 |
| |
  |
|
|
|
|
EXPLORING
KENTUCKY- August 2000 by Katherine Tandy Brown Art from the Heart With only the “faux folk art” country look as reference, most people who visit the Kentucky Folk Art Museum (KFAM) in Morehead for the first time expect to see dulcimers and old farm equipment. Instead, they find a spacious facility vibrant with colorful sculptures, paintings, assemblages, walking sticks and altered found items, such as a fat gourd with airplane wings and wheels. Celebrating creative voices outside mainstream art, folk art is made by self-taught artists, most of whom have had no formal art training. Probably Kentucky’s best-known was the late Edgar Tolsen, a Campton woodcarver whose pieces can now command upwards of $30,000. “The old definition of folk art is that of an isolated, self-developing artist,” says the museum’s director, Garry Barker. “But it’s nearly impossible to be isolated these days. Now it’s described as more rustic, outsider art, naive art. We’re finding it more in urban areas than here in the mountains.” Just off I-64, this treasure has set a stellar precedent. “We’re not the only museum to have a folk art collection,” Adrian Swain, its curator explains, “but we are the only one that has a sole focus in its collection of work by self-taught Kentucky artists. As such, it’s an important part of the larger picture of the state’s visual arts.” Equating folk artists to traditional 1960s artists and craftsmen, Barker says, “They’re very humble. They don’t do the art for the critics or the market. They’d be doing it anyway. They do it because it’s in there and it’s got to come out.” Addressing the museum’s numerous requests for classes, he continues, “You can’t train a folk artist. They either are or they aren’t.” Barker should know. A Berea College graduate, he has been in arts administration since 1955. From his first job in South Carolina with the Southern Highland Craft Guild, the nation’s largest regional organization of quality craftsmen, he became director of the Kentucky Guild of Artists and Craftsmen for ten years and of Berea’s Student Crafts Program for 13 years. Three years ago, the directorship of KFAM gave him a long-sought “excuse” to return to Rowan County. An English major in college, he’s published nine books of fiction, history, essays and poetry, and writes a weekly column for several state newspapers. “Though I’ve been jurying and judging art shows all these years, I’m not an artist,” Barker says. “I think I may be considered a ‘folkwriter.’” He thinks the big advantage he’s had is “being able to relate to the artists and craftspeople themselves” because of his own creative bent, i.e. “to speak both languages.” As the result of a KFAM promotional program begun in 1989, a viable world market for area folk art has developed, which in part its museum store continues. “Folk art is not like the trend in contemporary crafts where you mass produce,” he continues. “Most of these people who consider themselves artists do one piece and charge a lot more for it. It’s good for the artists but frustrating for customers because we can’t get them 100 pieces, or even two that are identical.”
Now KFAM is serving as an anchor to redevelop the downtown section as an arts district, complete with more arts organizations and galleries, the one-room Moonlight School (where adult ed began), and the proposed Kentucky Center for Traditional Music, which will recognize the teachers of today’s country music stars. With the museum from its birthing, Swain came to Morehead in the 70s as a potter to teach in the high school artist-in-schools program. By the 80s he’d opened an art gallery, where he began meeting area folk artists. One day in 1984, in walked now-noted folk artist Minnie Atkins. “Her pieces were really wonderful,” says Swain. So he consigned a few, while she began marketing. At the same time, Dr. Robert Burns, MSU’s dean Arts and Sciences, and Tom Sternal, chair of its art department, began collecting Kentucky folk art “on a shoestring.” By 1987, they’d hired Swain as part-time curator, a position which grew to full-time by year’s end. Though “we were learning museum practices in the trenches,” says Swain, by 1990 the collection filled one large room. With a few pieces in galleries elsewhere, the innovative curator put together a lauded traveling exhibition called “Local Visions.” “It was our first big splash,” he says. The collection was “crammed into” its next space, a 600-square-foot house on the Morehead campus where it moved in 1992. That same year, Dr. Ronald Eaglin, MSU’s current visionary president, arrived, saw the folk art collection’s potential and got a half million dollars to renovate the Owen Grocery building. That turned out to be less than half the money needed, but at the suggestion of an interim director, when the collection became a private nonprofit corporation – the Kentucky Folk Art Museum – private donations supplied the rest. In 1997 KFAM finally inhabited its new not-quite-completed space. In a spacious upstairs gallery, exhibits change every two to three months. Two past shows – “African-American Folk Art In Kentucky” and “Kentucky Quilts: Roots and Wings” are on a two-year road trip, which should net more than $25,000 in rental fees. Swain used its most recent show, “Self-Made Worlds: Visionary Folk Art Environments,” as a springboard to teach kids to value and take pride in regionally-produced art. The closest art museum to many public schools in Eastern Kentucky, KFAM hosts classes in its Morehead facility and travels to them via its traveling Folk Art Mobile. Also under the museum’s expanding wings is the annual Appalachian Celebration, which next year will observe 25 years of such a rich myriad of traditional music, dancing, arts, crafts, theater and mountain culture workshops that it’s been named a “Top Twenty Travel Event” by the Southeastern Tourism Association two years in a row. Twice a year KFAM hosts Arts and Crafts Markets, one in December and one on the last Saturday in June, the same day as Minnie Atkins’ “Day in the Country” – the major folk art event of the year, says Barker – which she began in order to introduce some of her neighbors to some gallery owners. “The economic impact of folk art on Elliott County would be hard to measure,” he says, “But I know a number of area people who’ve been able to quit their jobs to become full-time artists. There’s such a pocket of self-taught artists in Elliott, Rowan, Fleming, Morgan and Lewis counties. The bulk of our collection still comes from that circle. Ours is the one program I’ve seen that most truly recognizes local culture and creativity.” The museum’s growth is currently threefold:
“Any visual art center is a place where people come to be stimulated, to be given the opportunity to see things a little differently than they’ve seen them before,” Swain explains. “Our job is to set the stage so that can happen. Whether it’s good art or effective art or inspiring art or art that will endure depends upon how well the artist is able to touch elements in common with the lives of the people who experience that art.” The KFAM offers that
intriguing possibility seven days a week. Katherine Tandy
Brown is a staff writer for The Lane Report.
|
|
|
Copyright 1996-2000, by Kentucky Business Online, LLC. All rights reserved. Editorial
content is copyright 2000, Lane Communications Group Buzzword and the Buzzword balloon are registered trademarks of Buzzword, Inc. The Lane Report is a trademark of Lane Communications Group. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. |
Housed in a
commanding, two-story red brick structure, the museum was
built around 1904 by “one of the Tollivers that
survived the Rowan County War.” According to Barker,
this 1870s political feud was Kentucky’s bloodiest.
“They didn’t have as good publicists as the
Hatfields and McCoys, but they were a lot better
shots,” he says. During the violence,
Morehead’s population fell from 900 to 100,
motivating a local donation to start a school, in hopes
it would end the feud. Thus began the institution known
today as Morehead State University (MSU).