How did that end up in the museum, anyway?

Doug Kendall, Curator of Collections

“What’s New” is one of the recurring themes here on the Museum’s blog. We like to share the stories and images of our recent acquisitions. But how do artifacts and works of art find their way into the Museum’s collections? And why those things and not others?

The New York State Historical Association, which operates the Fenimore Art Museum, has existed for over 110 years and has been collecting for most of that time. As you can imagine, we’ve accumulated a lot of things over those years: almost 25,000 objects and over 100,000 photographs.

These days, the Museum continues to acquire artifacts, but the staff has to think hard before adding something new to the collections. We have limited acquisition funds, but even potential gifts have to be carefully scrutinized for relevance—after all, there are costs associated with cataloging, exhibiting and caring for each object in the Museum’s collection and both our resources and our space is finite.

That’s why the staff and Board of the Museum carefully developed a Collections Management Policy and review it every few years. One of the most important parts of the policy is the “Scope of Collections” section. Having a scope helps us recognize whether a potential gift makes sense as part of this museum’s collection or should perhaps be referred to another museum with a different mission. The Museum’s Collections Advisory Committee carefully considers every potential addition to the collection and makes a recommendation to the President and CEO of the organization, and the Vice President and Chief Curator, who have the authority to add items to the collection.

Residence and Office of James L. Smith, Mansfield, Cattaraugus Co NY

Graphite pencil on paper, framed

Artist Unidentified, ca. 1880

Gift of Scott and Gladys Macdonough, N0010.2010

Photograph: Richard Walker

Residence of Michael Van Alstine

Graphite pencil on paper

Fritz G. Vogt, 1890

The Farmers’ Museum, Museum Purchase, F0216.1944

Recently, a Connecticut couple offered to give the Museum a pencil sketch of a home in Cattaraugus County. This image falls within the Museum’s collecting interest in American folk art and it also provides evidence of upstate New York material culture, another of our collecting areas. Although we don’t know who sketched the James L. Smith residence and office, the style is reminiscent of the lithographs that appear in Victorian county atlases and histories, many of which can be found in our Research Library. In addition, the Smith sketch complements the drawings of itinerant Mohawk Valley artist Fritz G. Vogt in the collections of the Fenimore Art Museum and our sister institution, The Farmers’ Museum. So in this instance, the sketch of James Smith’s home and office is a welcome addition to the Museum’s collections for a variety of reasons.

Hen Party

Chris Rossi, Associate Curator of Exhibitions

Hen Party: A party for women only. First known use ca. 1885. (From Merriam-Webster online dictionary)

I had never heard the term Hen Party until I moved to Central New York. It’s a quaint folksy way of talking about a girl’s night out that for me, conjures up visions of ladies gossiping over their tea and knitting. The phrase has expanded meaning and in the 21st century can refer to a bachelorette party. Not quite the word picture I have in mind, but fun to think people are still using the term.

Did I mention the girl with the squirrel on her head?

We are having a Hen Party, so to speak, in the Clark Gallery here at the Fenimore Art Museum. Okay, our attendees are not as lively as those at the gatherings mentioned above. Instead they are quietly gracing the walls and pedestals of our exhibition, Picturing Women: American Art from the Permanent Collections, which opens on September 24.

Getting the ladies in place

Our collections hold a variety of portraiture from three centuries, which can make for some very interesting groupings. Laying out the gallery was like arranging seating at a dinner party. We have Abigail Adams keeping company with Dolly Madison while three folk art Madonnas enjoy each other’s presence. Perhaps they are comparing notes on childrearing? And I like to wonder what a very proper 19th century lady would like to chat about with her 20th century counterpart (who is shown lounging sans-clothing in a bed of water lilies.) We even have a kids’ wall, which is reminiscent of the kids’ table from the holidays of my childhood.

This eclectic gathering of women of all ages, social classes and occupations will be on view until the end of the year. Come visit the party, even if you are not a hen!

QR codes - connecting galleries to blogs

By Michelle Murdock, Curator of Exhibitions

Are you thinking, “What is this?!” Or maybe you’re thinking, “Wait, where’s my phone?!” Yep, I said phone. For many smartphone users, this funny looking box is a gateway to new learning opportunities. Does that sound too stodgy? How about this – if you have an iPhone or Blackberry or Android, you know that this code can direct you to the coolest stuff you never knew about, and that these codes can be found anywhere from water towers to magazines to cupcakes to museum galleries.

They’re called QR codes – as in quick response. They’re two-dimensional codes that are very similar to barcodes. They can look slightly different depending on the company that created them. The phone applications are varied, too, but the vast majority are free. What does this have to do with our museums? As you can see in the picture above, we are using QR codes in our galleries this year. But let’s back up a sec. Remember our sister blog, American Folk Art @ Cooperstown, run by our VP & Chief Curator Paul D’Ambrosio? Last fall, the Exhibitions team at Fenimore dreamed of bringing our social media efforts into our galleries. We knew that we could run a poll on Paul’s blog, asking readers to vote for their favorite posts and we could then install the artifacts that the posts addressed. But that was kind of boring. Not very innovative. Thankfully, two fellow staff members, Kajsa Sabatke and Erin Crissman, suggested we use QR codes. We jumped on the opportunity to allow our onsite visitors to participate in our online conversations.

Each artifact in the exhibition is accompanied by the original blog post, the original comments associated with that post, and the QR code that directs users to the post itself. We’re encouraging on site visitors to use the codes to link to the comments section and leave their own thoughts about the artifacts and the exhibition.

We also have plans to incorporate more QR codes throughout the museum. The exhibition Watermark: Michele Harvey & Glimmerglass includes a code that links to Michele’s website. The exhibition In Our Time: The World as Seen by Magnum Photographers includes a code for The George Eastman House and Magnum Photographers.

Why are we doing this? Just for fun? Well, sure it’s fun, but of course there’s more to it than that. We believe in giving our visitors every opportunity – whether traditional, innovative, or downright wacky – to use, explore and engage with our collections in ways that they find appropriate and satisfying. What do you think? Let us know!

J.O.J. Frost’s Fifty Cent Paintings in a Wheelbarrow

By: Paul D'Ambrosio, Vice President and Chief Curator
The following post is from my other blog, American Folk Art at Cooperstown. Enjoy!

To say that you find folk art in the most unexpected places can be, in some circumstances, an understatement. Consider the case of John Orne Johnson (J. O. J.) Frost of Marblehead, Massachusetts. Frost was born in Marblehead in 1852 and went to sea as a young man, then settled down, married, had two children, and went into the restaurant business with his father-in-law. He retired due to illness in 1865 and helped his wife Annie raise her acclaimed sweet peas and flowers. After Annie’s death in 1919 he lived a quiet, solitary existence.

To fill his days, and perhaps overcome his grief, Frost took up painting. He depicted vivid scenes of Marblehead’s history, memories of his own life, and wooden models of ship, buildings, birds, and fish. Local legend has it that he often carted his paintings around town in a wheelbarrow, offering them for fifty cents each.

Eventually he was inspired to open his own museum at his home on Pond Street, where he built a small structure in the back and charged 25 cents to see his works and hear his stories of old Marblehead. Stories abound about how local folks made fun of the paintings, but did not deter Frost from his enterprise.

Frost died in 1928, and his son Frank inherited about 80 paintings. He sold some to a couple who arranged for a show at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, which marked Frost’s first recognition as an artist, however short-lived.
The drama really unfolded in 1952, when a Mr. and Mrs. Mason bought the old Frost home on Pond Street. One day, while doing renovations to the house, they turned over some wallboards and found that the insides were painted with colorful scenes. By the time they finished their work, the Masons had discovered 33 Frost paintings that had been used by the artist's son to “sheetrock” rooms! The Masons sent the paintings off to galleries in New York and Boston in 1954, and Frost’s reputation as a major early 20th-century folk artist was sealed. Today his works are in major museums around the country.
You can see an impressive collection of Frost’s work at the Marblehead Historical Society and we always have one on view at the Fenimore Art Museum (see "Colonel Glover's Fishermen Leaving Marble Head for Cambridge, 1775" above). To me, it is another reminder to pay attention to those passionate local people who paint or sculpt their lives. And don’t ever pass up a fifty-cent painting in a wheelbarrow.

Above: Colonel Glover's Fishermen Leaving Marble Head for Cambridge, 1775 , painted in about 1925. Gift of Stephen C. Clark, N0024.1961

Headless Bodies: Myth or Fiction?

By: Paul D'Ambrosio, Vice President and Chief Curator

The following post is from my other blog, American Folk Art at Cooperstown. Enjoy!

In the more than 25 years of doing folk art exhibitions and giving tours to the public, I can attest that there is one “fact” that nearly everyone believes about folk art: folk portrait painters in the early and mid- 1800s painted the bodies in the winter and traveled around in the summer offering to paint one’s head in a body of one’s choosing. In fact, every time I take a tour group through the folk art galleries there is someone who will say, “Oh, those are the portraits where they painted the bodies in the winter…” How this iron-clad association came to be, I have no idea. It has not appeared in any published sources that I know of, even the popular magazines or newspapers that write about folk art.
So it will probably come as no surprise to you that it is patently untrue. Not that I can prove it to be false, but it stands to reason that if this was a wide-spread practice we would have found some headless bodies by now. Maybe stored away in some attic. Or in an artist’s estate. Or a little New England historical society collection (they save everything). Or at least written about in some diary or newspaper account from the 1830s or 1840s. But there is nothing. Dead silence on this issue.

What we do have, by contrast, is heads without bodies. Doesn’t that make more sense? People were particular about their likenesses. Before photography was invented in 1839 the portrait you had painted may well have been the only likeness of you taken in your lifetime. Often, artists would start with the head, sometimes on the back

of a canvas to practice. Sometimes, the picture is left unfinished for some unknown reason, and the head is left to float forever on the blank canvas. It would be pretty inconvenient – and an inefficient way of doing business – to travel the highways and byways with a load of headless bodies on canvas, hoping that you can somehow sell them all on your travels.
I suspect that the reason this myth came to be is the simple visual fact that many folk portraitists utilized stock poses and backgrounds to speed production of their work. The portraits shown here, by Samuel Miller, illustrate this practice. There is a certain sameness to how people presented themselves, and how they dressed, and how their interiors looked, that made this way of doing portraiture acceptable in many circumstances. But that’s still a far cry from peddling headless bodies.

Top: Picking Flowers, ca. 1845. Attributed to Samuel Miller (ca. 1807-1853). Gift of Stephen C. Clark, N0255.1961.

Bottom: Emily Moulton, by Samuel Miller, 1852, courtesy Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH

Folk Art on the Way to Anywhere

By: Paul D'Ambrosio, Vice President and Chief Curator

The following post is from my new blog - American Folk Art at Cooperstown. Enjoy!

The most remarkable thing about folk art is that it can be found anywhere. Perhaps the most exciting place to find folk art is along the highways or back roads of any region in the country. There are numerous folk artists who do more than make art; they create experiences by transforming their property into artistic environments that can be explored on foot.

These roadside attractions have been around for decades, but they have received a great deal of attention in the past 20 years or so. The most famous example is Watts Towers in Los Angeles (above), created by Simon Rodia from the 1920s to the 1950s and now a National Historic Landmark. Rodia was an Italian immigrant who spent 33 years making these 99-foot-tall towers out of steel pipes and rods coated with mortar and embedded with ceramic and glass.
Some of my favorite environments are in the South. Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden in Summerville, Georgia (above), was an amazing experience up until the mid 1990s, when I had the pleasure of visiting on several occasions. Finster was a Baptist preacher who believed he was instructed by God to "paint sacred art." The garden was one way he had of spreading the Gospel. Much of the best art from the garden is now in the collection of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, a necessary step as exposure to the elements poses threats to many of these creations.
Another favorite folk environment is closer to home: Veronica Terrillion’s “Woman-Made” house and garden in Indian River, New York (above). I had the pleasure of meeting Mrs. Terrillion some years ago and getting a tour of her environment. It is a stunning collection of concrete figures that represent her life and her interest in nature. Veronica died in 2003, but her garden can still be seen from the roadside and can be visited by appointment. You can find out more here.

Why do these artists create these fantastic settings? Many are driven by an intense need to share some aspect of their lives, and for them, a picture or series of pictures isn't enough. They need to draw people into their world in a real, physical way. If you have ever been in one of these environments, you will quickly realize that being enveloped in some else's imagined and created world is an extremely effective way of understanding their life and its relation to your own. That really is the point of all art. It's just doubly impressive when someone with no prior aptitude in the arts is able to draw upon their manual skills gleaned from a lifetime of hard work to make something truly magical. I'll be featuring some stellar folk art environments in more detail in the weeks to come, so keep your eye out here and on the road. Do let me know if you see something I should be aware of.

After a visit to any one of the hundreds of these environments in the US, you will forever be on the lookout for great folk art on your journeys just about anywhere. It can make an ordinary trip the experience of a lifetime.

Need More Folk Art?

By: Paul D'Ambrosio PhD, Vice President and Chief Curator
Although I have been a contributor to the main Fenimore Art Museum blog for the past few months, it has always been in the back of my mind to devote an entire blog to a subject that has been my passion and my specialty for more than 25 years: American folk art. Recently, I decided to start a blog just for my graduate course in American folk art for the Cooperstown Graduate Program in Museum Studies. This seemed like a good way to foster communication among the students but also to share some of the interesting stories and experiences gleaned from 27 years of working with our renowned collection of American folk art.

Once I had this focus, the floodgates opened up. I immediately wrote down a list of about 50 blog posts that could be done without even doing research. And the stories were, shall we say, often quite colorful: folk masterpieces uncovered in the walls of a Marblehead, Massachusetts home; arcane allusions to Amazon warriors in a painting of a mermaid; portraits done by an artist while he was on the run from the law; and much more.

It occurred to me quite quickly that this blog might have broader interest than just the graduate students. And so my new blog, http://folkartcooperstown.blogspot.com/, was born. Please take a minute to check it out. You’ll get a new perspective on some artworks and artists you thought you knew, learn a lot of new things you hadn’t heard before, and gain a new appreciation of the creativity of ordinary men and women across the country. You might even have some great folk art stories to share. Either way, this blog will open your eyes to the art that is all around us.

Folk Art: It is what it is

By: Paul S. D'Ambrosio, PhD, Vice President and Chief Curator
Ah, the definition question. That has vexed folk art scholars for decades, mainly because the material is so varied and has attracted the attention of specialists with very different points of view ranging from community-based folklorists to aesthetically minded art historians. At Fenimore Art Museum, we generally take an art historical slant -- not surprising, I guess, since we are an art museum. The following is a working definition I developed for our permanent collection galleries about a decade ago. I'm hoping that some of my folklife colleagues will submit their own alternative perspectives here. For now, at least, here is what we use at the Fenimore Art Museum to guide our thinking about the folk art collection.

American Folk Art
At the end of the 19th century, a few collectors of Americana became interested in the aesthetic designs of redware, stoneware, glass and painted furniture produced in the colonial and federal eras. By the 1920s, proponents of avant-garde art admired a similar aesthetic between the painters and carvers of this period and the post-abstract art of the early twentieth century. In 1930, Holger Cahill, a curator at the Newark Museum, brought groups of 18th and 19th century American objects together for a ground-breaking exhibition entitled American Primitives. The visual power of the exhibition struck a chord in the American public and the basis for what is now termed American Folk Art was created. Cahill called folk art “the expression of the common people, made by them and intended for their use and enjoyment...It does not come out of an academic tradition passed on by schools, but out of a craft tradition plus the personal quality of the rare craftsman who was an artist.”
At about the same time, contemporary folk artists such as John Kane and William Edmondson achieved widespread acclaim at such prestigious institutions as the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The interest in “modern primitives” grew in the 1940s, due largely to the efforts of dealer/author Sidney Janis and the phenomenal popularity of Grandma Moses. In the post-war decades American Folk Art has come to be recognized as a major contribution to American art and culture.

The artists and artisans who created these works are a disparate group. Historically, some folk artists acquired practical skills through apprenticeship in a craft tradition—such as sign painting or ship carving—and made their living by providing necessary items like portraits or shop signs. Others, particularly women, learned watercolor or needlework in schools and seminaries and created pictures for friends and relatives. A significant number of folk artists in the past and today acquired traditional skills through informal, intergenerational example. Lastly, there are folk artists, especially in this century, who create images that are highly personal through they may draw upon popular culture, memory, and the artist’s particular cultural or ethnic heritage. No matter how or why folk art is produced, it is valued for its beauty and expressive power, for the dynamic aesthetic of linear forms, strong colors, the combination of decorative and utilitarian concerns, and the sense of familiarity it evokes by reflecting everyday life as well as the hopes and dreams of ordinary people. Folk art is produced all over the world, and in every part of the United States. It is the product of people from many different backgrounds, creating art for many different reasons. This exhibition focuses on five major impulses in the creation of folk art:

· Expression of religious beliefs and values
· Decoration for the home
· Documentation of self, family, place, and community
· Expression of patriotism and political beliefs
· Stimulation of commerce

These universal impulses cross cultural boundaries and exemplify basic values shared by many Americans. The sixty pieces in this exhibition relate to one or more of these themes, represent the collective cultural heritage of America, and reflect the contributions of many different people to the mosaic of American culture.

So, let us know how you think American Folk Art should be defined!

Above: American Memory: Recalling the Past in Folk Art, installed at Fenimore Art Museum