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For Folk's Sake
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For Folk's Sake

Art and Economy in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia
By Erin Morton
Art/Photography/Design: Canadian, Cultural Studies
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9780773599864

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A radical re-examination of art in Nova Scotia and the place of folk art in the cultural hierarchy of the twentieth century.


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 Folk’s Sake charts how woodcarvings and paintings by well-known and obscure self-taught makers - and their connection to handwork, local history, and place - fed the public’s 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 Atkinson, Ralph Boutilier, Collins Eisenhauer, and Clarence Mooers. These artists are connected by the ways in which their work fascinated those active 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 professors 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 Folk’s Sake interrogates 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 Scotia’s most important art institutions.
Details

Part of the McGill-Queen's/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History Series (number 20 in series)

424 Pages, 7.5 x 9.75

76 photos, full colour throughout

ISBN 9780773548121

October 2016

Formats: Cloth, Paperback, eBook

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“An exciting, timely, important, and wonderfully written book that emphasizes the role of late capitalism in the development of the field of folk art, For Folk’s Sake illuminates new histories around the establishment of Nova Scotia as the folk art capital of Canada.” Sandra Alfoldy, NSCAD University
"Morton advances-and brilliantly illustrates-her main thesis that the emergence of folk art in Nova Scotia, a longtime very rural province, was not something that happened spontaneously, but that it was the result of a complex set of converging historical, political, and institutional changes that reshaped art and culture in the decade 1967-1977. The mechanisms that Morton studies have an almost universal value, such as the relationship between art and cultural policies, the shifting transformations of the discourse and appreciation of art over time, the semantic and ideological complexity of a notion such as value, the convergent as well as divergent interests of all actors in the field, the importance of power relationships in the cultural field, in short the impossibility to accept that art, be it the special type of art that is folk art, can exist just "for art's sake"-all these questions are carefully discussed in this passionately committed book that deserves a wide readership." Leonardo
Erin Morton is associate professor of visual culture in the Department of History at the University of New Brunswick.
Contents

Acknowledgments • xi

Preface • xv


INTRODUCTION

1 The Historical Presentism of Folk Art • 3

2 A Genealogy of Folk Art in Canada: Nostalgia and the Ancestry
of Modern Art • 17

PART ONE
Art Institutions and the Institutionalization of Folk Art

3 “Behind ThoseWeathered Doors”: Chris Huntington, the Art Gallery
of Nova Scotia, and the Institutionalization of the Folkloric Future • 39

4 Teaching the Self-Taught: Collins Eisenhauer, the Nova Scotia College
of Art and Design, and the Art-World Economies of Folk Art • 86

5 “Tales of These Halcyon Days”: The Centralized Decentralization
of Regional Culture Making • 133


PART TWO
Maud Lewis and the Social Aesthetics of the Everyday

6 Ordinary Affects: Public History,Maud Lewis, and the Cultural Object
of Optimism in Rural Nova Scotia • 175

7 Commemorative Expectations: The Community-Corporate Model
of the Maud Lewis Painted House Preservation • 218

8 ArtWorks: The Maud Lewis Authority, Tourism, and Neoliberal Copyright • 260


CONCLUSION

9 The After Images and After Affects of Folk Art in the Present • 295


Illustrations • 305

Notes • 313

Bibliography • 373

Index • 393
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Leonardo review by Jan Baetens
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