Encyclopedia of American Folk Art

Abstract

Encyclopedia of American Folk Art Gerard C. Wertkin, Editor. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. The Encyclopedia of American Folk Art includes one very manageable volume -a guide to the objects, artists, and cultural background of three centuries of folk art in America. This comprehensive reference is a welcome contribution to a field dominated by the study of particulars, with most publications either monographs or exhibition catalogues. Editor Gerard Wertkin, the longtime director of the American Folk Art Museum in New York, engaged ninety-two contributors, most of whom are elite scholars from academia, and the curatorial staffs of America's leading fine and folk art museums. As specialists, they maintain the particularity required to do justice to a subject as diverse as folk art, but by their number, cover the subject broadly. Each of the 607 entries contains abundant information and is so well written that one is compelled to read beyond the original query. Readers will also appreciate the cross-references and individualized bibliographies following each entry. Unfortunately, the illustration quality falls short of text quality. Some reproductions arc indistinct, as if overenlarged, and some of the color plates are dull or yellowed. Inexplicably, the text does not reference the illustrations, a problem especially for the color plates, which are grouped together away from the entries that they illustrate. Four categories of entries provide different types of information. One category comprises entries on types of objects, including functional objects like face jugs, quilts, and weathervanes; religious objects like retabalos and gravestones; and aesthetic objects such as folk versions of landscape and still-life painting. A second category comprises entries on individual artists. With about four hundred biographies, this is by far the largest category, and one that reflects the idiosyncracy and individuality contrasting American folk art with the more class-based and traditionbound folk art of Europe. A third category comprises entries on the art of communal groups, identified by hyphenated terms such as German-, Scandinavian-, Asian-, African-, Native-, JewishAmerican folk art, and so on. These essays furnish historical background for situating individual objects and artists. Communal groups generally are defined ethnically or geographically, but there are also entries on the art of groups defined by estrangement from community, such as outsider art and visionary art. …