Folk Art: Vernacular Art from Traditional Communities

In 1930, a sculptor named Elie Nadelman and his wife, Viola, opened a museum in Riverdale, New York. They called it the Museum of Folk and Peasant Arts. Nadelman had been collecting folk art for years, buying weather vanes, shop signs, carousel figures, quilts, and decoy carvings from farmhouses and antique shops across New England and the American South. He was a classically trained sculptor who had exhibited at the Armory Show in 1913, but he believed that the best American art was not in galleries. It was on barns, in attics, and on the rooftops of rural houses. The museum's collection eventually grew to over 15,000 objects. Today, it forms the core of the American Folk Art Museum's holdings, and Nadelman's conviction that folk art deserves the same attention as fine art has become mainstream.

Folk Art is visual art made within a traditional community, where skills, patterns, and designs are passed down through generations rather than taught in art schools. It is vernacular art, meaning it belongs to the people who make it and use it, not to an elite class of professional artists. Folk art objects are typically functional as well as decorative: quilts, weather vanes, shop signs, carousel animals, decoy carvings, pottery, furniture, and religious icons. The makers are usually anonymous or known only by local reputation. They learn their craft through apprenticeship, family tradition, or community practice, not through formal education.

This entry covers what folk art is, how it differs from fine art and from Outsider Art, the traditions that define it, and how it has been collected and valued by the art world.

What Is Folk Art?

Folk art is notoriously difficult to define. The Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, acknowledges that "there is no one definition of folk art" and considers multiple concepts in collecting and displaying it. The museum identifies several characteristics: folk art "may be decorative or utilitarian," "may be used every day or reserved for high ceremonies," "is handmade," "is traditional," and "is of, by, and for the people." Read more at Museum of International Folk Art.

The key distinction between folk art and fine art is how the maker learns. Fine artists are trained in art schools or academies, where they study art history, anatomy, perspective, and technique. Folk artists learn within a community, through demonstration and practice. The Austrian art historian Alois Riegl, in his 1894 study Volkskunst, Hausfleiss, und Hausindustrie, stressed that "the individual hand and intentions of the artist were significant, even in folk creativity." The folk artist works within inherited forms and conventions, but individual creativity and technical skill prevent those forms from stagnating. Each generation renews the tradition through personal choices and innovations.

Folk art is not the same as Naïve Art. Naïve artists are self-taught individuals who work outside any tradition. Folk artists are trained within a tradition, even if that training is informal. The Canadian Encyclopedia distinguishes between "cultural" folk art, which "has an ethnic basis" and "reflects the common ethos in a community," and "individual" folk art, which is "the expression of a unique if sometimes eccentric personality." Both are folk art because they emerge from and serve a community, not because the maker lacks training. Read more at The Canadian Encyclopedia.

History and Origins

Folk art is as old as human communities. Every culture that makes objects by hand produces folk art. The category as we know it, however, was created in the 19th century, when industrialization began to replace handmade objects with mass-produced ones. As factories replaced workshops, the handmade objects that had filled everyday life became rare, and collectors began to value them as artifacts of a disappearing way of life.

In Europe, the study of folk art was linked to nationalism. Scholars in Germany, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe collected folk objects as evidence of national character. The term Volkskunst (folk art) was coined in Germany in the late 19th century. In Britain, William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement looked to folk traditions as a model for reforming industrial design. Morris believed that the handmade object, produced by a craftsman who understood both the material and the tradition, was morally superior to the factory product.

In the United States, folk art collecting began in the 1920s, when modernist artists and collectors discovered that early American folk art shared qualities with modern European art. Elie Nadelman, Holger Cahill, and Edith Gregor Halpert were among the first to collect and exhibit American folk art as art rather than as historical artifacts. Cahill organized "American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America, 1750-1900" at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932, giving folk art its first major museum exhibition. The exhibition treated folk art with the same seriousness as fine art, a radical move at the time.

Folk Art Traditions and Forms

Quilting

Quilting is one of the most widespread folk art traditions, practiced in America, Britain, France, and many other cultures. American quilting developed from European traditions brought by settlers in the 17th and 18th centuries. Quilts were both functional bedcovers and expressions of communal creativity. Quilting bees, where women gathered to sew together, were social events as well as work sessions. The patterns, from geometric designs like the Log Cabin and Flying Geese to pictorial quilts showing scenes of farm life, were passed down through families and communities. The quilts of Gee's Bend, Alabama, made by African American women descended from enslaved people on the Pettway plantation, are among the most celebrated folk art works in America. They were exhibited at the Whitney Museum in 2002 and have been compared to the work of Abstract Expressionist painters like Mark Rothko and Piet Mondrian.

Weather Vanes

Weather vanes are one of the most distinctive forms of American folk art. Mounted on barns and public buildings, they combined function with decoration. The most common forms were horses, roosters, and arrows, but makers also produced cows, fish, locomotives, and angels. Weather vanes were typically made of copper, hammered into shape over a wooden mold and gilded. The makers were often anonymous, and their work was valued for its silhouette and surface patination rather than for individual style.

Decoy Carving

Decoy carving is a folk art tradition practiced by hunters along the Atlantic coast of North America. Wooden decoys were carved to attract wild waterfowl, and the best carvers combined functional effectiveness with sculptural beauty. The carvers of the Susquehanna Flats in Maryland, the Delaware Bay, and the Massachusetts coast developed regional styles that are now collected as sculpture. Elmer Crowell of East Harwich, Massachusetts, is considered the greatest decoy carver. His Canada goose decoy (c. 1910) sold at auction for $1.2 million in 2007.

Shop Signs and Figureheads

Before literacy was universal, shop signs used images to identify trades. A boot indicated a shoemaker, a pair of scissors indicated a tailor, a mortar and pestle indicated a pharmacist. In America, cigar store Indians were carved wooden figures placed outside tobacco shops. Ship figureheads, carved wooden figures mounted on the prow of sailing ships, were another folk art tradition. The best figurehead carvers, like John Haley Bellamy of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, developed distinctive styles that are now highly valued by collectors.

Religious Folk Art

Religious folk art is one of the oldest and most widespread forms. In Catholic Quebec, votive paintings commemorating miraculous events, like escape from shipwreck through the intervention of Sainte-Anne, were produced by self-taught painters and displayed in churches. In New Mexico, retablos, small paintings of saints on wood panels, and bultos, carved wooden statues of saints, were produced by Hispanic artisans from the 18th century onward. The santeros (saint makers) of New Mexico, including José de Gracia Gonzales and Pedro Antonio Fresquis, worked within a tradition that combined Spanish colonial religious imagery with local materials and aesthetic preferences.

Folk Art vs. Outsider Art vs. Naïve Art

The boundaries between folk art, Outsider Art, and Naïve Art are frequently debated. Folk art is communal and traditional. The folk artist works within an inherited tradition, producing objects that serve a function within their community. Outsider Art is individual and compulsive. The Outsider Artist works in isolation, driven by internal vision, with no connection to any tradition or community. Naïve Art is individual but connected to the art world. The naïve artist is self-taught but aware of art conventions and may exhibit or sell their work.

The Wikipedia article on folk art notes that "the makers of folk art are typically trained within a popular tradition, rather than in the fine art tradition of the culture" and that "there is often overlap, or contested ground, with 'naive art.'" The distinction is not always clean. Edward Hicks (1780-1849), the American Quaker painter who produced over 60 versions of The Peaceable Kingdom, is claimed by both folk art and naïve art. He was self-taught as a painter but worked within the Quaker community's visual traditions.

Folk Art in Museums and the Market

Folk art entered the museum world in the early 20th century and has been gaining institutional recognition ever since. The Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, founded in 1953, holds the world's largest collection of folk art. The American Folk Art Museum in New York, founded in 1961, focuses on American folk art and Outsider Art. The Smithsonian American Art Museum has a significant folk art collection.

The folk art market has grown steadily. Major auction houses, including Sotheby's and Christie's, hold regular sales of American folk art. The highest prices are for weather vanes, decoys, and portraits from the 18th and 19th centuries. The market is driven by collectors who value folk art for its aesthetic qualities as well as its historical significance.

See Folk Art in Person

The Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe holds over 130,000 objects from around the world. The American Folk Art Museum in New York focuses on American folk art and Outsider Art. The Shelburne Museum in Vermont has an extraordinary collection of American folk art, including weather vanes, decoys, and carousel figures. The Musée du Quai Branly in Paris holds folk art from Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

If you want to understand folk art, visit the Shelburne Museum in Vermont, where weather vanes, decoys, and shop signs are displayed in a setting that explains how they were used. Then visit the American Folk Art Museum in New York to see how folk art has been recontextualized as fine art. For more on related categories, read our entries on Outsider Art and Naïve Art, or explore our post on how to read a painting to see how folk artists approach composition and color without academic training.