Folky Quilts and the Term Folkart

Block in a late-20th-century sampler quilt advertised as "Folky"

The term Folk Art is often used to describe quilts or other forms of artistic expression. But it's complicated.

I feel the term Folk Art is so vague with so many possible meanings and connotations that it is useless as communication. Is the above, crudely-stitched version of Marie Webster's commercial design "Wind Blown Tulips" folk art or "folky" as the seller describes it?

Webster commercial pattern introduced in

the Ladies' Home Journal in 1911

What did the seller mean when describing this design made from a 

commercial pattern as folky? Badly stitched?

 Folky thus means unskillful?

Apparently so.

But "folk art quilts" also means a style of commercial

quilts designed decades after Webster by artists such as

Gwen Marston and Barb Adams who sewed quite skillfully.

From Barb Adams's & Alma Allen's Blackbird Designs.

This "folky" style of quiltmaking was extremely fashionable in the 1980-2010 period: Muted colors, exaggerated, distorted star shapes, asymmetrical floral arrangements far from traditional Germanic repeat formats and lots of plaids. What an art historian might call manneristic or highly stylized. Quite the commercial success.

On line ad for a folky, artsy quilt.

What makes this folky? It looks well stitched.

It seems that any quilt is folk art.

So what is folk art?

David Hackett Fischer in his book Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America makes a distinction between the words "Folkways" and "Folklore," which encompasses folkart.

"The word folklore was coined by British scholar William Thoms in 1846 as 'the generic term under which are included...arts...and the like current among backward peoples."

William John Thoms (1803-1885)

A British snob interested in "backwards peoples"

or "less cultured classes of more advanced peoples."

Fischer goes on: "The idea of folklore was modified...biases still survive." Dell Thayer Upton, looking at housing types coined the word "Vernacular Architecture," in the early 1980s, a language term that does seem to specifically describe housing styles without reference to class.

The vernacular quilt?

Dated 1885, Putnam County, Tennessee

Two crazy quilts recently auctioned, described as "American Folk Art."

Crazy quilts, made with purchased packages of silk scraps and patterned in booklets one could buy for 25 cents were neither crude nor the product of "backward peoples." 

Note some other words above that do not apply: "Self-taught art" and "Outsider Art."

1885

Crazy quilts were a commercial fad based in main stream popular culture, a clever economic response to an abundance of silk cutaways in the garment industry.

Instructions 1884

In my view the word folkart has no meaning, but the word is useful

when hoping to appeal to a customer's vague sense of nostalgia.

A marketing tool I have been known to use. Here

some "Folk-Art Songbirds" in a pattern Karla Menaugh

and I published 20 years ago.

I don't have a substitute term but I like The Vernacular Quilt. 

Gallery exhibit of Hans Hoffman Paintings

Vernacular Art. The dichotomy here today is "High-faluting New York gallery art" like the above (and its wanna-be's) versus objects created by unpretentious people who enjoy expressing themselves or are compelled to create. It used to be "The Academy" versus visual expression by people who had no familiarity with the formally trained, academy-accepted venue for showing work.

An Academy exhibit in Paris

Whatever the time period, there's a dichotomy---high art/low art.

Kansas's Garden of Eden, built by Samuel P. Dinsmoor in

the early 20th century.

When I was in the business of documenting this category of expression we called it Grassroots Art, a term coined by Gregg Blasdel in a 1968 article in Art in America. It's also called Outsider Art (Outside the Academy???) and in French Art Brut, which means Raw Art. Other terms: Self-Taught Art---again alluding to the the lack of high-faluting art school influence.

Bettie Mintz, a Maryland antiques dealer showed this quilt in an old

Quilt Engagement Calendar.

The vernacular quilt?