For Folk's Sake: Art and Economy in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia Volume 20

ISBN-13: 9780773548121 / Angielski / Miękka / 2016 / 424 str.

Erin Morton

Opis

The practice of folk art in Nova Scotia is no accident of history. Rather Nova Scotia s relationship with folk art emerged in tandem with developments in Canadian cultural policy that helped to shape not only the history of art institutions across the province between 1967 and 1997. Erin Morton examines the emergence of folk art in late twentieth-century Nova Scotia by paying attention to the ways in which a conceptual category took concrete, material form. New archival research places the phenomenon of folk art within histories of cultural and economic development in the province under late capitalism, and charts how the woodcarvings and paintings of self-taught makers, both well-known (such as Maud Lewis) and relatively anonymous (such as Collins Eisenhauer) entered into the public collection of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and the private collections of professors at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. By engaging the national and transnational developments that have helped to shaped public and academic ideas about folk art more broadly, Morton shows that folk art developed in a museum setting through a class of collectors and curators who sought it out according to a particular aesthetic language in conversation with various forms of modernism. Illustrated with over eighty images, Folk Folk s Sake interrogates the emotive and nostalgic pull of folk art to radically reconstruct the relationships that emerged between relatively impoverished self-taught artists, relatively wealthy collectors, and academically-trained professors and curators in Nova Scotia s most important art institutions."