Folk Art Chronicles

Archive for July, 2009

I absolutely love the motto of the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles: “Because a shrinking world requires an expanded mind!”

I‘ve followed this Museum, founded in 1973, since before it even existed—it evolved from an amazing shop on Wilshire boulevard called The Egg and I—created by Edith Wyle an intrepid cultural explorer.

We share a similar vision that diverse and myriad cultures can be understood through art which reflects universal themes common to us all.

It is amazing what can be accomplished in a modest space with a well curated exhibition. Such is the case with the two current shows at the Museum.

Celestial Ash: Assemblages from Los Angeles introduced me to four artists from southern California that I didn’t previously know: Matjames, Exene Cervenka, Gail Greenfield and Michael McMillen.

Curated by Kristine McKenna, the show’s common thread is the influence of Joseph Cornell and an emotional, introspective treatment of their materials. According to McKenna, (it’s) what they bring to these materials that transforms them. They revere what these objects represent: the past, and a kind of America that’s rapidly disappearing. They treat the objects as holy relics, so that’s how we read them.”

Matjames was living in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina destroyed his home, studio and much of his work. His artwork elevates objects that have been disregarded and discarded and gives them new value and meaning.

“People have their grandparents’ tea sets in their cabinets and hold them in high regard. But why can’t other objects be held in that same regard? I find a pencil on the ground and I bring it home. What could have been written by that pencil? It might have been a school kid’s pencil, or it could have been Einstein’s. There’s an energy to each thing. It carries a history, a haunting.”

For Exene Cervenka, “it’s all about the past, re-creating the past, reinterpreting the past.”

During the 30 years that she toured with the band X, she kept journals that evolved into picture books with fragments of poetry and keepsakes and eventually became collages.

Cervenka’s assemblages in the exhibition incorporate newspapers, dictionary pages, jigsaw puzzles, greeting cards, butterfly charts, Christian imagery, empty photo corners, blank labels and assorted small objects.

Gail Greenfield Randall fills the shelves of her shadowboxes with found objects and personal keepsakes: sea urchin spines, a miniature Bible, old medicine bottles, polished stones, small rusty bells. She remembers her grandmother “had a drawer that had dividers and each of the compartments held something delicious: like seashells, a pocket watch, a sewing kit, a cameo, a pair of old passports, a lock of hair. “I just loved it. When she passed away, I started making assemblages, using some of the materials I’ve collected over the years and objects that had belonged to her. I found the form not just therapeutic but incredibly satisfying.”

Randall’s pieces embody a coherent narrative in which the box provides a stage where a drama unfolds.

The final component in the exhibition is an installation “Asylum of Lost Thoughts” by Michael McMillen, entered through two creaky doors that lead you into a “theatre” composed of discarded items like an abandoned hospital ward. From here, you view a film that in itself is like an assemblage in motion. Each frame of the film, composed of all manner of strange images, some from old educational films, is like an assemblage or collage in itself. Your thoughts and feelings are directed by the music and its mood. Is this the inside of his brain?

“I’ve always been a collector of things, trying to recombine them into new things. It started when I was a little kid. I would patrol the alleys of Santa Monica, looking for stuff. A lifelong habit, I’m afraid. I’ve been fascinated by the way things go from A to Z, the history of their existence, how objects change. Maybe, without being too morbid, it’s a meditation on mortality, a contemplation of that.”

After spending an enchanting hour in the exhibition, Phillip Hunt, the sales person in the Museum shop directed me to the internet to view more of Michael McMillen’s work on line.

The exhibition Celestial Ash will be at CAFAM until September 13. For more information see the review by Leah Ollman in the Los Angeles Times. All the above photos are drawn from the LA Times and the CAFAM website.

While doing some research for a new client this week, I was reminded of two favorite books about folk art and how useful and inspiring they have been to me over time.

Both The Spirit of Folk Art by Henry Glassie and The Extraordinary in the Ordinary edited by Mary Hunt Kahlenberg speak of collections at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico (ah, the Folk Art Museum–a little bit of heaven on earth!) and address the much debated definition of folk art.

The books discuss two great lovers and collectors of folk art and how they became seduced by folk art and how they made their personal selections. According to Lloyd Cotsen, the objects…”speak of extraordinary beauty with an inner capacity to bring a sense of joy and fulfillment to my eye and heart.”

Henry Glassie interacting with the Alexander Girard collection at the Museum says “As the incarnation of the excellence of different cultures, art is the ideal resource for the person who would understand human unity and diversity. (Folk art provides) encounters that excite, confuse and nudge us toward knowledge.”

These two statements together eloquently provide the two different paths that led me to a love of folk art.