One of the pleasures of designing an exhibit is getting to know the objects to be displayed. Behind the piece itself is usually a story about the maker and their life. Sometimes that is easy to read into a piece and other times the artist only leaves clues and little else.
One of the most intriguing pieces in Fenimore Art Museum's upcoming exhibit Unfolding Stories: Culture and Tradition in American Quilts, is the Trade and Commerce quilt. Created around 1835 the quilt is an exuberant depiction of life along a major river and truly exceptional for its conception and execution. The delightful vignettes of trade and commerce on water and on land reflect the observant eye and compositional expertise of its maker, Hannah Stockton Stiles. She clearly was familiar with the maritime trade, and her accurate depiction of the boats that formed part of the river traffic is remarkable.
Who was Hannah? She was born in Trenton, New Jersey to John and Hannah Stockton. We know she was married in 1818 to John Stiles of Philadelphia. That means the Delaware River was a familiar setting for Hannah in both her childhood and married life.
She stitched her story into the quilt with some references we can only guess at. Is it possible that the figures at the lower center of the outside border represent Hannah and her family? Perhaps she kept a cow and drove to market. Did her family own any of the boats depicted on the quilt? Whatever the answers, it is clear that life along the river was a major part of who Hannah was and how her life was shaped.
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.
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.
Did you know that this painting was the inspiration for the layout of the Village Crossroads at our sister museum, The Farmers’ Museum? Its first-hand account of the organization of a mid-19th century rural New York village was the perfect primary source as The Farmers’ Museum was being created in mid-20th century. Want to learn more? You can check it out 
Lipman owned two great Peaceable Kingdoms by the Quaker minister and artist Edward Hicks, the earlier one incorporating a border with the paraphrased verse from Isaiah, and the later noteworthy for its unified and dramatic composition.
The Lipman Collection was especially strong in sculpture, and included a unique Cigar Store Figure with African features, reportedly made by a freed slave by the name of Job in Freehold, NJ.
After the acquisition of the Lipman Collection, the lower level of Fenimore House, a former swimming pool in Edward’s mansion, was filled in to create state-of-the-art galleries for all of the folk art holdings. (see photo below)
Why is this fireboard considered a great work of art? The unknown artist who painted the picture followed the guidelines of tastemaker Rufus Porter, who published a book in the 1820s (titled Curious Arts) and a series of articles in Scientific American in the 1840s on how to do mural painting and simple, effective decoration. Everything in Bear and Pears is on the horizon line, objects are made different sizes to give the illusion of depth, and the artist used a rag or sponge and stencils to paint faster. The result may be out of line with what we consider realism – the “pears” are larger than the house – but the balance of forms and colors is striking. It’s no wonder that so many of these untrained artists created works that bend the rules of realism; it requires a lot of training and experience to make a painting a “window” into the observed world. It is a testament to their innate artistic ability that the works these folk artists made were sought after by connoisseurs of modernism and eventually enshrined in museum collections.
When the New York State Historical Association Board Chairman and chief patron Stephen C. Clark hired Dr. Louis C. Jones in 1947 to lead the Association that he had brought to Cooperstown, the two of them made an unlikely team. Clark was a scion of the Singer Manufacturing Company fortune and a great collector of Post-Impressionist and Early Modern art, while Jones was an academic who was teaching English at the State College for Teachers in Albany. Jones initially did not want the job; his interests were local history and folklore. He was actually a member of a group that called itself The Society for Connoisseurship in Murder. It says a lot about Lou Jones’s personality that he was once quoted as saying “I personally like murders much better than riots. They have a kind of intimacy that the larger gatherings lack.”
