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Illinois
Issues
December 2002
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Folk Art:
Sometime fine art, sometime craft, it defies definition
The workshop on the south side of Bloomington is snug, and all
the surfaces are coated with a yellowish film. Shelved against
the wall are strips of rosewood, hackberry, maple, walnut, sycamore,
cedar and sassafras.
“If you cut the sassafras with a saw,” observes Dale
Evans, a central Illinois maker of old-time musical instruments,
“it smells like root beer.”
Evans moves quietly around the work tables, pointing out the
table saw, band saw, drill press, sander, scroll saw, jointer
and wood lathe, as well as dozens of hand tools, including two
tiny carpenter’s squares fashioned of walnut and brass. On
the wall hang templates in the shape of double French curves,
the blueprints for pear-shaped violins or mountain dulcimers.
“No two instruments are alike. Each one is unique,”
he explains, pointing to a mountain dulcimer in the final stages
of construction. He’s still working on the nut and the bridge,
the top and bottom ends of the fretting, critical in the production
of the instrument’s tone. “Fretting is an art form,”
he says, holding up a roll of wire, which he snips and hammers
into precisely sawed lines in the neck of the instrument.
Like weaving baskets and carving duck decoys, making mountain
dulcimers is an Illinois folk tradition. And the practitioners
of these arts belong to small but well-defined communities of
artisans. Illinois is also home to potters, including Bill Heyduck
of Charleston, and quilters, such as Cora Meek of Mattoon. Like
the musical instruments made by Evans, their pottery and quilting
reinterprets and rejuvenates Illinois folk art, keeping it alive
for another generation.
At one end of the spectrum of what has been called folk art are
the traditional crafts, including chair making, basket weaving,
pottery throwing, textile weaving and metal working, skills usually
passed along from a learned master to an eager apprentice. At
the other end of the spectrum is so-called outsider art, the raw,
unpredictable and uninhibited objects created by self-taught artists
working outside the academy. This might include sculpture from
scrapped auto parts or the work of Chicago painter Lee Godie,
who makes her art from ballpoint pen ink, glitter, feathers and
bits of thread. In between these two extremes are the quilts,
dolls, duck decoys and weathervanes, and the portraits or landscapes
of such self-taught painters as Grandma Moses.
So folk art can be construed as something plain or decorative,
functional or nonfunctional, traditional or contemporary. And
because the term “folk art” suggests such a diversity
of forms, it defies easy definition. Yet, as the the spectrum
widens, folk art becomes more influential.
What remains constant in any reckoning of folk art, however,
is total commitment to craftsmanship, the artistic integrity of
the finished product. The mountain dulcimer, according to Evans,
is “an unforgiving instrument. If it’s not built right,
it will tear itself apart. You have to make it so it sounds good
and stays together. It took me 10 or 15 attempts to get it right.
Experience, experience, experience.”
Back in his apartment in downtown Bloomington, Evans plays and
displays all of the three dozen instruments that share his home,
along with many of his paintings from his art school days in the
late 1960s at Indiana University. Dale is a creative person, assembling
an er’hu, a two-string Chinese fiddle, from a tin can and
old violin strings. The thing produces a cello-like sound.
No surprise, Evans does programs at local schools and plays banjo
in the Tater Patch String Band, enjoying such traditional folk
tunes as Soldier’s Joy, Arkansas Traveler and Ragtime Annie.
And this genial and self-effacing luthier, or maker of stringed
instruments, is fulfilling presumptions about folk art. He works
with natural materials, follows traditional models and helps to
advance Illinois’ cultural tradition in folk music and its
particular instruments, including banjos and folk violins. Like
the potters and quilters and woodworkers, he is clearly making
a functional object, though many contemporary folk artists also
are producing entirely nonfunctional pieces.
Evans began as a claw-hammer banjo player, but his first instruments
were fabricated entirely from found objects, not exactly true
“folk art,” but certainly in tune with the nontraditional
mater-ials and forms of outsider art.
He admits a certain satisfaction in being able “to look
at a pile of junk and make an instrument.” Tin cans, broken
musical instruments, serviceable parts of chairs, tables and other
pieces of furniture can be cut, shaped and reconfigured into the
unexpected form of a musical instrument. His adaptive reuse, to
borrow an architectural term, of natural materials can be applied
to traditional forms with surprisingly “authentic” results.
Like a proud father, he shows off a beautiful mountain dulcimer,
an instrument the size of a violin that rests flat on the knees
and is plucked or strummed like a guitar. The mountain dulcimer
is Scots-Irish in origin and came west by way of the Appalachians,
then to Kentucky and southern Illinois. So this instrument is
truly part of the state’s heritage. This particular dulcimer,
however, was made from a discarded butcher’s block and an
abandoned chest of drawers.
“It’s a shame to send this stuff to a landfill,”
he laments. “It’s my pride and joy.”
Evans’ forte is the larger cousin of the mountain dulcimer,
the hammered dulcimer. He has made more than 260 of them, and
he keeps No. 100 in his apartment. Popular in the Eastern states
during the 19th century, the hammered dulcimer is a more upscale
instrument, requiring more skill to play and carrying a higher
price tag. He charges a reasonable $800 for his handmade version,
constructed of mahogany, redwood, walnut and hard maple. The strings
are delicately struck with two little walnut hammers, though in
the past folk musicians have substituted corset stays or bamboo
leaf-rake tines.
Some theorists insist folk art must follow a master-apprentice
pattern. And while that relationship certainly existed in the
past, contemporary folk artists often are revered precisely because
they fit no mold and work with complete independence — or
because their “master” takes the form of a blueprint
or another dulcimer. In the 21st century, as in the 19th and 20th,
folk art forms are disseminated by a variety of media, including
books, magazines, films and Web sites. This trend is particularly
evident in the communication of popular design motifs for American
quilts.
Folk artists share, in addition to commitment to craftsmanship,
a singular, personal vision. Each artifact they produce, no matter
how old or new, has a dramatic presence and carves out a special
niche in our consciousness, like the painted wooden fish made
by the late Arthur Ryan Walker of Sullivan in east central Illinois.
Like many artists, curators, potters and woodworkers, Evans balks
at the term “folk art,” probably because of the possible
negative connotations of that elusive concept. Folk art is sometimes
considered “naive” or “primitive,” something
produced by a person who is unskilled, self-taught or outside
the academic tradition — and there is some measure of truth
in those prejudices. But “folk” is a highly resonant
and positive word, too, as in folk music and folklore or the Ballet
Folklorico de Mexico.
Archaeologist Robert Mazrim, curator and owner of the Sangamo
Archaeological Center in central Illinois’ Elkhart, which
contains a treasure trove of domestic artifacts from Illinois
frontier life between 1780 and 1840, says any definition of folk
art “depends on the parameters of time and place.” Those
circles, he says, have been broadened. In fact, the closer we
come to the present, the more visible and influential folk art
becomes.
Evans concludes that he is working in the tradition of medieval
luthiers. “It is an art, but I think of myself as a folk
craftsman.” But his artistry is nevertheless recognized in
Tuning the Wood: Contemporary Illinois Stringed Instrument Builders,
a book about folk musical instruments that was published in 1987
by the Illinois State Museum.
This squeamishness about direct application of the term “folk
art” is plainly evident in the official language and catalog
descriptions used by such state agencies as the museum, the Department
of Transportation, the Illinois Arts Council and the Department
of Commerce and Community Affairs, which published last year a
volume titled Made in Illinois: An Artisan Gallery, lavishly illustrating
sculptural objects, textiles, jewelry and pottery. That book is
a visual testament to the variety, quality and beauty of art objects
currently being produced in abundance all over the state of Illinois.
One of the featured potters is Bill Heyduck, a former ceramics
professor from Eastern Illinois University, who exhibits regionally
and maintains a shop and studio in the east central Illinois community
of Charleston. His work is regularly offered for sale at the Tarble
Arts Center in Charleston and in the gift shops of the Illinois
State Museum in Springfield, Chicago and Rend Lake.
Like Robert Mazrim, Heyduck immediately alludes to the historical
tradition of pottery in Illinois, particularly the Kirkpatrick
Family, which originally located in Vermilionville in LaSalle
County in 1836, later moving to Anna and other locations in southern
Illinois. The family was famous for producing whiskey bottles
in the shape of pigs, some of which were incised with the map
of the Illinois Central Railroad and used as promotional items
by the company.
Mazrim was particularly taken with Wallace Kirkpatrick, famous
for his many whimsical designs, especially those depicting snakes,
which earned him the nickname “Mad Potter of Illinois.”
But the playfulness and directness of the Kirkpatrick designs
are very much at the center of traditional understandings of folk
art, which includes cigar store Indians, ship figureheads, weathervanes,
boot scrapers, dolls and bird decoys, as cataloged by Jean Lipman
in the classic American Folk Art in Wood, Metal and Stone, published
in 1948.
Many of these pieces have a humorous, even quirky, quality, and
Heyduck picks up on that aspect of the folk tradition in his various
“cat” creations, including pitchers, jars and teapots
lidded with distinctive cat heads. They have become his trademark,
as he has been producing them for the past 10 years, probably
under the influence of animal-shaped pottery collected during
a year he spent in Mexico.
He can’t keep up with the demand. “They’re all
useful,” he insists, gleefully pouring water from a teapot
with a spout shaped like the mouth of a cat.
Like Evans, Heyduck places a high premium on craftsmanship. Any
defective pieces are relegated to his “mistake shelf,”
the graveyard of cracked pots or those with runny glazes. In his
work building, his big bisque kiln has been fired exactly 180
times, according to his well-annotated log. Heyduck specializes
in stoneware, which is fired at 2200 to 2400 degrees Fahrenheit,
unlike earthenware pottery (terra cotta pots) that are fired at
temperatures around 900 to 2100 degrees. He keeps several shelves
stacked with jugs of raw materials, including talc, wood ash,
dolomite and feldspar, which can be combined with cobalt, chromium
and yellow ochre to produce, respectively, shiny glazes in brilliant
hues of blue, green and reddish brown.
“‘Craftsman’ to some people means just repeating
designs, but no one does that anymore,” says Heyduck. In
fact, his considerable body of original work eloquently demonstrates
that academically trained potters can and do participate in the
folk tradition, though he has no immediate master or predecessor.
Nor does he belong to a specific local tradition, like the potters
of southern Ohio, who still work in a distinctive regional style.
But Heyduck, like the snake potter Kirkpatrick, is an indisputable
Illinois original who has made a living from his craft or art,
however it is defined. He is squarely in the folk tradition. And,
if a label is required, it should be neo-folk artist.
This whole question of tradition becomes especially tricky to
assess in the area of quilting. Like pottery and the making of
old musical instruments, quilting seems to progress in a continuous
line from the recognizable patterns of 19th century quilts to
the thematic and art quilts of the present day, which may be abstract
expressionist creations in stitched cloth or eloquent pleas for
victims of AIDS or family abuse.
Quilting, especially that of such small communities as the Shakers,
the Amish and the Mennonites, would seem, at first glance, to
depend on a tradition and a master-apprentice mode of learning.
Yet all American quilters participated in a stylistic discourse
that depended on such common patterns and designs as Tumbling
Blocks, Wedding Ring, Sunburst, Starburst, Nine Patch, Pinwheel,
Hourglass and Diamond in the Square. Several thousand of these
patterns have been identified, and the historical truth is that
they were popularized by magazines and newspapers as much as they
were by individual quilters.
So an Amish quilter in Pennsylvania might secure a copy of the
Nine Patch pattern independently of her cousins, say, in Indiana
and Illinois who were making similar quilts. There is no such
thing as an Amish quilt per se, though there certainly are Amish-produced
quilts.
The quilt is a perfect example of the democratic spreading of
an artistic style through mass media. Even the cotton batting
used by quilters was commercially available as early as the 1840s,
around the time the frontier period ended in Illinois. So to find
a folk quilt, one must look deep into the historical record —
or seek signs of originality outside the media-driven patterns.
The decorative arts department at the Illinois State Museum contains
three quilts that meet these criteria handily. Sally Kincaid Mitchell’s
scrap wool quilt of orange and brown dominant tones with blue
striping and plaids was a unique creation that appeared around
the time the Illinois frontier ceased to be. Cotton appliqué
quilts such as the ones produced by Elizabeth Sutherland Jones
(leaf and berry design) and Katherine Schlesinger Kaiser (tulip
vase design) are utterly original products that, like all works
of art, proceed from a personal vision. These quilts are true
folk art while the other popular pattern quilts could be considered
“folk objects,” borrowing the nomenclature Mazrim uses
to distinguish the various types of early Illinois pottery.
Another indisputable folk art quilt is the denim scrap quilt
by Cora Meek, which is housed in the Tarble Arts Center. This
highly expressive design, with its white outlines of fish, leaves
and gingerbread men seems strangely modern, like a surrealistic
production of Dali or Miro. It has a style all its own. As Michael
Watts, director of Tarble, has observed, “There’s a
truth and directness to folk art, and you don’t want to see
that lost.”
The influence of folk art on other contemporary styles is now
an issue because examples of folk art, “naive art,”
or outsider art are on display at such museums as Intuit: The
Center for Intuitive and Outside Art in Chicago, the subject of
a recent Associated Press story. And we now have the paradox of
young artists at the Art Institute of Chicago painting academic
imitations of outsider art, just as Lisa Mahar’s nontraditional
painted chairs are featured in the Made in Illinois volume.
The lines are harder to draw, and the boundaries are more easily
broken. The Illinois Arts Council has solved the problem of defining
folk art by linking it to ethnic and community-based art, then
awarding grant money on that basis. No matter how we define it,
folk art is important to Illinois because it is a direct link
to our frontier past and a telling clue to the shape of our future.
In some ways, folk art is in the same position today as was that
raw form of pop music called “grunge rock” in the early
1990s when it was discovered and co-opted by the mainstream recording
studios. Young, plaid-shirted bands such as Pearl Jam and Nirvana
could hardly deserve claim “alternative” status once
they made the Top 40 charts. Will folk art suffer a similar fate
and be swallowed up by galleries, entrepreneurs and the arts network
in general? After all, folk art designs are already popping up
on posters and even on the cover of Time magazine. And the currently
popular film White Oleander ends with a scene of an “outsider”
artist recreating her life through a series of suitcases filled
with such symbolic objects as human hair, clothing and religious
icons.
Is it possible that we have begun a new era in art, one that
will be completely driven from the bottom up? That is, will folk
art become the pre-eminent art form of the 21st century, utterly
dominating and possibly eradicating the beaux arts or “fine
arts” tradition?
This general cultural theory called Postmodernism certainly suggests
that a movement toward openness and acceptance of diversity is
the direction of the future.
If the Intuit museum and SOFA, the International Exposition of
Sculpture Objects and Functional Art, which also claims Chicago
as its venue, are reliable indicators of the future, then folk
art, in one of its several guises, is undoubtedly here to stay.
And, in the end, folk art may not have a future because it may
be the future.
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