Dear Friend,
As we celebrate the last days of the season, I am delighted to look back on an eventful summer at the Museum, as well as look forward to an exciting autumn ahead.
Our summer marquee exhibition Francesc Tosquelles: Avant-Garde Psychiatry and the Birth of Art Brut was a resounding success and reviewed favorably in The New York Times and The New York Review of Books, among other news outlets. The American Folk Art Museum was the only North American institution to host the exhibition, following presentation at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Spain, and I am immensely proud of my colleagues at AFAM, especially Senior Curator of Self-Taught Art and Art Brut Valerie Rousseau, for organizing such a groundbreaking exhibition that critically examined the history of mental health, institutionalization, and artmaking, as well as one that served as a powerful reminder of the universal, transformative power of art.
This summer also marked the opening of FOLK: Selections from the American Folk Art Museum at the Peoria Riverfront Museum in Peoria, Illinois, alongside the inaugural exhibition of the Peoria museum’s Center for American Decoys, which includes loans of 50 extraordinary waterfowl decoys from AFAM’s collection. I had the tremendous pleasure of visiting Peoria in August to celebrate the opening of the Center and their landmark collaboration with the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, who were commissioned to create the Center’s displays.
The opportunity to partner with the Peoria Riverfront Museum for the exhibitions of decoys and FOLK is a model example of our conscientious work to expand access and highlight the breadth and range of art produced in an ever changing America. And that mission is one that is shared by the Art Bridges Foundation in Arkansas, whose critical support helped make these exhibitions a reality and reinforces our commitment to expanding the horizons of folk and self-taught art.
The American Folk Art Museum has now successfully organized five traveling exhibitions in the last several years, like FOLK, drawn from our Museum’s collection and based upon the critical scholarship of our exceptional curatorial team, which have presently toured two dozen states and brought self-taught artists to new audiences around the country. The AFAM continental tour continues this month with openings of Mystery & Benevolence: Masonic and Odd Fellows Folk Art at the Kalamazoo Valley Museum in Kalamazoo, Michigan, as well as Handstitched Worlds: The Cartography of Quilts at the Fleming Museum of Art at the University of Vermont in Burlington.
Back in New York, we are also excited to welcome you to our fall shows, Anything but Simple: Gift Drawings and the Shaker Aesthetic and Playing with Design: Gameboards, Art, and Culture, which open to the public this Friday! Both exhibitions showcase unique aspects of art and design from American culture and history and are organized by Curator of Folk Art Emelie Gevalt and Art Bridges Fellow Austin Losada.
Coinciding with the 250th anniversary of Shakerism in the United States, Anything But Simple features rarely seen drawings made by women from the Shaker communities during the mid-19th century that are believed to represent divine messages. Often given as tokens to other Shakers during meetings, these vibrant artworks on paper, symbols of love and nature, mark a distinct contrast with the clean lines typically associated with Shaker design and material culture. We are grateful to the Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, which originated the exhibition and is sharing many of these rarely traveled works, in addition to loans of Shaker artworks from generous collectors across the nation.
Playing With Design features over 100 handmade gameboards made in North America between the mid-19th and early-20th centuries, and includes early examples of classic games of Parcheesi, checkers, and chess, as well as hand-painted iterations of Monopoly and Chutes and Ladders. The exhibition explores how gameboards give material shape to the ideals that have informed American culture over the course of more than 100 years, including morality, religion, patriotism, entrepreneurship, and imagination. A significant number of works in the exhibition were donated to the Museum this summer or are promised gifts from the collection of Doranna and Bruce Wendel, who have long been champions of folk art and gameboards in particular, amassing the premier collection on the subject over many decades. AFAM is honored to now be the steward of such a legendary and important collection.
Meanwhile, in the Daniel Cowin Gallery, our exhibition Somewhere to Roost continues to dazzle guests with a fresh installation of dozens of works from the Museum’s collection, including paintings, textiles, photographs, and sculptures, all of which explore the ways that artists evoke and construct ideas of “home.” This exhibition is the third presentation of AFAM’s ever-evolving collection, organized by Luce Assistant Curator Brooke Wyatt and sponsored by a generous grant from The Henry Luce Foundation in New York.
On the horizon, AFAM’s annual benefit gala will take place Friday, October 25th on the Hudson River at Chelsea Piers, and this year’s “Casino Night” theme is an homage to and celebration of Gameboards and the history of play and games in American culture. We are thrilled to have esteemed honorees at this year’s gala, whose support has made a lasting impact at the American Folk Art Museum: inspiring patrons, Trustee Bobbi and Ralph Terkowitz, and Miriam Buhl, pro bono counsel, Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP, who has magnanimously supported legal services at AFAM over many years. Additionally at the event, we will present self-taught artist and musician Otis Houston Jr. with the Museum’s Visionary Award. Based in East Harlem, Houston began making art after taking a class while incarcerated. Since 1997, he has maintained an ongoing presence under the Triborough Bridge on the FDR Drive in New York, where he stages impromptu performances and a site-specific installation of signage and sculpture.
Established in 2008 through the generous support of our beloved, late Trustee Audrey B. Heckler, the Visionary Award honors an individual, institution, or project that has made a unique and distinctive contribution to the field of self-taught and vernacular art. Tickets to the gala are still available, and if you are interested in attending, please click here for ticket pricing and details.
Our impact is far and wide, and AFAM is proud to engage hundreds of thousands of people onsite in Manhattan and online across the globe. Indeed, our online programs have reached audiences in more than 60 countries across nearly every continent. Our commitment to learning and engagement in folk and self-taught art across time and place will become even more robust through a new Museum website, significant funding of which has been provided this summer by the Booth Ferris Foundation in New York. The multi-year website initiative will be led by Derek Parsons, Chief Communications and Audience Officer, who joined AFAM in August after serving as Vice President of Communications at Sotheby’s in New York, where he oversaw all media relations and communications in promoting Sotheby’s in the Americas. Derek joins our leadership team as we also welcome our 30th Trustee to the American Folk Art Museum, James Rohrbach, an entrepreneur and artist who was recently recognized by The New York Times for his business mentorship in preparing future generations of artists and art professionals.
With so much information to share, I hope to see you in our galleries soon.
Game on!
Jason T. Busch
Becky and Bob Alexander Director & CEO