliance is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the UCF College of Arts and Sciences. Folkvine.org is another innovative education-oriented project funded by Florida that utilizes new media technology to build a sense of community. Using video and narrative, participants learn about folk artists in an effort to enhance their understanding of the artists’ works. This award-winning, interactive website features local artists and invites visitors to participate rather than function as passive viewers.

Dedicated educators also rely on national networks for support, such as CARTS—Cultural Arts Resources for Teachers and Students, the website for the National Network for Folk Arts in Education. This online clearinghouse for national and regional folklore resources includes virtual folk artist residencies, educational teaching tools, articles, and more.

DONALYN HEISE
University of Memphis

Joyce Cauthen, Presenting Mississippi’s Traditional Artists: A Handbook for Local Arts Agencies (2006); James S. Lanier, The Complete Lanier: A Professional Profile (1998); June K. McFee, Preparation for Art (1970); June K. McFee and Rogena M. Degge, Art, Culture, and Environment: A Catalyst for Teaching (1980); University of Central Florida, www.folkvine.org.

Baskets, Lowcountry

Travelers along coastal Highway 17 North near Mt. Pleasant, S.C., across the Cooper River from Charleston, cannot fail to notice the coiled baskets displayed on rough wooden stands on the edge of the road. These baskets, made of golden sweet grass, decorated with russet bands of longleaf pine needles, and bound with strips of palmetto frond, have been offered for sale on the highway since the 1930s. Widely recognized as one of the oldest African-inspired crafts in America, Lowcountry baskets are appreciated today not only for their utility and beauty but as symbols of the region and of the people who make them.

The tradition of coiled basketry goes back centuries on both sides of the Atlantic. In the late 1600s, European settlers and the enslaved Africans who worked the land in the new British colony of Carolina began experimenting with rice as a potential export crop. The skills associated with growing rice and processing the grain were familiar to many of the Africans, particularly people from the Upper Guinea Coast, where Europeans saw rice under cultivation as early as 1446, and the inland delta of the Niger River, where rice has been grown for 2000 years. On Lowcountry plantations, one particular basket—a wide-coiled winnowing tray called a “fanner”—was adopted as the essential tool for separating the grain from its chaff. To wrap and stitch rows of bulrush, basket sewers on the mainland used white oak splints, while Sea Islanders fashioned strips from the stem of the saw palmetto.

As plantation agriculture spread across the South, basket makers took with them the tradition of coiled basketry that had taken hold in the Lowcountry. When rice production expanded into Georgia and North Carolina in the early 18th century, South Carolina planters led crews of experienced slaves to break the new ground and plant the crop. By the mid-1840s, rice operations extended down the coast of Georgia and into northern Florida, and the range of the basket followed suit.

With the breakup of the plantation system at the end of the Civil War, many freed people acquired land and began to farm for themselves. Coiled grass baskets remained in use in homes and fields and became a familiar sight on the streets of Charleston. People from rural settlements such as James Island, Johns Island, Edisto Island, and Mt. Pleasant brought farm produce to market in coiled rush baskets balanced on the head.

In the early decades of the 20th century, as agriculture declined and jobs in industry lured tens of thousands of black southerners to the North, Lowcountry baskets could have gone the way of gourd and earthenware vessels, wooden mortars and pestles, palmetto fans and thatching. But the tradition proved to be resilient. Seventy-five miles south of Charleston, the Penn School on St. Helena Island introduced “native island basketry” as part of its agricultural curriculum for boys and kept bulrush basket making alive.

Meanwhile, around the time of World War I, basket makers in the vicinity of Boone Hall Plantation north of Mt. Pleasant increased their output and expanded their repertory in response to a new wholesale market and a budding tourist trade. Charleston merchant Clarence W. Legerton began commissioning baskets to sell by mail through his Sea Grass Basket catalog and retail from his bookstore on King Street. Sam Coakley from Hamlin Beach acted as an agent for the community of sewers. Every other Saturday basket makers would bring their wares to his house for Legerton’s inspection.

These Mt. Pleasant “show” baskets differed from agricultural work baskets in several ways: the sewers tended to be women, not men; sweet grass was the principal foundation material rather than bulrush; palm leaf was used in place of white oak splints or palmetto butt to bind the rows of grass; and new forms were created and pine needles added for decorative effect. With the construction of the Cooper River Bridge in 1929 and the paving of Highway 17, basket makers found a way to reach their market directly. They began selling baskets by the side of the road, displaying them on chairs or overturned crates. As the tourist trade quickened, sewers responded with new, individualized basket shapes displayed on an innovative marketing device—the basket stand.

Today the basket makers’ creativity and resilience are being put to the test as rampant development threatens the future of their art and the physical continuity of their community. Since the 1970s, suburban and resort development has drastically diminished the local supply of sweet grass. The highway that once assured the survival of the tradition now threatens to run the basket stands off the road, and subdivisions and gated communities are displacing the very neighborhoods where basket makers live.

In spite of these dangers, Lowcountry basketry continues to thrive. To compensate for the sweet grass shortage, sewers have reintroduced bulrush. Baskets are bigger and bolder. Some pieces are considered collectors’ items, with prices reflecting this status. As symbols of the distinct Gullah culture of the south Atlantic Coast and as works of art, coiled baskets carry a lot of weight. Yet they remain what they have always been: vessels made of grass sewn with a flexible stitching element, useful for countless purposes.

DALE ROSENGARTEN
College of Charleston

Joyce V. Coakley, Sweetgrass Baskets and the Gullah Tradition (2006); Dale Rosengarten, Row upon Row: Sea Grass Baskets of the South Carolina Lowcountry (1994); Dale Rosengarten, Theodore Rosengarten, and Enid Schildkrout, eds., Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art (2008); John Michael Vlach, The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts (1990).

Bottle Trees

Bottle trees are a product of southern black culture with roots in the animistic spiritualism and totemism of several African tribal cultures. Glassblowing and bottle making existed as far back as the ninth century in Africa, as did the practice of hanging found objects from trees or huts as talismans to ward off evil spirits. The bottle tree was a Kongo-derived tradition that conveyed deep religious symbolism.

The bottle tree was once common throughout the rural Southeast. Trees were made by stripping the foliage from a living tree, with upward-pointing branches left intact. Bottles were then slipped over these branch ends. Cedars were a preferred species, because they were common, resistant to decay, and well shaped with all branches pointing upward.

According to folklore, brightly colored bottles attracted and entrapped spirits. When the wind shook bottle trees, spirits could be heard moaning. In some cases, paint was poured into the bottles before hanging them on the trees. This was done ostensibly to help trap spirits, but the addition of color to clear bottles may have been the true motivation.

Today bottle trees are scarce. Those that exist in northeast Mississippi, for example, are produced by rural whites as often as blacks. Like the hex signs of Pennsylvania Dutch barns, they are a vestige of the past, produced more for the sake of art than for protection from the supernatural. They can be beautiful, and even the worst examples are still curiosities.

Southern authors, notably Eudora Welty, have commented on bottle trees, perhaps because they have a primal fascination. Sunlight on and through colored glass has charmed people for centuries; the bottle tree can be considered the poor person’s stained glass window.

JIM MARTIN
Yazoo City, Mississippi

Robert Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (1983); John Vlach, The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Art (1978); Eudora Welty, “Livvie,” in The Wide Net (1943), One Time, One Place (1971).

Cajun and Creole Folk Art

Louisiana’s Cajuns are descendants of 18th-century Acadians, French-speaking colonists deported from Nova Scotia by the British in 1755. However, today’s Cajuns also trace their ancestry and aspects of their culture to various waves of Continental French, Irish, German, Spanish, and other settlers in south Louisiana. Best known for their music, food, and celebrations, Cajuns also produce abundant arts that reflect the region’s landscapes, traditional occupations, and recreations. These arts, like most living traditions, constantly adapt to changing times. Some have almost disappeared, others thrive, and still others are being rediscovered and revived.

Life in much of south Louisiana revolves around waterways. Not surprisingly, Cajun folk arts include carved bird decoys and detailed miniature versions of pirogues, skiffs, oyster luggers, and other vernacular boats.

Acadian weaving is one of the culture’s oldest and most exquisite folk arts, though it is less common today than in the past. Acadian settlers brought a tradition of spinning and weaving wool to their new home, where homegrown cotton replaced wool. Cajun women once made virtually all the textiles used in their homes—blankets, towels, coverlets, clothing, and other goods—from white cotton and a wild brown cotton (coton jaune) woven on two-harness looms. Most Acadian textiles were a plain weave of natural white cotton and the delicate café-au-lait of brown cotton. Cajun women created textural patterns by weaving in heavier yarns (cordons), pulling up short weft loops (boutons), and adding color with narrow bands of indigo cotton or strips of commercial fabric. Acadian cotton blankets were widely admired for their beauty; with the help of the influential Avery family, they were promoted and marketed nationally in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By the 1930s weaving had declined in popularity among Cajun women. In the 1940s the Acadian Handicrafts Project (directed by Louise Olivier through Louisiana State University’s Extension Service) attempted to revive local interest by hiring traditional weavers to demonstrate and teach the art. The project had limited long-term success, but contemporary weavers have begun weaving in the traditional style for festival and museum demonstrations, sparking a modest revival.

Perhaps the most vibrant Cajun folk art is the creation of colorful disguises for annual Mardi Gras runs (courirs de Mardi Gras), held in more than a dozen rural prairie communities. On Mardi Gras day, or the weekend before, masked and costumed men (and in some places women and children) travel the countryside on horseback or in trucks, seeking donations of chickens, rice, and other gumbo ingredients. In exchange for these gifts, they sing, dance, beg, and clown before inviting their hosts to share a gumbo feast. Each community has its own disguise conventions and aesthetics, but Cajuns typically wear a two-piece, pajamalike suit de Mardi Gras, a tall, pointed hat called a capuchon, and a handmade mask. Some Mardi Gras suits are made of expensive satins, but most juxtapose vividly colored cotton prints with contrasting solid colors. Layers of fringe line arms and legs, and matching fabric covers the capuchon.

Mardi Gras masks may be traditional or innovative. Wire screen masks are the most traditional form, but construction and adornment vary from one place to another. Husband-and-wife team Georgie and Allen Manuel, of Eunice, purposefully re-create an old-fashioned look by painting stylized features on their masks. In other communities, such as Tee Mamou in Acadia Parish, mask makers prefer more elaborately decorated masks covered in fake fur, burlap, Spanish moss, or feathers. Tee Mamou artists feature layers of three-dimensional materials: long fabric noses, protruding tongues, rubber insects and snakes, and toy animals. Cajun women, who now run Mardi Gras in some communities, are among the most prolific and inventive mask makers. Suson Launey, Renée Frugé Douget, Jackie Miller, and other artists have introduced new materials, techniques, and whimsical designs. One popular innovation by Suson Launey is a yarn mask stitched on plastic needlepoint screen, which many women find more comfortable than wire screen. Cajun Mardi Gras masks have become favorites with folk art museums and collectors, folklife festivals, and tourists, as well as with locals.

Creoles in Louisiana have a similar wealth of folk arts. “Creole” has meant various things to different people throughout history, but today it typically refers to people of Afro-European (French and sometimes Spanish) descent, often with some American Indian heritage as well. Like the word “Cajun,” Creole implies roots in a French-speaking (or Creole-speaking), Catholic culture that emphasizes strong family ties. Louisiana has rural Creole communities—on the prairies of southwest Louisiana and the Cane River area, for example—and an urban community in New Orleans, each with its own history and traditions.

New Orleans’s Creoles are historically some of Louisiana’s most skilled building-trades workers as plasterers, bricklayers, and ironworkers. They have brought the same artistry, and some of the same techniques, to the city’s festive traditions of second-line parades (featuring elaborately decorated umbrellas, sashes or “ribbons,” and baskets) and Mardi Gras Indian processions.

Generations of New Orleans Creoles and African Americans have “masked Indian” on Mardi Gras each year and again on St. Joseph’s night. The tradition’s origins are contested, but participants say that it began as a tribute to American Indians who harbored and intermarried with runaway slaves. The first documented black Indian group was the Creole Wild West in the 1880s, led by a Creole man named Becate Battiste. The custom probably predates this reference and has connections to similar Caribbean festivities.

Mardi Gras Indian suits, with their ornate beadwork and brilliantly colored plumes, are some of Louisiana’s most dazzling folk arts. In the years before World War II, suits were fairly simple, with decoration improvised from discarded or inexpensive materials. The master Allison “Tootie” Montana recalled his father and other men using glitter-covered egg crates, small pieces of tin and other metal, bottle caps, and pieces of mirror to make their suits shine.

Today’s suits are far more intricate, expensive, and time consuming to create. Designing and building a beautiful suit is central to masking Indian; as several participants have remarked, “If you want to mask Indian, you’ve got to sew.” They create a new suit each year, keeping design and colors secret. Competing to make the prettiest suit, makers buy the best beads, ribbons, rhinestones, and ostrich plumes died shades of yellow, purple, blue, red, and other colors. Many say they work all year long on a new suit, between work, Indian practice, and other responsibilities.

Making a truly exceptional suit requires not only a great deal of time and thousands of dollars but also imagination, a talent for design, and an eye for color. The suit begins with an idea, inspired by an existing illustration, a dream, or some other source. This design is sketched on a piece of canvas backing and then painstakingly stitched with hundreds (or thousands) of colored beads, sequins, and rhinestones to make a “patch.” The suit will eventually include numerous beaded patches sewn onto a larger satin foundation. Once the suit is complete, some patches are visible only when the wearer raises other pieces to display them. A finished suit can include more than a dozen pieces, including the plumed “crown” or headdress, apron, vest, leggings, and moccasins, all generously jeweled, beaded, and feathered. A suit can weigh well over 100 pounds.

New Orleans is a city of distinctive neighborhoods, and different parts of the city favor certain styles of Mardi Gras Indian suits. Historically, most New Orleans Creoles lived in Downtown neighborhoods (divided from Uptown by Canal Street). Downtown Indians often prefer the abstract, three-dimensional style made famous by Allison “Tootie” Montana. Montana, Big Chief of the Yellow Pocahontas group for 50 years, was a master plasterer who brought his building skills to suit making, creating impressive sculptural effects. One memorable example was an elephant head with its trunk jutting from the front of the suit decorated in pearls, sequins, and small mirrors as well as beads. Uptown Indians create detailed patches—typically depicting 19th-century Plains Indian life, especially battle scenes—with thousands of beads and small rhinestones. There are also Midtown and “Back of Town” Mardi Gras Indian styles, though crossover is common.

Mardi Gras Indian suits are not only exceptional art; they are material expressions of Creole and African American history, heritage, and pride. They are avidly sought by art collectors and museums, such as the American Folk Art Museum. Most suits are taken apart after St. Joseph’s Day. Patches are rearranged in a new suit, sold, or given to another masker. The Backstreet Cultural Museum in the Treme neighborhood, however, now collects and preserves suits that might have been discarded and displays them for a wide audience. Other museums, including the Louisiana State Museum, also exhibit entire costumes. Virtuosic contemporary costume makers, such as Darryl Montana, continue to bring new techniques and materials to Mardi Gras Indian art.

CAROLYN E. WARE
Louisiana State University

Barry Jean Ancelet, Jay Edwards, and Glen Pitre, Cajun Country (1991); Maida Bergeron, ed., Fait à la Main: A Source Book of Louisiana Crafts (1988); F. A. de Caro and R. A. Jordan, Louisiana Traditional Crafts (1980); Michael P. Smith, Mardi Gras Indians (1994); Nicholas R. Spitzer, ed., Louisiana Folklife: A Guide to the State (1985).

Calligraphy and Penmanship

Begun by people who had little training in the art of writing and were willing to teach themselves by purchasing a book or attending penmanship classes, calligraphy has long been enjoyed for its craftsmanship and its finely drawn images. Before the early 20th century, the art of fine penmanship was understood to include the embellishment of manuscripts with elegant pen-work “flourishes.” These flourishes were hand-drawn ornaments that ranged from a few simple arabesques executed beneath a writer’s signature to elaborate pictorial drawings that a penman composed using multiples of the same straight and curved lines. The subjects of calligraphic drawings range from simple sketches to large depictions of arresting doves, running deer, roaring lions, and rearing horses.

Execution of these drawings was one of the bona fides of the established penmanship instructor, and mastery of calligraphic drawing was the goal of many of the penmanship students who enrolled in the “writing institutions,” “business colleges,” and “mercantile academies” of the 19th century. In rural areas, itinerant “writing masters” and “professors of penmanship” promoted their classes with local displays of their calligraphic drawings.

American penmanship is grounded in British writing styles, and into the early 19th century Americans used English copybooks to teach penmanship. In the young nation, already beginning the change from an agricultural to an industrial economy, however, need arose for a simple, rapid writing style, attractive but also consistently legible. Platt Rogers Spencer, an Ohioan, developed and ably promoted “The Spencerian Handwriting System,” which dominated schools for the rest of the century.

The Spencerian System became a veritable industry itself, with Spencer’s children, siblings, and students opening schools around the country. The South could claim well-known Spencerian business colleges in Washington, D.C., and Louisville, Ky. Booker T. Washington included a course in “Elements of letters and Spencerian copy-book” in his curriculum at Tuskegee University. Many of Spencer’s apostles also produced books and copy sheets that gave models for flourished drawings and offered them for sale by mail order. A practitioner of Spencerian handwriting, a man named Louis Madarasz, who worked in Arkansas and operated a mail-order design business, is the probable creator of Coca-Cola’s famous manuscript logo.

The Spencerian method reduced lettering to a group of seven interchangeable elements, or “principles,” that could be combined in various ways to form 26 gracefully balanced letters in a regular, repeatable manner. While Spencer may have developed his concept of principles on his own, such a system was not an entirely new idea; earlier penmen had also recognized common elements in calligraphy. None, however, had promoted it so effectively as the key to training new hands. Teaching of the principles and their integration into letters required rote memorization and recitation of the principles needed to form each letter as well as repeated practice in forming each element until the student could produce pages of identical strokes. Spencer’s penmanship books remain in print.

The elements used to form letters could also produce pictorial drawings. Indeed, most calligraphic drawings, like Spencerian letters, break down into a series of repeated parallel principles. A typical drawing of the penman’s quill, for example, uses a combination of only three basic principles stroked onto the paper one after another in a prescribed manner.

LESLIE SPRAKER MAY
Cranbury, New Jersey

William E. Henning, The Golden Age of American Penmanship and Calligraphy (2002); Tamara Plakins Thornton, Handwriting in America; A Cultural History (1996).

Canes

Hand-carved canes are both folk art and part of America’s cultural history. American folk art canes can be divided into traditional canes and contemporary canes. Traditional folk art canes are generally those made from the early 19th century until around World War II. Contemporary canes are those made in the second half of the 20th century, mostly after 1970, and until today.

During the 19th century, particularly in the second half of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th century, many American men carried or, in the terminology of the times, “wore” a cane as part of their attire. Although most of these canes are plain, others are decorated, for example, with gold-plated, silver, or ivory handles.

The folk art counterparts of these traditional decorative canes are canes made by carvers, some of whom were skilled whittlers or craftsmen. Traditional folk art canes are utilitarian, but generally they were not designed primarily as walking aids. Rather, like today’s business cards or T-shirts, they often served as means for the user to communicate his vocation, fraternal affiliation, or other personal interests.

Traditional folk art canes are generally made from tree branches (from almost any kind of tree or shrub) with carvings or decorations on the shaft or the handle or both. The carvings or decorations involve almost every conceivable subject, including the ubiquitous snake, often used, among other reasons, because a snake’s body suited the cane’s gnarled form. The carvers of the traditional folk art canes were probably men. Historical records, family memories, and characteristic designs have allowed scholars to identify some of the cane makers. In the case of contemporary canes, the names of almost all of the makers are known.

There is little compelling evidence of regional styles, and where (and often when) a traditional cane was made is very difficult to determine. In fact, unless a cane is inscribed with the name of the carver, is made with native wood, or has a special subject or an identifiable history or style, it is difficult to determine whether a traditional cane was even made in the South, North, East, or West, let alone in which state. There are, however, some common regional subjects; for example, alligators combined with snakes are often found on traditional southern folk art canes. The one subject that truly identifies traditional southern canes is the Civil War, which is a common subject among the canes made by Civil War veterans in the United Confederate Veterans, an organization founded in 1889. R. M. Foster (1830–after 1900) from Sparta, Mo., is an example of a prolific maker of canes with southern themes. He incised on one of his canes, “carved by a rebel’s hand, who gave his health, his wealth, his all for Dixie’s Sunny South Land.” Other known 19th-century southern multicane carvers include Virginians Thomas Purkins (1791–1855) and Zachariah S. Robinson (1806–73).

Southern African Americans also made traditional canes. Some canes may be identified as African American by their African-based iconography. However, other American cane makers sometimes used the same iconography. Among the known, and perhaps one of the most important, 19th-century southern African American cane makers was Henry Gudgell (1829–after 1867), who lived in Missouri but was born a slave in Kentucky.

As distinguished from traditional canes, contemporary canes are frequently made as a works of art rather than as utilitarian objects. They tend to be bolder and brightly colored, include fewer details than traditional canes, and reflect the popular culture and interests of the day. Twentieth-century southern carvers include William Rodgers (1865–1952) from Georgia, Denzil Goodpaster (1908–95) from Kentucky, and Luster Willis (1913–90) from Mississippi.

GEORGE H. MEYER
Bloomfield Village, Michigan

Catherine Dike, Canes in the United States (1994); George H. Meyer, American Folk Art Canes (1992); Kurt Stein, Canes and Walking Sticks (1974).

Caribbean American Folk Art

The history of the black self-taught artists of the western Pan-African diaspora is no more and no less than the history of the Pan-African culture itself. Vernacular art is cultural art, and, in the African Atlantic diaspora, it serves as a visual aspect of the oral culture. It encompasses various manifestations of folkways, including storytelling, remembrance, proverbs, acts of spirituality, veneration of and homage to ancestors, moralities, worldviews, and visual traditions.

There are major regional variations in these manifestations, in the same way that there are also regional variations in North American blues styles. Africa is the baseline of commonality; differing local cultures constructed by enslaved Africans, including interactions with the dominant religion, account for the degree of variation within African art in the Caribbean. Santeria and Palo Mayombe in Cuba, Haitian Vodou, and Brazilian Macumba and Candomblé all display French and Spanish Catholic influences. In the United States and Jamaica, the Church of England and other Protestant denominations have exerted considerable influence.

Patterns of immigration from Africa and the dominant class’s attitudes toward African cultural continuities have also played a role in Caribbean American art making. Slaves imported into the United States from Havana or from other points in the Caribbean clearly brought concepts and practices inflected with specific Caribbean local cultures. This pattern of immigration continued even during the postemancipation period, when several waves of legal and/or smuggled indentured servants, mainly from the Congo, arrived in the Americas. These new arrivals reinforced African aesthetic preferences, while workers from China and India contributed their own resources to a Caribbean vernacular. In some locales, slaves could openly express themselves according to their own cultural preferences. In Jamaica and Haiti, for example, masters did not forbid the use of drums. To this day the persistence of more obvious African folkways survive in those countries as well as in Brazil and Cuba, where slaves were also allowed to maintain African beliefs and aesthetics.

Scholars of African Caribbean art have focused their attention on Haiti, Jamaica, Brazil, and the southern United States. The practices of self-taught artists in Cuba still await close examination. While there are major differences among the vernacular visual arts of these countries, the rise of tourism, the bourgeoning civil rights movement in the United States, Negritude, the Harlem Renaissance, and the legacy of Marcus Garvey are all aspects of black self-awareness that these arts have in common. The true impetus for the Caribbean art came from its African legacy, reinvented, expanded, and continued through each culture. Increasing political awareness and cultural resistance have allowed these Caribbean artists to take on the role of culture bearer. In their communities they are often priests, visionaries, or healers. Kapo, Hector Hyppolite, Everald Brown, Elijah Pierce, Sister Gertrude Morgan, and Andre Pierre were all preachers within their religions.

Haiti, with its highly intricate and complex dance between Vodou and Catholicism, became known for its self-taught artists in the mid-1940s through the efforts of Dewitt Peters, an American living in Port-au-Prince. Peters encouraged the work of local artists as a way of attracting those tourists who wanted more than a cursory experience of the island’s culture. Long before Peters, however, the culture was deeply impregnated with art. The Vodou temples, or humforts, had elaborate and highly detailed murals on their walls depicting the lwa, or the sacred spirits of Vodou. Drums were built on African models, and ceremonial flags had their own sets of symbols based on the families of lwa. This rich legacy of visual imagery translated easily to boards of Masonite set on easels. While most Haitian self-taught artists painted narratives with references to Vodou practice and belief, several artists like Georges Liautaud used steel to produce both utilitarian metal sculptures, such as iron crosses for cemeteries, and idiosyncratic sculptures. Others, like Andre Pierre, Rigaud Benoit, Castera Bazile, and Hector Hyppolite, translated their wall paintings to the easel.

It is important to make a distinction between narrative and sacred art. In Haiti, narrative work such as village scenes, depictions of history, or ceremonies, even if filled with the imagery of Vodou, is not Vodou art. For example, the narrative easel paintings that feature lwa by Andre Pierre may serve a didactic function but not a sacred one. On the other hand, Pierre’s depiction of lwa on the walls of his temple or on gourds for his altar assumes a different meaning. Pierrot Barra’s sculptures consisting of cast-off dolls encrusted with charms, glitter, sequins, beads, and crosses that were originally intended for altars have been recontextualized within the art world. It is safe to say that most of the art in the Haitian art market is about Vodou, not a functional part of the religion itself.

As in the United States and Haiti, the self-taught art of Jamaica was first noticed in the 1940s. Jamaican art draws on a variety of visual resources—the Pre-Columbian cave paintings of the Taino people, the myriad forms of African drums, the banners that decorate the balm yards of folk healers, and the ritual costumes of the African Baptist Revival ceremonies. Among the artists working in Jamaica were John Dunkley, David Miller Sr., David Miller Jr., and Kapo (Mallica Reynolds).

While self-taught Haitian artists attracted an international following during the 1940s, self-taught artists working in the United States and Jamaica have received primarily national acclaim. Jamaica’s market for self-taught artists has always remained rather insular; artists’ pieces are collected and shown more locally than internationally. That we have seen Jamaican art at all is largely a result of the efforts of David Boxer, director of the National Gallery of Jamaica, founded in 1974. Recognizing the importance of the Jamaican “Intuitives,” he made their art an integral part of the museum’s collection.

Jamaican artists are more idiosyncratic than the Haitians. It is as if each artist expresses his or her spirituality without being conscious of other artists. The objects in Jamaican yard shows are not accumulations of disparate elements but are fully integrated constructions that may be ephemeral. Similar to the abstract yard shows in the southern United States, Jamaican yard shows are not outdoor galleries of works for sale. Artists in Jamaica, like Lloyd Atherton, make guardian figures and amulets to serve specific and generalized spiritual purposes.

The yard show provides the basis of a language that links most of the work of the Afro-Atlantic diaspora. These yard shows have a syntax that can be interpreted as an encyclopedia of references and symbols shared by members of a cultural community. Grey Gundaker and Robert Farris Thompson have written exhaustively on yard show complexes in the United States, but to date the Caribbean versions, such as the balm yards or yards by artists such as Lloyd Atherton, Sylvester Stephens, and Errol McKenzie, and various Rastafarian groups in Jamaica, have not received such treatment. The humforts and healing spaces in Haiti have not been adequately contextualized with their North American counterparts. The language of the yard show provides the vocabulary for nearly all African American artists.

The yard show is an arena where “place” is contextualized into an immediate visual culture in the subverted or recycled language of the dominant culture. Objects with a specific meaning in one world pick up multiple meanings when used in another. The language of the yard show is often highly symbolic and seemingly cryptic or solipsistic, yet it is based on criteria that are logical and recognizable to their intended audience. Yard shows are places where the tangible world of the present meets the nonmaterial and immanent world of spirits and ancestors.

Another commonality of African Caribbean art is an urge to repair and complete the birth-death-rebirth cycle—the Kalunga cycle—disrupted by slavery. Forcibly removed from home and the essential passage of life, enslaved Africans cannot hope to finish the part of that cycle after death where they meet with the ancestors beneath the waters, assess the life previously lived, receive guidance, and are thus reborn into the next life wiser and more prepared. The yard show re-creates African home ground in the Americas and affords a symbolic chance of positive redemption. For the Rastafarians of Jamaica, this completion of the cycle becomes graphically symbolic, as the intention of a Rasta yard is to re-create an actual piece of Africa within the oppressors’ homeland.

The Haitian yard of the Vodou temple also offers a locus for completion of the life cycle. In this yard, the center pole (poteau mitan) surrounded by images of the Spirits represents the tree of life that redeemed souls climb to contact Guinee, the true African home ground. With similar purpose, Errol McKenzie in Jamaica has created the symbolic body of a goddess spirit who covers an entire hillside. The buildings on the site, which contain her heart and her spirit, are the places where one can learn to become more African. As we can see in places like Hilton Head, S.C., or New Orleans, La., and in the vast numbers of yard shows all through the North American South, the origins and the philosophies of the Caribbean and the United States are deeply and intricately intertwined. Variations tend to be local but intrinsically contain philosophical universalities. Specifics differ and coincide at the same time. To truly understand the North American Pan-African complex, one needs to combine the Caribbean and the United States to achieve a true view of black art in America.

RANDALL MORRIS
Brooklyn, New York

Donald J. Cosentino, Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou (1995); Grey Gundaker, Signs of Diaspora / Diaspora of Signs: Literacies, Creolization, and Vernacular Practice in African America (1998); Betty M. Kuyk, African Voices in the African American Heritage (2003); John W. Pulis, ed., Religion, Diaspora, and Cultural Identity: A Reader in the Anglophone Caribbean (1999); Dianne M. Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience (2005).

Craft Revival

The southern craft revival—or handicraft revival, as it was often called at the time—was an effort focused on making and selling handmade creative products to provide work for rural families. The movement was centered in the southern Appalachians, the upland sections of Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. Beginning in the late 19th century, the revival continued for 50 years, peaking in the 1930s and dissipating by the mid-20th century. In 1896 William Goodell Frost, president of Berea College, announced “An Educational Program for Appalachian America,” in which he identified “a life of survivals . . . [found in the] people of the mountains—independent landholders, sturdy yeomen . . . the bone and sinew of the nation.” In May of that same year, the college held its first “homespun fair” to celebrate the culture of these peoples. The year 1896 also marked the death of John Ruskin, an influential English thinker and writer who railed against the abuses of industrialization and proposed that dignity be returned to common labor.

The initial development of the South’s craft production centers was organic. Some began as missionary projects; others began as schools. Some were nonprofit; still others were aimed at bringing money into local communities. Under the overarching umbrella of “mountain work,” the craft revival continued to evolve. The earliest craft revival endeavors came about after mountain workers became aware of local weaving traditions. Frances Louisa Goodrich, Yale educated and northern born, established a mission station in Madison County, N.C., with support from the Presbyterian Home Mission. Goodrich was motivated by the gift of a locally made coverlet. Farther north in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, Katherine Pettit and May Stone cofounded the Hindman Settlement School in 1902. After learning to weave from a local woman, Pettit established a weaving program at Hindman. Hands-on educational programs were also established in rural mountain communities. The craft revival also saw several initiatives that sought to reposition Cherokee craft, previously suppressed, within the cultural landscape. In 1914, the Cherokee living on the Qualla Boundary (the federally defined Cherokee reservation) established an annual festival to celebrate traditional culture. By the 1930s the Cherokee were part of the broader craft community. Culturally specific native arts—baskets, beadwork, and arrows—were shown as part of the Mountain Handicrafts traveling exhibition in 1933. Throughout the 20th century, the Cherokee have been known for masterful baskets and wood carvings.

In 1926 the independent nature of individual craft revival centers began to change when Allen H. Eaton, a curator and writer with an expertise in crafts, spoke on crafts at the Conference of Southern Mountain Workers, headquartered at Berea. Inspired by Eaton’s presentation and subsequent programs on handicrafts, the annual conference provided mountain workers with a forum to discuss production and marketing. In 1928 a handful of craft enthusiasts came together to discuss the formation of a guild to eliminate competition and foster cooperative marketing. At the spring conference in 1930, the guild was formalized as the Southern Mountain Handicraft Guild (later, the Southern Highland Handicraft Guild and today’s Southern Highland Craft Guild). The Mountain Craftsmen Cooperative Association was founded in 1932 in an attempt to alleviate the poverty surrounding West Virginia’s coalfields region, and in 1946 Cherokee makers banded together to create Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual, an artisan cooperative.

The promotion of southern crafts, via the craft revival, and increased tourism were successful in bringing regionally made items to the attention of a national audience. In 1933 the Mountain Handicrafts exhibition toured the eastern United States. Eleanor Roosevelt purchased Brasstown carvings from the John C. Campbell Folk School entries. In 1935 the Southern Highlanders opened three gift shops, one in New York City’s Rockefeller Center. In 1933 and 1934 photographer Doris Ulmann traveled the region taking photographs that were published in 1937 as part of Allen Eaton’s study Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands, a text that remains a valuable resource to scholars today.

The craft revival was an enigmatic movement in that it combined progressive and conservative elements. Its leaders sought to create a rural and sustainable economic enterprise, while simultaneously preserving and maintaining traditions thought to be in danger of extinction. Woven into the complex tapestry that formed the revival were issues concerning the value of work and the place of country life within an industrializing nation. One legacy of the craft revival was its influence on folk artists who transformed community craft forms into individualistic works of folk art.

M. ANNA FARIELLO
Western Carolina University

Allen H. Eaton, Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands (1937).

Decoys

Decoys, or artificial birds used to entice game within gunshot range, are a highly prized genre of American folk art. The word “decoy” is derived from the Dutch de kooi (the cage or trap) or possibly from eende kooi (duck cage). The original term refers to a method of gathering wildfowl first recorded in 16th-century Europe. In this context, the decoy refers to a long, cone-shaped tunnel of netting arranged over a pond; the ducks were herded in by men in boats or by a small, trained dog. Sometimes semidomesticated ducks, known as “coy ducks,” were used to entice the wild waterfowl into the mouth of the tunnel.

In 1924 the earliest known decoys were discovered near Lovelock, Nev., in a cave containing a massive number of artifacts. This cache of 11 canvasback decoys, made of tule reeds and feathers, are between 1,000 and 2,000 years old. As migration patterns, climactic conditions, and food availability made sections of North America—particularly the Atlantic Coast and the Mississippi River—prime hunting grounds for wildfowl, it is not surprising that Native American artifacts are the oldest known examples of bird decoys.

The carving tradition can be mapped along with gunning patterns throughout the country, with distinctive styles emerging to reflect the varying hunting conditions and aesthetic values of their respective communities. In the South, the decoy tradition is most visible in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Louisiana. Chincoteague, Va., on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay, has produced some of the finest examples of decoy carving by such legendary carvers as Ira Hudson, Miles Hancock, and Delbert “Cigar” Daisey. Well-known North Carolina carvers include Ned Burgess, Lee and Lem Dudley, Ivey Stevens, and John Williams. South Carolina, thought to be devoid of handmade decoys until the 1980s, was home to the five Caines brothers, whose elegant and distinctive birds from the late 19th century were discovered near Georgetown. Decoys made in the Carolinas are often purposely oversized so that they can be seen on open water.

In contrast, Louisiana’s decoys tend to be light and long, made of cypress root and tupelo, now recognized by carvers as superb materials for carving. In Louisiana, which offers plenty of ground cover, hunters do not need large rigs to attract wild fowl. This decreased requirement for quantity may contribute to the famous quality of so many of the region’s decoys. John Bruce, Nicole Vidocavitch, Mark McCool Whipple, the Vizier family, and Reme Ange Roussel are all well-known Louisiana carvers.

Collecting decoys has become a significant hobby for both art collectors and hunters. Since the 1960s, many organizations, specialty books, and magazines have emerged to support the growing trend for collecting decoys, and prices for rare works by well-known carvers have reached record highs, in some cases more than a million dollars.

CYNTHIA BYRD
Ward Museum of Wildfowl Art
Salisbury University

Joel Barber, Wild Fowl Decoys (1934); Adele Earnest, The Art of the Decoy: American Bird Carvings (1965); Joe Engers, ed., The Great Book of Wildfowl Decoys (1990).

Environments

Scattered across the South are dozens of places where remarkable artists have planted unusual gardens, embellished their homes, or built entire environments in response to highly personal urges to create. Environment makers typically work alone on their own property without financial recompense or formal training in art or architecture. Although environments have been called “outsider sites” (after the term coined by Roger Cardinal in his landmark 1972 book Outsider Art), “folk art gardens,” “visionary yard art,” “eccentric spaces,” and a variety of other terms, “self-taught artists’ environments” now seems the most appropriate term. The term “yard show” refers to an African American vernacular tradition.

Artists’ environments are not specific to the South; similar environments can be found elsewhere throughout the United States and in most other countries. Brother Joseph Zoettl’s Ave Maria Grotto, for example, belongs to a global Catholic tradition of creating artificial and other pilgrimage sites. However, like evangelical religion, snaky backwoods, rejection of conventional taste and good sense, eccentric individuality, and ornery behavior in general, self-taught artists’ environments have long been commonly identified associated with the South, not always for complimentary reasons.

Some of the environments, like Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden in Pennville, Ga., have covered acres. Others take up no more space than a small yard show, while some environments are entirely indoors. All, however, are idiosyncratic expressions of their makers’ personalities, needs, and beliefs.

Although the life stories of the artists who made these environments are as varied as their creations, some broad patterns can be established. More often than not, people who suddenly feel motivated to transform their property in inventive ways have been engaged in an occupation that yields tangible results for a day’s work. For example, farmers can see the fields they have spent the day plowing; textile workers can look at the bins of towels or count the picks on their pick-clocks to calculate their earnings; loggers can take satisfaction in the piles of logs loaded onto their trucks; and laundresses can see the linens hanging on their clotheslines in the late afternoon breeze. Visible accomplishments can signify the artists’ senses of self-worth as contributing members of a community or as fully participating partners in a household.

When something upsets this sense of self-worth—a debilitating accident, an unexpected layoff, a serious illness, a psychologically scarring incident, or the death of a spouse or child—environment builders remake their immediate surroundings to suit their emotional needs. Such needs run the gamut from the need to understand—and express—the meaning of life and one’s own place in it (a common motivation behind many religiously inspired environments), to make sense of history, to memorialize lost loved ones, or to demonstrate (or continue to exercise) special skills. Outdoor environments also attract attention, and many environment makers are eager to gain an audience for their insights.

Examples abound for each of these categories. Lonnie Holley began his Sandman Studio and Square Acre of Art in Alabama near Birmingham’s airport after a fire killed two of his nieces; the environment’s original site (the artist later moved it to Harpersville, Ala.) included thousands of sculptures that dealt with the historic suffering and diaspora of African peoples as well as the artist’s own personal losses.

Death is not the only way loved ones can be lost, of course. After ill health prevented him from holding a regular job, Edward Leedskalnin began building his Coral Castle environment in south Florida to memorialize the 16-year-old fiancée who had many years before backed out on their planned wedding. “Prophet” Royal Robertson’s Artistico environment in Baldwin, La., was a furious antimemorial aimed at his estranged wife, Adelle, who had left him after many years of marriage.

Often artists seek to place personal losses within a wider historical context. Leedskalnin’s castle seems to hark back to some ancient civilization, while Robertson often incorporated futuristic cities and space travel in his diatribes against Adelle (and against women in general). Sam Doyle’s Nationwide Outdoor Art Gallery on St. Helena Island, S.C., Joe Minter’s African Village in America, Rev. George Kornegay’s Art Hill, and Kenny Hill’s Chauvin Sculpture Garden are examples of environments that rely heavily on historical references to reestablish a sense of personal equilibrium. Minter’s and Kornegay’s environments are especially intense recollections of the civil rights movement and powerful examinations of African American history.

The need to use acquired skills is another strong motivator. Minter’s steel and metal constructions reflect the years he spent in Alabama’s steel industry. Rev. B. F. Perkins built a folk art environment near Bankston, Ala., in large part to prolong his ministry, following a “Judas betrayal petition” that his former church had raised to oust him. Vollis Simpson’s Whirligig Park near Lucama, N.C., got under way in earnest only when Simpson entered semiretirement yet still felt a strong urge to keep developing the advanced techniques he had acquired as a machinist and farm equipment repairman.

For most environment makers, the primary artistic strategy is accumulation. John Milkovisch, for instance, gradually covered his entire house with flattened beer cans and decorated it with garlands of pull-tabs and can lids to make the Beer Can House. At some point the house transitioned from an ordinary Houston, Tex., bungalow with a bit of weird décor attached to a display that visitors would come from some distance away to behold. Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden, with its immense towers of hubcaps, bicycle frames, bottles, vast mosaics of broken mirrors, and embedded tools demonstrate Finster’s deep satisfaction in accomplishing a large quantity of work. Loy Bowlin, who had already adorned his car and clothing to underline a newly minted identity as the Original Rhinestone Cowboy, attached thousands of rhinestones to the interior of his house, the Beautiful Holy Jewel Home in McComb, Miss.

The clusters of giant wind-operated mechanisms hulking across the road from Vollis Simpson’s workshop, and the acres of trimmed and sculpted living plants that form Pearl Fryar’s Topiary Garden outside Bishopville, S.C., have almost as much to do with providing proof of industriousness and self-worth as with pursuing any overarching artistic goals. The accumulated sizes and numbers suggest the duration of the efforts involved, though the astounding results were by and large something the artists discovered in hindsight and had likely not predicted at the outset.

Although the majority of environments grow from similar gradual accumulations of objects, a few begin with some kind of revelatory experience that from the outset gives shape to the environment in its entirety. Kenny Hill’s millenarian garden in Chauvin, La., is such an environment. Eddie Owens Martin claimed that Pasaquan near Buena Vista, Ga., was inspired by an encounter with a being dressed in a futuristic “levitation suit” that he met while walking down a Manhattan street one afternoon. Following directives provided by this being (which apparently only he could see), Martin headed home to Georgia, moved back into his by-then-abandoned family farm, proclaimed himself St. EOM, and founded his own religion, which he called “Pasaquoyanism.” With the help of a few assistants the place was gradually transformed to approximate the image revealed in St. EOM’s visionary experience, complete with brightly painted pagodalike Pasaquoyan temples, extensive wall murals, dance platforms, freestanding statuary, and consultation rooms. Although local residents undoubtedly regarded St. EOM a peculiar man, they were so willing to pay for St. EOM’s advice as a fortune-teller that he made a reasonable living.

John Milkovisch’s Beer Can House, Houston, Tex., 1968–94 (Photograph courtesy Larry Harris)

Though most visionary encounters are religious in nature, there have been a few exceptions, such as Jeff McKissack’s Orange Show in Houston, Tex., which began with a stunning realization concerning the key importance of that fruit as a necessary element in maintaining human health and well-being. Despite the secular aims of his environment, McKissack was no less evangelical than others in promoting his vision for improving his fellow citizens.

A growing number of southern self-taught artists’ environments have been actively preserved for the future. Brother Zoettl’s Ave Maria Grotto, on the grounds of St. Bernard Abbey in Cullman, Ala., has long been both a pilgrimage site and a roadside attraction advertised on highway billboards. After Jeff McKissack’s death in 1980, a group of admirers stepped in to preserve the Orange Show. This group, now known as the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art, sponsors Houston’s Art Car Parade and numerous community arts programs. In 2001 the Orange Show Center took on responsibility for the Beer Can House. Thanks to the Kohler Foundation of Sheboygan, Wisc., Kenny Hill’s Chauvin Sculpture Garden has been preserved in place. The Kohler Foundation gifted the site to Nicholls State University in Thibodeaux, which also sponsors community art programs. With the support of an active community group, Eddie Owens Martin’s Pasaquan was in 2008 recognized by the National Register of Historic Places for its architectural and historical significance, and Leedskalnin’s Coral Castle has also been placed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Friends of Pearl Fryar’s Topiary Garden seeks to preserve that environment and supports many community programs. With the group’s help, the environment has become a preservation project of the Garden Conservancy. Supporters of Loy Bowlin’s Holy Jewel Home painstakingly disassembled the house’s interior. Although no longer in its original site, the environment has found a home at the John Michael Kohler Art Center in Sheboygan. Similarly, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Ga., exhibits objects removed from Finster’s Paradise Garden.

Unfortunately, not all sites have been so lucky. Without well-organized community support, environments rarely survive the deaths of their creators. Most of Enoch Tanner Wickham’s Wickham’s Sculpture Park (also known as the Wickham Stone Park) stood forlornly headless near Palmyra, Tenn. In 2006 Wickham’s family moved the 14 intact sculptures to nearby family property. The statues continue to be displayed to the public.

Where once such environments were primarily seen as objects of ridicule and their makers as Boo Radley–esque outsiders (years ago, “Everyone throws away their trash but the Finsters” was a common taunt in Pennville). Some communities, though, recognize their artists as local treasures. Summerville, Ga., has created “Howard Finster Day,” and Paradise Garden was recently purchased by Chattooga County, Georgia, as a tourist attraction. Wilson, N.C., has its annual “Vollis Simpson Whirligig Festival and Parade,” and Bishopville, S.C., now proudly proclaims itself the “Home of Pearl Fryar’s Topiaries.” Kenny Hill’s Chauvin garden enjoys much community support, and volunteer docents stand ready to guide tourists through the site. In places like these, self-taught artists’ environments have earned the people who made them a place of respect that is long overdue.

ROGER MANLEY
Gregg Museum of Art and Design
North Carolina State University

John Beardsley, Gardens of Revelation: Environments by Visionary Artists (2003); Kelly Ludwig, Detour Art: Outsider, Folk Art, and Visionary Environments Coast to Coast (2007); Roger Manley, Self-Made Worlds: Visionary Folk Art Environments (2005); Leslie Umberger, Sublime Spaces and Visionary Worlds: Built Environments of Vernacular Artists (2007).

Eroticism

Flip through any major exhibition catalog and book dedicated to the work of American self-taught artists, and you will not find very much erotic art. This is especially true of books about the South, which, paradoxically, has produced some of the most accomplished purveyors of aesthetic erotica.

Although eroticism is an important part of many well-known artists’ work, it has systematically been hidden away in the back rooms of galleries or in the storage facilities of museums—along with anonymous vernacular erotica such as hand toys and prison flipbooks—thanks to the puritanical nature of American cultural institutions. The result has been a failure to represent the full range of many southern self-taught artists’ oeuvres. Such major artists as Edgar Tolson, Miles Carpenter, Sam Doyle, Mose Tolliver, and Thornton Dial celebrated eroticism as an important aspect of the human experience. Tolson, of Trent Fork, Ky., was best known for his wood carvings of Adam and Eve confronting the Serpent, but less so for his wonderfully whimsical, erotic versions of the first couple of the Bible, engaged in compromising positions. Carpenter, a wood carver from Waverly, Va., carved well-endowed, pitchfork-wielding devils. Sam Doyle, of St. Helena Island, S.C., used latex paint on tin to capture randy scenes and portraits, part of the artist’s chronicling of his local community.

Mose Tolliver, of Montgomery, Ala., and Thornton Dial, of Bessemer, Ala., have both focused on the erotic allure of the female nude. While Tolliver’s paintings of nudes sprawled on exercise equipment bear a slapstick appeal, Dial’s monumental nudes are more serious, undeniably powerful celebrations of female sexuality. Dial, in fact, uses depictions of nude women as symbols of freedom, equating the oppression of women with the oppression of all minorities.

Steve Ashby of Delaplane, Va., arguably the master of self-taught southern erotica, has been noticeably underrepresented in the self-taught arena, likely because his larger-than-life, figurative, mixed-media assemblages are almost all explicitly erotic, often utilizing moving parts to create a dynamic effect. Until erotic artwork is integrated into gallery and museum exhibitions, this work will remain largely unknown, except to those who seek it out.

JENIFER BORUM
New York, New York

Milton Simpson, with Jenifer P. Borum, Folk Erotica: Celebrating Centuries of Erotic Americana (1994).

Face Jugs

One of the most intriguing products of southern folk potters, past and present, is the face jug. Where did the idea of modeling a human face on a jug (and other vessel types) come from, and what were the meanings of early examples? Emerging knowledge suggests that the answers are far from simple.

A substantial group of face vessels was made in 1863–65 by enslaved African American potters at Thomas Davies’s Palmetto Fire Brick Works in South Carolina’s Edgefield District. They are distinguished by bared teeth and bulging eyes of white clay set into the wheel-thrown stoneware to contrast with an often dark alkaline glaze. Ceramics historian Edwin Atlee Barber speculated in 1909 that their inspiration came from the “Dark Continent.” Portrait pots were indeed made in Africa, perhaps early enough to have influenced the African American potters. Barber, who corresponded with Davies, says that the slaves made face jugs on their own time but offers no motive; it is known, however, that Nigeria’s Yungur people made figural vessels to contain ancestral spirits at shrines. Africa, then, is one possible source of the southern face jug tradition.

However, the slave-made examples are not the earliest such pieces. Fragments of a vessel with a European-looking face were excavated from the site of Phoenix Factory, a short-lived Edgefield operation of the early 1840s. A white potter who worked there, Thomas Chandler, then ran his own shop in the district where a jug stamped “CHANDLER / MAKER” was made no later than 1850; its happy face contrasts with the angry-looking ones by slaves. Before coming to South Carolina, Chandler worked in New York State, and on his northern sojourn he may have met potters of the Remmey family, who created the earliest dated Euro-American face vessels (1830s) as an extension of the German Bartmannkrug tradition (a jug with a bearded face molded on the neck). However speculative, this connection to Germany via the Mid-Atlantic is not far-fetched: another potter, German-born Charles Decker, worked at the Remmey Pottery in Philadelphia before establishing Tennessee’s Keystone Pottery in 1871, where he and his son William made Remmey-style face jugs. Chandler’s example raises the question of influence between him and the slave potters—or were they working in separate traditions with different meanings?

Another possible influence is England, where Toby jugs have been made since the 1760s. Depicting the figure of a jolly drinker with tricorn hat, these molded character mugs differ in spirit from the South’s face jugs. Perhaps southern potters drew on all three sources—Africa, Germany, and England. Conversely, it may be that none was an influence, but that the tradition arose from an anthropomorphizing impulse universal in clay-working societies.

The current popularity of face jugs as an icon of southern folk art is due largely to Lanier Meaders of Mossy Creek, Ga. (1917–1998). His father, Cheever, made a small number of face jugs, but they became the cornerstone of Lanier’s career, which gained national publicity in the 1960s. Cheever had learned of face jugs from William Hewell of Gillsville; Hewell, in turn, acquired the idea from his Ferguson in-laws, who made the earliest known north Georgia examples. In 1921 Casey Meaders, Cheever’s brother, brought the face jug tradition to North Carolina’s Catawba Valley, where Harvey Reinhardt made them in the 1930s. Reinhardt’s work influenced that area’s famed folk potter Burlon Craig, who also visited Lanier Meaders in the late 1970s. Beginning in 1925, brothers Davis and Javan Brown made face jugs at Arden, N.C., like those made by their family back in Atlanta. All this history indicates diffusion of a 19th-century Anglo-southern face jug tradition.

For 19th-century African American potters, face vessels may have been made to place on graves or as nonverbal protests against enslavement. For white potters of the early 1900s, they were occasional whimsies expressing a masculine “aesthetic of the ugly,” later to become tourist novelties and, now, a good source of income in the folk art collectors’ market.

JOHN A. BURRISON
Georgia State University

Robert Hunter, ed., Ceramics in America (2006); Jill Beute Koverman, ed., Making Faces: Southern Face Vessels from 1840 to 1990 (2001).

Festivals and Fairs

Folk art festivals and fairs constitute only a small number of the thousands of festivals held each year in the South. Some long-standing events showcase local history traditions, foods, and material culture. In general, arts organizations, historical societies, civic organizations, and community volunteers operate these community events. Other fairs, newly created, are the offspring of entrepreneurs, auction houses, antique businesses, museums, nonprofit organizations, or even groups of artists. These fairs constitute a major marketplace for the sale of folk art; indeed, folk art festivals and fairs generate significant revenues for artists, dealers, and sponsors.

Because “folk art” means so many different things to so many people, folk festivals often take on specific personalities. Events that equate folk art with the traditional material culture of a specific community often feature functional objects—pottery jugs and bowls, fabrics, and baskets. These events often pay homage to craftspeople who have learned their craft from family or other community members. Festivals of this kind, often calling themselves “folklife” festivals, may focus on scholarship and seek to preserve traditional cultures. Folklife festivals in Kentucky and Texas as well as the Smithsonian Folklife Festival produced annually on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., are good examples. These events demonstrate the creative strength of community-based traditions by showcasing food, musicians, and performers, as well as craftspeople and artists. While folklife festivals may offer visitors the opportunity to purchase objects, they emphasize education.

On the other hand, festivals that classify themselves as antique shows are a major marketplace for objects known as traditional folk art—duck decoys, vernacular pie chests, memory paintings, root sculpture, embroidery, quilts, calligraphic drawings, and mixed media pieces. Examples of this kind of festival are Nashville, Tenn.’s Heart of Country Antique Show and Fearrington’s Antique Show in North Carolina. For the dealers and collectors who participate in antique fairs, “folk art” refers to handmade, traditional, and sometimes even functional objects but emphasizes aesthetics. At these fairs, dealers play an important role in educating collectors, explaining, for instance, the aesthetic differences between an everyday duck decoy and one crafted by the Ward Brothers.

Other fairs define “folk art” in one of a series of terms, including self-taught, visionary, outsider, vernacular, naive, or even primitive. These fairs showcase 20th- and 21st-century works made outside the academic fine art field and without regard to formal art training or process. This conceptualization is perhaps the most prevalent one in the southern United States, where sculpture made with found objects or carved wood, paintings, assemblages, decorated furniture, and story quilts are often displayed. These objects are often based in traditional community values, and their makers may have learned processes or concepts from family members. The artists, however, transform what they have learned into a personal aesthetic. Although their purposes may initially have nothing to do with the world of art, the individuality of their creations attracts public interest and creates markets for their work.

Across the South, “folk art” festivals and fairs provide an active marketplace. Driven by the enthusiasm of private collectors as well as an increasing number of artists, the marketplace is a strong force. Visitors seek to purchase the art and meet the artists. Because the enthusiasm for contemporary folk art has been marked by interest in the artists themselves, their presence is significant. Some wear quirky dress and drive outlandishly decorated cars; they give the events a distinctive character. Moreover, in the South, strong bonds of friendship among the artists create an atmosphere of camaraderie and easy informality.

Because precise definitions fail, the inclusion of the term “folk art” in a festival’s title offers no firm guarantee of the kind of art it displays. Some artists, such as traditional potters and quilters, can be featured in the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and also in contemporary folk art marketplaces. New artists appear frequently, finding inspiration in the work of more legendary artists and defining themselves in the same genre. “Faux” folk artists, that is, trained artists or hobbyists working in a “folky style,” often participate, making art with similar materials and exuding a similar character. Some work is personal, some more contrived and derivative. There is generally a diverse mix of music and food, a wide range of quality and subject—and in some cases traditional objects in the form of antiques. “Craft” and “art” are not clearly defined. Because of its popularity, moreover, “folk art” has also become a component in broader fine art festivals and a small presence at primarily music events.

Among the best-known folk art festivals and fairs in the South is the Kentuck Festival of Art, which began in 1971 as a small sidewalk celebration in downtown Northport, Ala., near Tuscaloosa. In 1973 the festival moved to nearby Kentuck Park nestled on the banks of the Black Warrior River. A two-day, out-door, juried art festival, Kentuck annually hosts more than 30,000 visitors and showcases more than 250 artists. Guest artists have included Jerry Brown, Nora Ezell, Howard Finster, Charlie Lucas, Lonnie Holley, Allie Pettway, Jimmy Lee Sudduth, Mose Tolliver, and Yvonne Wells Myrtice West. Southern basket makers, blacksmiths, furniture makers, quilters, and potters also show their wares. Legendary musicians perform, and there are children’s art activities and southern and ethnic foods. The Kentuck Festival of the Arts takes place the third weekend in October every year.

Kentucky is famous for two folk art festivals. A Day in the Country takes place each June in Morehead, Ky. Begun by nationally acclaimed husband-and-wife folk artists Minnie and Garland Adkins at their mountain home in eastern Kentucky, A Day in the Country was established to showcase the work of regional artists, such as Linvel Barker and Tim Lewis. The festival originated in 1987, when the couple hosted a small picnic that included Museum of American Folk Art Assistant Director (now Director Emeritus) Gerald W. Wertkin. The festival soon attracted art collectors from across the United States. Since 2003 the festival has been hosted by the Kentucky Folk Art Center in nearby Morehead. It features the work of more than 50 southern folk artists and attracts a crowd of more than 1,000 people. Visitors can expect to find wood carvings, stone carvings, paintings, and more. Another Kentucky folk art festival takes place each November when Louisville hosts the Good Folk Festival. Begun in 2006, the festival attracts nearly 1,500 visitors and showcases the work of more than 80 local, regional, and internationally known artists, including southerners C. M. and Kelly Laster, Jim Shores, and Lavon Williams, as well as more than 40 or so “primitive” musicians. Housed within the 14,500 square feet Mellwood Arts and Entertainment Center, a refurbished meat packing plant turned creative environment, the festival features folk artists—visual and musical—of the 21st century. The brainchild of Scott Scarboro, a multimedia artist and entertainer from Louisville, who creates kinetic junk art and electrified homemade instruments, the Good Folk Festival showcases visual art that is characterized as “elegantly raw,” “rough,” “hand made,” and “soul felt,” and performance art that is “stripped down,” “raw,” and “traditional with a contemporary bend.” Daniel Johnston, the singer-songwriter-artist and folk-punk hero from Texas who was immortalized in the 2005 film The Devil and Daniel Johnston, was the featured artist of Good Folk Fest 2008.

The Fearrington Folk Art Show, founded in 2002, occurs each February in Pittsboro, N.C., located near Chapel Hill. This two-day folk art festival invites a select group of artists to exhibit. These include Missionary Mary Proctor, Benny Carter, Cher Shafer, and Sam “The Dot Man” McMillan. Whimsical, wind-driven whirligigs by Vollis Simpson greet visitors and residents year round. Folk art shows up as well on the walls of the farm’s old granary, now transformed into a restaurant and bar. Fearrington also hosts the Antiques Show, begun in 2007. Touted for an outstanding selection of 18th- to 20th-century American and Continental furniture and accessories, the fair also features southern furniture, folk art, silver, jewelry, fine carpets, prints, paintings, early tools, porcelains, and architectural pieces offered by 26 dealers.

The Slotin Folk Fest, a three-day event every third weekend in August, bills itself as the world’s largest folk art show and sale. Held in the 80,000 square foot North Atlanta Trade Center, in Norcross, Ga., Folk Fest hosts around 100 galleries or dealers who specialize in self-taught, outsider, and contemporary folk art as well as southern folk pottery. When former Cliffs Notes salesman Steve Slotin and his wife Amy founded Folk Fest in 1994, the fair drew a crowd of 6,000; now it attracts as many as 12,000 visitors each year. Collectors from across the nation as well as local onlookers are attracted by the show’s wide selection of artwork, which ranges in cost from $5 to $50,000 and includes starter pieces as well as museum quality masterpieces. The Meet-the-Artist-Opening-Night Party also draws crowds. In earlier years Leroy Almon, Archie Byron, Ned Cartledge, Howard Finster, Woodie Long, C. J. Meaders, Lanier Meaders, R. A. Miller, W. C. Rice, and Mose Tolliver, all now deceased, appeared at the festival. Other artists who attend include Lonnie Holley, Charlie Lucas, Missionary Mary Proctor, and Purvis Young.

The House of Blues Folk Art Festival, scheduled each November, originated in 1999. Located at the House of Blues, Downtown Disney, Walt Disney World Resort, Lake Buena Vista, Fla., the two-day festival, entitled “Where the Art Meets the Soul,” is free to the public and features not only the work of folk artists, who often attend, but also musical performances and Delta-inspired cuisine. By 2008 the HOB Festival, then in its 10th year, was a thriving enterprise. Scheduled in conjunction with the 33rd annual Festival of Masters, a nationally recognized and juried fine art fair presented by Sharpie and also located in downtown Disney, the HOB festival showcased 40 artists and attracted more than 150,000 visitors. Activities complementing the fair include children’s programs, sidewalk decorations, and paintings by members of the Florida Chalk Artists Association, and performances by members of the Cirque du Soleil La Nouba.

More than 30 years ago, Emma Lee Turney established an antiques and craft fair in Round Top, Tex. (pop. 77), which lies midway between Houston and Austin. Today, the Round Top Antiques Fair and Art Festival has grown into Texas Antiques Weekend, an antiques and art extravaganza that is spread over several neighboring towns near Round Top, including Warrenton, Carmine, and Shelby as well as communities in between; takes up as many as 300 acres of land; and features more than 2,000 dealers. Estimates of visitors attending the shows range from as low as 15,000 to an extraordinary 50,000. Attendees come to see fine patchwork quilts, old farm tables, walnut church pews, folk art, school maps, painted pine cupboards, French trims, and cowboy kitsch galore. The festival traditionally occurs over the first full weekend of April and October, but in the last few years, “antique weekend” has become “antique week” or even “antiques up to three weeks.”

Folk pottery celebrations and art car events are two specific types of festivals of interest to folk art enthusiasts. The pottery events showcase work that falls strongly in both the defined categories of traditional “folklife” and more contemporary “folk art.” The best known of these pottery festivals are held in north Georgia and North Carolina, many in October and November. The events are held at individual pottery locations, and they draw sizable audiences, with collectors arriving at daybreak for the best selections.

Art car events bring artists together to showcase the decorated vehicles they have made. Two such annual southern Art Car Weekends happen in Houston, Tex., in May, organized by the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art, and in Louisville in August, organized by the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft. These events offer parades and a variety of other activities, bringing the message that art is a part of everyday life.

GEORGINE CLARKE
Alabama State Council on the Arts

Henry Glassie, The Spirit of Folk Art: The Girard Collection at the Museum of International Folk Art (1989); Chuck Rosenak and Jan Rosenak, Contemporary American Folk Art: A Collector’s Guide (1989); Betty-Carol Sellen with Cynthia J. Johanson, Self Taught, Outsider, and Folk Art: A Guide to American Artists, Locations, and Resources (2000).

Fraktur

Fraktur is a term used by scholars and collectors to refer to the decorated certificates and drawings produced by German-speaking people in America and Europe. Originally the term referred to a printer’s typeface and to the elaborate manuscript lettering derived from typeface used in German-speaking countries from the Renaissance into the early 20th century. The German term Fraktur refers to the broken or “fractured” style of the lettering. In America, fraktur has come to signify an entire genre of Germanic works on paper, applied even to drawings that lack text. The term is also sometimes applied erroneously to folk art drawings and documents that are not of Germanic origin but have similar folk art appeal.

Fraktur was made wherever German-speaking immigrants settled. Though most often associated with Pennsylvania, fraktur was also produced in Ohio, Canada, and the South as immigrants spread far beyond Pennsylvania’s borders. Many examples of fraktur are found in southern states with Germanic populations, including Maryland, Virginia, and North and South Carolina; German-speaking settlers migrated to the Shenandoah Valley in the second quarter of the 18th century and into the 19th century and then settled throughout the South. Southern fraktur shares many similar designs, colors, and forms with Pennsylvania fraktur, in part because some Pennsylvania artists moved or traveled to the South. Settlers also brought fraktur with them from Pennsylvania when they moved southward, thus introducing motifs to new areas. Variations among southern fraktur are often the result of the influence of individual artists, a trend that also appears in Pennsylvania as many artists developed a distinctive design vocabulary and style that then influenced a particular region’s fraktur.

The earliest known evidence of fraktur production in Pennsylvania dates from the 1740s, while most are dated between the 1780s and mid-1800s. Most frakturs were produced to commemorate special events, in particular births and baptisms (Geburts und Taufscheine). Fraktur artists rarely made marriage certificates, though some did produce family registers. The second major category of fraktur was related to the German parochial school system and included Vorschriften or writing samples, songbooks, copybooks, and rewards of merit. Many other types of fraktur were produced, including house blessings, New Year’s greetings, bookplates, religious texts, and love letters.

The primary reason for the dominance of the Geburts und Taufscheine is that most German-speaking immigrants and their descendants were members of the Lutheran or the Reformed denominations and placed high importance on infant baptism. The Plain Germans, including the Amish, Mennonites, and Schwenkfelders, were Anabaptists who did not practice infant baptism and thus largely did not make Taufscheine. Some Anabaptists did, however, make birth certificates, or Geburtsscheine. Occasionally, they also used a birth and baptismal certificate but left the baptismal information blank, or commissioned a certificate later when the person was baptized as a young adult.

American fraktur is rooted in European traditions, yet there are few, if any, exact counterparts for the most common types of American fraktur, birth and baptismal certificates. Rather, the American form appears to be derived from several related European types of fraktur. One such type is the Taufzettel, a baptismal paper that was folded around a coin and given to the child. Another is the Geburtschein, an official birth certificate. These documents were issued by the minister, who in Europe was a state-sanctioned official. A third form of related European fraktur is the Taufpatenbrief, literally a letter from the godparents to the child. These typically record the names of the godparents and date of the baptism. Frequently decorated with hearts, flowers, angels, and other motifs, these European pieces bearing similarities to American fraktur. The exact manner by which these related European traditions may have provided the inspiration for producing birth and baptismal certificates in America is not altogether clear. Immigrants likely brought records with them to document their age and provide proof of baptism, though few frakturs can be documented as being brought from Europe during the period. Another possibility is that the American Revolution necessitated men to provide proof of age for conscription reasons, for which birth and baptismal certificates could be utilized, but whether this practice actually contributed to the rise in the making of birth and baptismal certificates after the Revolution is difficult to determine. Other factors, including a desire to preserve Germanic identity within the larger American culture, may have encouraged German-speaking people to produce and own ethnically distinctive objects such as fraktur. Eventually, in the 19th century, confirmation became a more important religious right of passage and was accompanied by the production of confirmation certificates in addition to the more traditional birth and baptismal certificates.

Most known fraktur artists were men, typically ministers and schoolmasters, who had the necessary education to produce fraktur as well as access to the materials and clientele. Some were professional scriveners and artists. Fraktur artists made these certificates, drawings, and other documents for extra income or as gifts for their family, friends, parishioners, or students. The materials used in producing fraktur were fairly simple: paper, ink, and watercolors, sometimes assisted by tools like a compass or straightedge, used for laying out designs and text. For many years it was believed that artists made their own inks and pigments using berries, bark, and other ingredients and utilized local cherry tree gum as a binder. Research, however, indicates that many fraktur artists were actually sophisticated consumers of imported materials. Scientific analysis of numerous frakturs has revealed the use of a wide range of commercial pigments (many of them imported), including Prussian blue, chrome yellow, and vermilion, with gum Arabic used as a binder. Newspaper advertisements from the 18th and 19th centuries also document the availability of a wide range of imported pigments not only in Philadelphia but also in inland market towns and cities.

Today one of the most distinctive and highly prized types of folk art, fraktur began as a largely personal and private art. Few, if any, pieces were originally framed, hung on walls, or otherwise displayed. Frakturs were placed inside books for safekeeping, often folded several times, and occasionally pasted inside furniture, in particular to the underside of the lid to a chest. Frakturs were also rolled up and stored inside chests and boxes. As the popularity of collecting fraktur grew in the early 20th century, pieces were increasingly framed and hung for display.

Fraktur production continued well into the 19th century, although it underwent significant changes. Traditional school-related frakturs such as the Vorschriften declined as public education replaced parochial school systems. English-language fraktur became increasingly available, though demand for German fraktur continued as well. More and more print shops continued to make hand-drawn fraktur into the 1900s. Some artists, however, such as the Amish artist Barbara Ebersol of Pennsylvania, established and produced printed fraktur certificates and broadsides by the thousands. In a sense, fraktur never died out but rather evolved and adapted along with the Germanic culture that introduced it to America. To this day, fraktur artists work in traditional and contemporary styles.

LISA M. MINARDI
Winterthur Museum and Country Estate

John Bivins, Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts (November 1975); Russell D. Earnest and Corinne P. Earnest, Papers for Birth Dayes: Guide to the Fraktur Artists and Scriveners (1997); Cynthia Elyce Rubin, ed., Southern Folk Art (1985); Donald A. Shelley, The Fraktur-Writings or Illuminated Manuscripts of the Pennsylvania Germans (1961); Frederick S. Weiser and Howell J. Heaney, The Pennsylvania German Fraktur of the Free Library of Philadelphia (1976); Klaus Wust, Virginia Fraktur: Penmanship as Folk Art (1972).

Fraternal Societies

Fraternal societies have played an important role in shaping the behavior, beliefs, and personal identities of many southerners. Groups such as the Freemasons, the Odd Fellows, the Modern Woodmen of America, the Improved Order of Red Men, and hundreds of other voluntary, oath-bound organizations have tutored members in systems of thought and have bestowed symbolic identities and fictive familial relationships on their members. While some fraternal organizations promoted ethnic solidarity and fiscal responsibility through insurance, nativism, or other values, the initiation of new members constituted the central activity of most groups. Fraternalism in the South can be traced to the establishment of Masonic lodges in coastal cities in the first half of the 18th century. The movement reached its greatest popularity and influence in the years between 1865 and 1930.

Fraternalism has appealed to southerners of both European and African descent, although blacks and whites have rarely belonged to the same organizations. Instead, parallel systems of lodges developed in many communities, such as the Independent Order of Odd Fellows and the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows or the Ancient Arabic Order Nobles of the Mystic Shrine and the Ancient Egyptian Arabic Order Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, in which men practiced similar rituals and promoted comparable ethical systems but did not communicate or engage in fraternal brotherhood.

Members of societies have placed fraternal symbols on everything from palatial buildings to personal adornments. Fraternal material culture can be divided broadly into objects created for institutional use and personal items used by individual members to celebrate their affiliation. Altars, ritual paraphernalia, and emblematic paintings fall into the former category, whereas watch fobs, walking sticks, chains carved of wood, and marquetry picture frames are in the latter. Because numerous men held memberships in more than one society, personal objects often combine the symbols and emblems of multiple groups.

A wide range of artists and artisans created fraternal objects. While enthusiastic amateurs have produced numerous items expressing their devotion to fraternal ideals, in other cases creators of the highest training and talent have created extraordinary works of the greatest refinement. The Masonic chair currently owned by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and created by Benjamin Bucktrout in Williamsburg, Va., in the 1770s is a notable example. Similarly, as a young man the artist John Gadsby Chapman created a ritualistic painting for the Masonic lodge in Alexandria, Va., in the second quarter of the 19th century. Local milliners, silversmiths, and engravers, like Thomas Coram and Horatio G. Aspinwall, both of Charleston, S.C., often received fraternal commissions. Starting in the 1850s and expanding after the Civil War, a specialized industry, largely based in the Midwest, shipped fraternal goods to groups across the nation. Although regalia houses produced fraternal goods in large quantities, it can be difficult to differentiate their products from items created locally.

WILLIAM D. MOORE
Boston University

Barbara Franco, Fraternally Yours: A Decade of Collecting (1986); John D. Hamilton, Material Culture of the American Freemasons (1994); F. Carey Howlett, American Furniture (1996); William D. Moore, Folk Art (Winter 1999–2000); Mark A. Tabbert, American Freemasons: Three Centuries of Building Communities (2005).

Furniture, Decorated and Painted

Painted and decorated furniture of the 17th through the mid-19th century reflects the color choices and artistic vision of individual artisans rather than the published designs for high-styled furniture forms and decorations. Makers of painted furniture were aware of what was being done in more urban areas with fine cabinet woods, yet they chose to incorporate color, religious, cultural, fraternal, or political traditions, and occasionally whimsy, into the furniture they produced. Sometimes they attempted to mimic high-style furniture in their painted designs, and sometimes they decorated pieces following their own artistic vision.

There are three general categories of decorated and painted furniture. The first includes furniture that was painted with one or two colors in order to create a more elaborate and unified appearance than that of unpainted furniture. These pieces were usually made of plain, inexpensive woods like pine or tulip poplar. They might also be made with various woods that would have looked incongruous without a unifying painted surface. When furniture has surface decorations that are of an artistic nature and transmit a cultural or personal aesthetic, these pieces certainly fall under the rubric of folk art. The second category involves the application of grain painting or faux-finishing. The patterns created by dragging glazes over a base coat of a different color with tools such as combs, feathers, or leather rollers provide the effect of richer woods with deeper colors and pleasing grain patterns. Rosewood, mahogany, bird’s-eye maple, and even marble were emulated by these faux finishes—both on furniture and in architectural settings. In the early 19th century, this type of graining was commonly found on “fancy” furniture, so called because of the exuberant and often whimsical nature of the pieces and their ornament. Furniture makers had two variations of faux-finishing at their disposal: imitative, which mimicked the natural materials, and imaginative, in which the artisan allowed his fancy to dictate the grained designs. A third category of decorated furniture includes furniture that was painted with pictorial elements or scenes. Often these pictorial elements may derive from cultural, religious, fraternal, or patriotic traditions or from the maker’s idiosyncratic artistic sensibility. The distinctive regional aesthetics and cultural influences on pieces of southern decorated and painted furniture often differentiate them from their northern cousins.

Some of the earliest painted furniture in the South are utilitarian objects that had color added to appeal to a less affluent audience eager to acquire more fashionable furnishings. One early 18th-century cupboard from the Tidewater area of Virginia, composed primarily of yellow pine with tulip, poplar, and walnut components, was originally painted blue with a white interior in order to highlight ceramics stored inside. While many other pine cupboards were left unpainted during this period, the blue paint provided both a unified and pleasing appearance. This type of decorating, which allowed furniture makers to create slightly more expensive and fashionable utilitarian objects, was common throughout the South.

A very distinctive regional approach to painting furniture was found on the Eastern Shore of Virginia and Maryland. The raised-panel cupboards and presses produced by the carpenters in this area were typically painted blue with details including panel outlines, fluted columns, and moldings picked out in white and occasionally green, black, and orange. The Eastern Shore, a peninsula extending south from Delaware on the eastern side of the Chesapeake Bay, was geographically isolated from the rest of the Tidewater region. Because of its physical separation and agricultural economy, finish carpenters made much of the furniture locally. The design and coloration of these cupboards and presses relates quite closely to the architectural paneling found in Eastern Shore houses that were built by these same artisans.

Grain-painted furniture of the South also demonstrates a crossover between the architectural and furniture finishes. Numerous houses with grained and marbleized wainscoting, baseboards, and mantles have been found from Virginia to Georgia, including one painted by Isaac Scott for Colonel and Mrs. Alexander Shaw of Wagram, Scotland County, N.C. In addition to graining the woodwork, Scott painted the pine wall boards with drapery swags in imitation of period wallpaper borders. Southern corner cupboards, chests, boxes, clocks, tables, and trunks were also painted with these faux finishes, sometimes with the feet of the object grained to match a room’s baseboard. Some of the graining was done in a naturalistic or imitative manner to replicate the natural material. Other grain patterns, however, were imaginative designs hardly recognizable as any specific wood or stone. The decorators of this furniture were typically not the joiners or cabinetmakers who constructed the furniture. Rather, the decorators often were signboard or coach painters or artisans in other related professions. Nineteenth-century published manuals such as Nathaniel Whittock’s Decorative Painters’ and Glaziers’ Guide (1828) taught those interested in the subject the subtleties of the techniques.

The fancy furniture of early 19th-century Baltimore filled the need for fashionable painted furniture both locally and throughout the Chesapeake region. Produced by manufacturers such as John and Hugh Finlay, Thomas S. Renshaw, and John Barnhart, the Baltimore furniture of the first quarter of the 19th century echoed the forms of fashionable urban mahogany and rosewood furniture with an exuberance of faux-graining, gilding, and colorful painted motifs that included flowers, wreaths, anthemia, and musical instruments. Landscape views also adorn some chairs and tables. These pieces demonstrate the confluence of the furniture decorators, found in the grain painters, with artists like Francis Guy. Guy, who immigrated from England without academic training in art, painted landscape scenes and house views, both real and imaginary, on high-style furniture from the Finlay manufactory and in time became one of the most celebrated American landscapists. Affluent Baltimoreans purchased suites of this furniture for their parlors as well as for assembly rooms. While much of the Baltimore furniture was purchased locally, these firms also advertised and shipped their wares across and down the Chesapeake Bay to the Eastern Shore, Norfolk, and beyond.

The southern backcountry was a melting pot of settlers from northern states such as Pennsylvania and Connecticut as well as from Europe. English, Scots-Irish, Irish, German, Swiss, and Welsh immigrants populated the backcountry from the Valley of Virginia down into North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia. These immigrant groups brought with them their own distinctive cultural traditions, including the furniture forms and decorations with which they were familiar. The German and Swiss traditions stand out, especially in the work of decorative painters in the Valley of Virginia, where groups of affiliated artists created distinctive local styles. For example, Johannes Spitler (1774–1837), a German immigrant decorator working in Shenandoah County, Va., was instrumental in establishing the distinctive style of Wythe County, Va., painted chests. Wythe County chests, with facades broken into three painted arch-headed panels enclose painted vases of tulips that are the most traditional German American designs. Similar designs and motifs appear on Pennsylvania German chests as well. Johannes Spitler pairs a consistent paint scheme of white, red, and black on a blue background with a consistent repertoire of motifs: geometric designs, free-hand flowers and animals, stylized hearts and moons, compass-drawn flowers, and abstract fractured designs that are all linked to the decorative German fraktur tradition. While most of Spitler’s work diverges from traditional German American chest and clock designs, it may incorporate typical elements such as tulips, birds, and hearts. Not all painted chests and clocks find their ornamental devices in cultural traditions brought to America by German immigrants, however. Furniture decorators, for example, may have employed political imagery. One Greene County, Tenn., chest displays the eagle from the Great Seal of the United States alongside traditional tulips. The imagery on the chest demonstrates the decorator’s Germanic ancestry as well as his patriotism. Members of fraternal organizations often purchased furniture and decorative arts ornamented with specific symbols related to their groups or positions. An unusually pedimented and paneled tall case clock found in Edgefield, S.C., is decorated with Masonic imagery both on the clock face and on the case. These are just a few of the many unique objects decorated by southern artisans.

Painted chests, clocks, hunt boards, tables, sugar chests, and other common forms, with either solid colors, faux finishes, or painted decorative motifs, are known from Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas. These pieces of painted and decorated furniture reflect distinctive cultural, religious, fraternal, and political influences as well as the decorators’ own traditions and personal aesthetics.

TARA GLEASON CHICIRDA
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

Benjamin H. Caldwell Jr., Robert Hicks, and Mark W. Scala, Art of Tennessee (2003); Lance Humphries, in American Furniture, ed. Luke Beckerdite (2003); Ronald L. Hurst and Jonathan Prown, Southern Furniture, 1680–1830: The Colonial Williamsburg Collection (1997); Deanne D. Levison, Neat Pieces: The Plain-Style Furniture of Nineteenth-Century Georgia (1983, 2006); James R. Melchor, N. Gordon Lohr, and Marilyn S. Melchor, Eastern Shore, Virginia: Raised Panel Furniture, 1730–1830 (1982); J. Roderick Moore and Marshall Goodman, The Magazine Antiques (September 2007); Sumpter Priddy, American Fancy: Exuberance in the Arts, 1790–1840 (2004); Cynthia V. A. Schaffner and Susan Klein, American Painted Furniture, 1790–1880 (1997); Donald Walters, The Magazine Antiques (October 1975); Gregory R. Weidman and Jennifer F. Goldsborough, Classical Maryland, 1815–1845: Fine and Decorative Arts from the Golden Age (1993).

Furniture, Vernacular

When used to describe furniture, the term “vernacular” means different things to different people. For some, vernacular furniture is simply the opposite of formal or high-style furniture; in other words, vernacular furniture has no obvious design source that can be traced to formal design books such as Thomas Chippendale’s The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director. To others, equally vague terms often used to describe furniture, such as “plain,” “country,” “common,” “folk,” “rural,” or “provincial,” are synonymous with “vernacular.” Although no single definition of vernacular furniture will probably ever be completely accepted by all furniture historians, perhaps scholar David Knell comes closest to an inclusive definition in his book English Country Furniture (1992). In it he describes the concept of vernacular furniture thus: “The label . . . ‘vernacular’ [is] an adjective borrowed from architecture and implying a relatively unsophisticated product of ordinary people, normally of a regionally traditional design frequently made of native materials, and usually with connotation of general, utilitarian use. In its widest sense, ‘vernacular furniture’ is the furniture ‘of the people,’ as opposed to that of a privileged few.”

An example of furniture that strictly adheres to Knell’s definition is a cupboard in the collection of the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA). The cupboard is made of yellow pine, which has been painted dark red with black or green and white used as accent colors. Although the case and drawers are dovetailed, the dovetails are rather large and crude; the doors have heavily fielded panels; and the decorative cornice is composed of three parts—a lunetted band topped by two separate ogee moldings. Most fasteners are fairly large cut nails, and the doors swing on hand-forged pintle hinges, which allow the doors to be removed easily. The door pulls are petite, squared wooden examples. The most likely construction date is 1800–1820. In addition to step-back cupboards like this one, the maker also produced hanging cupboards, corner cupboards, dish dressers, chests, and chests of drawers.

The maker of MESDA’S cupboard lived and worked in the north-central part of Montgomery County in the Piedmont of North Carolina. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, this area was relatively isolated, with no large towns and only small farms, gristmills, sawmills, and a few gold mines dotting the hilly landscape of the Uwharrie Forest. An early inhabitant, probably a general carpenter who built houses as well as furniture, was most likely responsible for the MESDA piece.

The cupboard is a perfect example of vernacular furniture because it is a relatively unsophisticated product (at least in comparison to urban examples), was made by an ordinary craftsman probably for an ordinary neighbor, was of a regionally traditional design, was made of native yellow pine, and was made for the utilitarian purpose of storing food and food-related items such as dishes, drinking vessels, cutlery, and textiles. It could have been owned by any of the small farmers who lived in the area and clearly was not a product made for “the privileged few.”

“Peaked apron” cupboard made by Jacob Sanders, Montgomery County, N.C., ca. 1800 (Old Salem Museums and Gardens/MESDA)

The makers of such furniture were almost always of limited means, but that fact in no way limited their creativity. The maker of MESDA’S cupboard used a bright polychrome paint scheme, shaped pintle hinges, tiny pulls, and decorative cornice to create an object that surely brightened and cheered the functional space in which it first resided, much as it does its museum setting today. In fact, many contemporary collectors prefer the warmth of vernacular furniture to the high style of more formal examples. To some, the ordinary is extraordinary.

TARA GLEASON CHICIRDA
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

David Knell, English Country Furniture (1992).

Furniture, Vernacular, of Texas

During most of the 19th century, Texans obtained their house furniture from local cabinetmakers. From the extension of the Cotton Kingdom into Texas by Anglo-Americans in the 1820s until the late 1870s, the region’s isolation from the rest of the United States meant that factory-made furniture from the East was not generally available. During those years there was at least one cabinet shop in every county in Texas, and most towns had several. By the 1880s most of these shops had disappeared, and Texans started furnishing their homes with mass-produced furniture. In the 18th century Hispanic carpinteros undoubtedly made furniture in the Spanish communities in Texas, as they did in New Mexico, but no examples or documentation of their work has survived.

Texas furniture became distinctive within the South. The majority of 19th-century cabinetmakers in Texas were southerners, but a significant minority was German, as a result of the German immigration to Texas that took place in the 1850s and 1860s. In 1860, when only 6 percent of the state’s population was German-born, Germans totaled 33 percent of the cabinetmakers listed on the census. The German cabinetmakers, who had passed through formal apprenticeships in Europe, tended to be better trained than their Anglo-American counterparts, and their furniture shows that they were more aware of cosmopolitan styles.

Most rural cabinetmakers in Texas operated one-man shops and also farmed, a pattern that is found all through the rural South in the 19th century. Many also practiced other woodworking trades and built houses, cotton gins, wagons, and coffins as well as furniture. Their shops were equipped with hand tools and foot-powered lathes, and they produced a limited variety of furniture forms: chairs, tables, beds, wardrobes, bureaus, settees, desks, pie safes, and cupboards. They produced little upholstered furniture.

Furniture makers usually obtained wood locally, either from the pine forests of east Texas or from the fluvial hardwood forests along the rivers and creeks of central and north Texas. The primary woods used were pine, cedar, and walnut. However, there was an active lumber trade, and exotic woods such as mahogany and rosewood were imported through Galveston and hauled by wagon to cabinetmakers as far inland as San Antonio and New Braunfels. Pine from Alabama, Florida, and Maine was also imported through Galveston, as was hardware such as hinges and locks. Pine furniture was often painted with oil-based paint or grained in imitation of more expensive woods. Furniture from other woods was finished with a glossy varnish, often made from copal, a tree resin.

Before the Civil War most Texas cabinetmakers worked in the Plain Grecian style, known as “pillar and scroll,” that was popular throughout the South. German-born cabinetmakers frequently made furniture derived from the Biedermeier style popular in Germany in the 1840s. By the 1870s, increasingly sophisticated clients were demanding furniture in the Renaissance Revival, Rococo Revival, and Gothic Revival styles; and Texas cabinetmakers responded with furniture that exhibited elements of these styles. In the 1880s a San Antonio furniture factory produced furniture made from animal horns in the Rustic style, which was popular in Europe and the East for furnishing hunting lodges.

As in the rest of the South, some furniture makers in Texas specialized in the production of inexpensive chairs. Chair makers used a turning lathe and a drawknife to make light ladder-backed chairs with rawhide, woven corn-shuck, or split oak bottoms. They usually shaped the parts in the winter and assembled them as needed. According to the 1860 census, Anderson Dorris of Lockhart and his son John made 450 hide-bottomed chairs in that year and sold them for $1.50 each. Some Texas chair makers continued their production well into the 20th century; the Jackson family of Blue in Lee County made chairs there from the 1870s through the 1930s.

After the Civil War the American furniture industry began to be concentrated in the Midwest. Factories with steam-powered machinery produced large quantities of cheap furniture that could be shipped by railroad to local consumers. As the national railroad net was extended across Texas in the 1870s, some local Texas cabinetmakers struggled unsuccessfully to compete with midwestern factories by employing more workers and by adding horse-powered and steam-powered woodworking machinery to their shops. Mechanization was most intense in east Texas and on the Blackland Prairie of north Texas. William Sheppard’s shop in Tyler provides a good example of the process. Sheppard was a Kentuckian who moved to Tyler in the 1850s and opened a one-man cabinet shop equipped with hand tools. By 1860 he was in partnership with J. C. Rogers; they described themselves as “Furniture Merchants and Cabinet Makers.” They had a horse-powered lathe and three employees who made bedsteads, wardrobes, and bureaus. Their retail department also carried furniture made by other local cabinetmakers. By 1870 they had moved to a new location several miles from Tyler called Mechanicsville, where they had a 15-horsepower steam engine, four lathes, two boring machines, a tennoning machine, and 10 employees who made $5,500 worth of furniture that year. By 1880 they had gone out of business.

Other Texas cabinetmakers, however, continued to work in one-man shops with hand tools well into the 1870s. This was especially true in the German settlements of the hill country west of Austin, where German-born cabinetmakers worked in relative isolation from Anglo-American society and where some of the most aesthetically pleasing furniture made in 19th-century Texas was produced. The hill country shops in New Braunfels and Fredericksburg operated on a carefully circumscribed basis, none of them employing more than one person and an apprentice and none of them using steam-powered machinery. The best-known hill country cabinetmakers were Johann Jahn of New Braunfels, Franz Stautzenberger of Clear Spring, and Johann Peter Tatsch and William Arhelger of Fredericksburg. Collectors eagerly seek out their furniture. Major collections of 19th-century Texas vernacular furniture can be seen at the University of Texas at Austin’s Winedale Historical Center in Round Top, Tex.; the Witte Museum in San Antonio; and the Museum of Texas Handmade Furniture in New Braunfels.

LONN TAYLOR
Fort Davis, Texas

San Antonio Museum Association, Early Texas Furniture and Decorative Arts (1973); Donald L. Stover, Tischlermeister Jahn (1978); Lonn Taylor and David Warren, Texas Furniture: The Cabinetmakers and Their Work, 1840–1880 (1975); Tommy Titsworth, Early Comfort, Texas Cabinet Makers: A History of Hill Country Furniture (2007).

Gravestone Carving

Southern cemeteries are free outdoor art museums displaying the work of both taught and commercial gravestone carvers. A few graveyards include masterpieces by formally or self-trained artists, but most grave markers are more notable as indicators of the rich cultural and social diversity of the South than as works of art alone. Gravestones also provide an ongoing historical record of the South’s self-identity in relationship to other parts of the United States.

In the 18th century, wealthy southerners could afford to employ New England artisans to carve gravestones of slate and other materials, and a few southerners in the Charleston, S.C., area and elsewhere imported gravestones from England. Local Charleston artists such as the Scots immigrant Thomas Walker carved in a manner once associated solely with New England Puritans. The icons on these colonial-era stones reflect the styles promoted by the design books and apprenticeship system of the time. Many display the winged skulls, winged hourglasses, and other memento mori symbols observable in New England graveyards.

In the late 18th century, the winged skulls slowly morphed into winged soul effigies with angelic faces, and more-inspiring icons such as the anchor of hope began to appear in gravestone sculpture. In addition, classical designs such as willow trees and urns suggested that American citizens were eager to align their new republic with those of ancient Greece and Rome. The New Orleans sculptor Jacques Nicolas Bussière de Pouilly used classical and other revival styles in the distinctive aboveground tombs of that city after Louisiana became a state in 1803. Traditional gravestone carvers, such as the Bigham family of the North Carolina Piedmont, also exemplify a growing national consciousness in their iconography as they gradually replaced traditional Scots-Irish designs such as the Scotch thistle and the Dove of Promise with such symbolic references to the new Republic as the seal of the United States.

In some parts of the South during the 18th and early 19th centuries, however, financial necessity and ethnic identity dictated memorial practices—and this pattern continues in some areas well into the 21st century. The Upland South, for example, has many folk cemeteries with features such as mounded graves, wooden grave houses, and “scraped earth” graves free of vegetation. Many gravestone makers represented in these folk cemeteries are self-trained artists who create markers out of materials at hand, such as wood, concrete, and broken glass.

African American graves can also demonstrate a keen sense of ethnic consciousness. Sometimes graves are decorated with shells or with broken household vessels that derive from African practices and from beliefs that the ancestors lived in a watery realm and that vessels or water symbols aided communication between the worlds of the living and the lives of the dead. Other African American grave markers include symbols of time, like broken clocks and objects or clothing used by the deceased. Concrete markers, sometimes embedded with marbles, by unnamed, self-taught artists are also characteristic of many African American graveyards such as Holt Cemetery in New Orleans. The starkly eloquent grave markers of Nashville’s folk sculptor William Edmondson presage the abstracted forms of his later sculptures.

Ethnic identity is a primary defining feature in other graveyards as well. In North Carolina’s Davidson County, 19th-century artists such as cabinetmaker Joseph Clodfelter and members of the Swisegood School carved on soapstone distinctive pierced-stone designs of hearts, fylfot crosses, and tulips that derived from their German Protestant heritage. Many southern cities have Jewish cemeteries—sometimes as part of larger municipal cemeteries—and their iconic grave markers reflect both Jewish culture, with stars of David and Hebrew inscriptions, and an investment in the shared secular symbology of wider American culture. Makers of more complexly decorated stones, with flowers, birds, and other symbols found in Jewish folk art, may have been immigrants familiar with Jewish aesthetics and expectations. Recent Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union have introduced a 20th-century style of folk carving. Though some American Jews have believed that the elaborate portraits carved into black granite are not consistent with Jewish practice, enameled portraits commonly appear on early 20th-century gravestones. With rabbinical approval, carved portrait stones are now welcome in Jewish cemeteries throughout the United States.

The 19th century introduced a paradigm shift in cemetery and gravestone design. Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Mass., consecrated in 1831 as the first picturesque rural/garden cemetery in America, exerted considerable influence. Large municipal cemeteries in the South such as Hollywood in Richmond, Va., Cave Hill in Louisville, Ky., and Bonaventure in Savannah, Ga., incorporate such rural cemetery elements as winding paths, graves clustered by families, lush natural plantings, iconic gravestones with hopeful symbols such as the opening doors of heaven, and unique marble statuary, sometimes commissioned from European artists. Southern garden cemeteries may contain some particularly southern monuments to the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. Oakland Cemetery’s grandiose “Lion of Atlanta,” a slumbering lion resting upon the Confederate flag, guards the graves of some 6,000 Confederate and Union soldiers—including 3,000 of unknown identity. Carved by Georgian T. M. Bradley and erected in 1894, the lion was carved from the largest block of marble yet quarried in Georgia. By the middle of the 20th century, the trend toward memorial parks with flat commercial markers and a few pieces of mass-produced statuary deemphasized the work of individual artists, as does the more recent trend of ecologically friendly cemeteries. In Ramsey Park preserve in Westminster, S.C., founded in 1998 as the first green cemetery in the United States, trees or other plants and natural stones with minimal biographical information, brief epitaphs, and very simple line drawings minimize the carver’s artistic presence.

By the turn of the 20th century, middle-class southerners could order relatively inexpensive marble tombstones from Sears Roebuck Tombstones and Monuments catalogs. However, while the availability of standardized, mass-produced stones greatly decreased the number of local stone carvers who might have preserved regional styles, these generic stones did not completely displace the folk memorials that some people preferred and that others chose out of necessity.

In working garden cemeteries, churchyards, and folk cemeteries, significant new designs continue to appear. Many mourners prefer memorials and grave decorations like those of their ancestors; many include grave gifts to personalize the grave. Because of advances in computer-assisted engraving, customers can choose fairly inexpensive individualized memorials. Recent stones engraved with footballs, dogs, or men fishing reflect regional interests while others engraved with portraits or prized possessions reflect a cult of the individual or even affirm the notion common to southern gothic fiction that the lines between physical and spiritual dimensions may blur. Although these machine-made recent stones are not folk art, they do reflect a folky, informal sensibility often found in southern folk art.

JUNE HADDEN HOBBS
Gardner-Webb University

Diana Williams Combs, Early Gravestone Art in Georgia and South Carolina (1986); D. Gregory Jeane, in Cemeteries and Gravemarkers: Voices of American Culture, ed. Richard E. Meyer (1989); M. Ruth Little, Sticks and Stones: Three Centuries of North Carolina Gravemarkers (1998); Peggy McDowell, Cemeteries and Gravemarkers: Voices of American Culture, ed. Richard E. Meyer (1989); Susan H. McGahee and Mary W. Edmonds, South Carolina’s Historic Cemeteries: A Preservation Handbook (2007); David Charles Sloane, The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History (1991).