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Folk art emerged in twentieth-century Nova Scotia not as an accident of history but in tandem with cultural policy developments that shaped art institutions across the province between 1967 and 1997. For Folks Sake charts how woodcarvings and paintings by well-known and obscure self- taught makers and their connection to hand- work local history and place fed the publics nostalgia for a simpler past. The folk artists examined here range from the well-known self-taught painter Maud Lewis to the relatively anonymous woodcarvers Charles Atkin- son Ralph Boutilier Collins Eisenhauer and Clarence Mooers. These artists are connected by the ways in which their work fascinated those ac- tive in the contemporary Canadian art world at a time when modernism and the art market that once sustained it had reached a crisis. As folk art entered the public collection of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and the private collections of pro- fessors at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design it evolved under the direction of collectors and curators who sought it out according to a particular modernist aesthetic language. Morton engages national and transnational developments that helped to shape ideas about folk art to show how a conceptual category took material form. Generously illustrated For Folks Sake interro- gates the emotive pull of folk art and reconstructs the relationships that emerged between relatively impoverished self-taught artists a new brand of middle-class collector and academically trained professors and curators in Nova Scotias most important art institutions. Erin Morton is associate professor of visual culture in the Department of History at the University of New Brunswick. 1 7 M Q U P F A L L 2 0 1 6 A R T H I S T O R Y C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S For Folks Sake Art and Economy in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia erin morton A radical re-examination of art in Nova Scotia and the place of folk art in the cultural hierarchy of the twentieth century. S P E C I F I C AT I O N S McGill-QueensBeaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History November 2016 978-0-7735-4812-1 44.95A CDN 44.95A US 34.99 paper 978-0-7735-4811-4 110.00S CDN 110.00S US 84.00 cloth 7.5 x 9.75 392pp 76 photos full colour throughout Ebook available