Dear Friends,
As 2024 draws to a close, I am honored to reflect on the many amazing highlights from an eventful and impactful year at the American Folk Art Museum.
In 2024, we welcomed the largest number of visitors to the Museum in five years, including 2,000 students, and led 300 guided exhibition tours. This fall we also celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Museum Career Internship Program, which offers paid opportunities to undergraduates to learn about all aspects of museum administration. It is a vital program that has grown into the cornerstone of our education initiatives, and we are so proud to have reached this milestone with our dedicated partner LaGuardia Community College. We look forward to another 10 years of providing students with this unique hands-on learning experience.
The Museum’s commitment to our local community remains unwavering, and we continue to seek new ways to strengthen those relationships. Earlier this autumn, we welcomed Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine and New York City Council Member Gale Brewer for tours of our exhibitions and to deepen relationships with our elected officials as we look to the future of AFAM and our important role among New York City’s art institutions.
Our current exhibitions, Anything but Simple: Gift Drawings and the Shaker Aesthetic and Playing with Design: Gameboards, Art, and Culture, have given our galleries a special buzz this season, and earned more positive coverage from the press. The New Yorker recently called Anything but Simple “an exuberant exhibit” that shows “when it comes to art, the [Shakers] should be known for far more than its furniture,” while 4Columns hailed it as a “marvel” and a “quiet celebration of a context in which women’s work was of equal value to that of men.” Emelie Gevalt, AFAM’s Curatorial Chair for Collections and Curator of Folk Art, also contributed a terrific essay on Playing with Design to the most recent edition of Americana Insights, a leading publication dedicated to the research and study of Americana and American folk art. I hope you can visit AFAM to view both of these absorbing exhibitions before they close on January 26.
The Museum was also recently awarded a significant grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) to fund the digitization of the Healing Arts Initiative (HAI) artistic archive, which AFAM acquired in 2022. For nearly five decades, HAI created a platform and a community for some of New York City’s most culturally underserved residents, specifically the elderly, individuals with low-income, and people living with mental illness. The Museum is committed to conserving this collection, as well as making it accessible to artists, students, researchers, and the broader public. Now, for the first time, these thousands of individual artworks by hundreds of artists will be digitized to ensure broader access to the archive and greater awareness of HAI.
Later this month, we will launch our latest publication, Francesc Tosquelles: Avant-Garde Psychiatry, Radical Politics, and Art, which is published in conjunction with AFAM’s groundbreaking and critically-acclaimed 2024 exhibition on the Catalan psychiatrist. Consisting of 31 essays by international contributors, the publication marks a major milestone in Tosquelles scholarship as the first-ever comprehensive study to be printed in English. Many of the essays were commissioned specially for this publication, and I am confident it will become a standard text for research on 20th-century self-taught art.
Looking ahead to next year, I am so excited to share first details about our forthcoming spring exhibition, Madalena Santos Reinbolt: A Head Full of Planets (February 12 – May 25). This landmark survey for the self-taught Brazilian artist Madalena Santos Reinbolt—who is best known for her large-scale embroideries made from hundreds of vibrant colored threads—marks the first-ever solo museum show for Santos Reinbolt organized outside her native Brazil. We are honored to partner with the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) in São Paulo, Brazil, in presenting this groundbreaking exhibition. Stay tuned for more details to be announced soon!
Much more is in store for the Museum in 2025, including the temporary closure of AFAM next summer as we continue with the ongoing renovations to our home at Lincoln Square. We will share further specifics on the renovations and timeline in the coming months, but we are excited to reopen a whole new American Folk Art Museum next year.
I hope you are as inspired as I am about the future of the American Folk Art Museum, and invite you to consider making a donation or becoming a member of the AFAM to support all the exciting initiatives we have planned.
As Director of the nation’s museum of folk and self-taught art, I am continually humbled by the unyielding support of our patrons, donors, and members – whose financial contributions critically allow the Museum to remain free to all. My AFAM colleagues and I are grateful for our community of supporters that share in our mission of celebrating the accomplishments of folk and self-taught artists across time and place. We are more committed than ever to delivering on that mission, and, as we continue to reach new milestones in the year ahead, please consider making a gift to AFAM’s Annual Fund to celebrate #GivingTuesday tomorrow or as a gift during the holidays. Every donation will be matched, dollar for dollar, up to an aggregate of $20,000, thanks to a generous gift from a long-time Trustee and patron.
Your contribution will empower AFAM to increase opportunities for engaging and inspiring audiences of all ages through the exhibitions and programs we host at the Museum.
Wishing you and yours holiday cheer!
With gratitude,
Jason T. Busch
Becky and Bob Alexander Director & CEO