Displaying items by tag: folk art

When Ruth Horwich, a fixture in Chicago’s art community for over fifty-five years, passed away in July 2014, she left behind an extraordinarily diverse and deeply personal art collection. Horwich and her husband, Leonard, began collecting art in the late 1950s, often focusing  on unknown and emerging artists. The couple amassed a fascinating collection that included works by Chicago Imagists, European Surrealists, and self-taught and folk artists. They also acquired many notable pieces by Robert Matta, Alexander Calder, and Jean Dubuffet.

In addition to growing her collection, Horwich was dedicated to providing key support to many Chicago art institutions.

Swiss dealer Bruno Bischofberger will open a gigantic new Zurich gallery to the public in June 2015 with a solo show by Spanish painter Miquel Barceló.

Spread over 250,000 square feet, the complex is currently open by appointment only. It comprises galleries, offices, storage, as well as spaces for Bischofberger's extensive art collection. A folk art museum is also in the pipeline.

The new complex has been years in the making and radically transforms the site of a former car factory in the south east of the city.

The High Museum of Art has announced that Katherine Jentleson will become its curator of folk and self-taught art. The position, which has gone unfilled for nearly two years, was endowed last summer through a $2.5 million gift from Atlanta patrons Dan Boone and his late wife Merrie Boone.

Jentleson, a Ph.D. candidate in art history at Duke University and the 2014-15 Douglass Foundation Predoctoral Fellow in American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, will start at the High in September, She has worked at New York’s American Folk Art Museum and curated or assisted in organizing exhibits at Duke’s Nasher Museum of Art in Durham, N.C.

On Friday, January 23, 2015, Allan Katz, a collector and dealer of period American folk art and Americana, debuted a new catalogue at the opening of the prestigious Winter Antiques Show in New York City. Brimming with beautifully photographed folk art objects and Americana, the catalogue offers a glimpse into Katz’s illustrious inventory.

Highlights from the catalogue include “Dude” -- a carved and paint-decorated wood and metal figure with fabric clothing. Created around 1910, “Dude” was part of Andy Warhol’s extensive American folk art collection. The Pop artist began collecting in the 1950s and in 1977, New York City's American Folk Art Museum featured his collection in the exhibition Folk and Funk.

How would a guy make a quilt?" Joel Otterson asked himself when he began his foray into the craft. "He would make it out of concrete and stone," he answered. And so he did.

Otterson's "quilts" consist of interlinking blocks of concrete, stone and ceramics that are meant to be walked and danced on rather than slept under. One is 19 by 22 feet and made from six tons of concrete and 500 dinner plates cut into 4,000 pieces. There's even a "crazy quilt" made from the scraps of his concrete projects.

Otterson is one of eight artists involved in "Man-Made: Contemporary Male Quilters," opening Jan. 25 at the Craft & Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles and curated by CAFAM Executive Director Suzanne Isken.

The Lady Lever Art Gallery’s world renowned Wedgwood collection has gone on display in Moscow, attracting more than 10,000 visitors in just four weeks. It is the first time that the unrivalled collection has ever traveled abroad, with 140 items traveling to the Russian capital. The collection is on show at the All-Russian Museum of Decorative, Applied and Folk Art as part of the UK-Russia Year of Culture 2014.

Objects from the world’s finest group of Wedgwood jasperware are on display, including a rare copy of the celebrated Portland Vase and the largest jasperware panel ever produced. Two rare enamel plaques painted by artist George Stubbs also feature.

In a letter he wrote in 1825, the American painter John Vanderlyn said that paintings by the itinerant portraitist Ammi Phillips were “... cheap and slight, for the mass of folks can’t judge of the merits of a well-finished picture.” Vanderlyn had gone to France for academic training. His masterpiece, “Ariadne Asleep on the Island of Naxos” (1809-14), a suavely erotic, neo-Classical vision of a nude woman dozing in a pastoral landscape, is one of the gems of the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. But a discerning viewer today might well prefer Phillips. His “Girl in Red Dress With Cat and Dog” (1830-35) is one of the loveliest paintings by any American artist.

A wonderful painting attributed to Phillips is included in “A Shared Legacy: Folk Art in America,” an inspiring exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum.

The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive presents "American Wonder: Folk Art from the Collection," on view October 1 through December 21, 2014. Featuring approximately fifty portraits, landscapes, weather vanes, decorative sculptures, and other works dating from the wake of the Declaration of Independence War to the end of the Civil War, this exhibition captures glimpses of young America during a period of boundless optimism, massive growth, and eventual upheaval. This distinguished collection at BAM/PFA—one of the most impressive American folk art collections from this period anywhere—results from the generosity of two collectors and patrons, Bliss Carnochan and Nancy Edebo. "American Wonder" is the last major art exhibition to open in BAM/PFA’s current museum building at 2626 Bancroft Way before the institution moves to a new location, currently under construction, in downtown Berkeley in early 2016.

American Wonder starts in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century New England, where the country’s newly independent citizens were beginning to help define and assume a national identity—one aligned with the goals of liberty, self-improvement, and advancement.

The self-taught artist Ralph Fasanella (1914-97), born in the Bronx to Italian immigrants, believed that painting could be a form of labor advocacy. He worked as an ice delivery man, a truck driver, a gas station owner and a union organizer, all the while developing his colorful and detailed scenes of working-class life (as in “Family Supper,” which shows his mother, a garment worker, taking her second shift at a crowded dinner table). He also made historical paintings, like the mid-1970s series of canvases documenting the 1912 “Bread and Roses” strike in Lawrence, Mass.

The High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, has received a $2.5 million gift from local philanthropist Dan Boone and his late wife Merrie Boone. The generous donation will support and expand the museum’s folk and self-taught art initiatives, including the endowment of a permanent, full-time curatorial position to lead the department. With the addition of the Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art, all seven of the High’s collecting departments will have a full-time endowed curatorial position.

The Boones’ gift will enable the continued growth of the museum’s exhibition program, conservation efforts, and its folk and self-taught art collection, which is considered one of the finest of its kind.