Blogs → Just Looking: New England Art →
Folk Art Is Fine Art
Old, Weird America at the DeCordova
by Edgar Allen Beem
In this pluralistic 21st century art society, the distinction between fine art and folk art is hardly worth making. An artist is an artist is an artist and art is anything an artist says it is. Art can be an object, an act, an installation, or just idea. It can be made of anything from oil paint to chewing gum. Anything goes.
Folk art, outsider art, naïve art, whatever one chooses to call it, however, is the source material for The Old, Weird America: Folk Themes in Contemporary Art (through September 6) at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Old, Weird America, organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, was selected as the Best Thematic Museum Show Nationally in 2008 by the International Art Critics Association.
The exhibition, the largest the DeCordova has ever hosted, features art by 18 artists, most in their 30s and 40s, whose work "illustrates the relevance and appeal of folklore to contemporary artists."
Toby Kamps, curator of the exhibition, writes in the exhibition catalogue that "in this post-9/11 America of high-emotion and sweeping change, artists naturally look for inspiration in the forgotten and unresolved relics of our nation, the volatile and mercurial old, weird America of folk history."
This Old, Weird America (the show takes its title from rock critic Greil Marcus' book about the influences of folk music on that of Bob Dylan and the Band) is populated largely by cowboys and Indians, pilgrims, Civil War soldiers, and slaves. The narrative that runs through the diversity of media is one of poking around in the past both for ironic fun and revisionist fantasy.
The star of the show is Kara Walker, famous for her bawdy, bitter silhouettes of African-American history. To Old, Weird America Walker contributes a shadow puppet video entitled "8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture by Kara E. Walker" that satires both black creation myths and white racism.
Race is also the subject of Deborah Grant's "Where Good Darkies Go," a grid of acrylic on birch panels based on the folk paintings of Bill Traylor. And the War of the States fought to free the slaves inspired Allison Smith's seven life-size Civil War soldier dolls, Barnaby Furnas' wild battle scenes and portrait of the rebel John Brown, and Greta Pratt's photographs of Lincoln impersonators.
Earlier American history is explored in Sam Durant's tableaux of pilgrims and Indians, Brad Kahlhamer's visionary watercolors evoking his Native American heritage, and apocalyptic paintings by Aaron Morse such as "The Good Hunt" in which a buckskin-clad Deerslayer seems to have gunned down every living thing in the forest, including the forest itself.
For comic relief from the history of American violence, there are the mechanically animated square dance dresses of Louisville artist Cynthia Norton, sometimes described as the post-modern Minnie Pearl.
Throw in a few bobbysoxers, greasers, and surfers and Old, Weird America pretty much distills the essence of America, a place of both great freedoms and magnificent faults.
[DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, 51 Sandy Pond Rd., Lincoln MA, 781-259-8355.]
Reader Comments
Registered users can add comments.
Registration is free, and just takes a moment.
Login or Register.