Dear Friends,
As spring quickly approaches here in New York City (after what feels like an especially cold winter!), it has been an auspicious start to 2025 at AFAM.
It fills me with great pride to share the fantastic news, just announced today, that the American Folk Art Museum was voted the #1 Best Art Museum in America by readers of Newsweek magazine in their annual poll! Voting for the Best Art Museum 2025 contest was open for the month of February, and Newsweek’s readers, which typically average about 50 million per month, selected the American Folk Art Museum as the best-of-the-best among the 15 institutions nationwide shortlisted for the distinction. I am honored that AFAM was nominated alongside so many world-class museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Art Institute of Chicago. My colleagues and I are overjoyed to announce this news to the amazing AFAM community, and we are grateful to each and every one of our supporters who banded together to give the nation’s museum of folk and self-taught art the recognition it deserves!
The Newsweek contest comes on the heels of further praise for the Museum in the press in the past several weeks. We were recently named one of the best museums in New York by Town & Country and Veranda magazines. To be recognized on such a national scale not only represents the strength of our profile in New York as an indispensable member of the city’s vibrant cultural community, but also the fulfillment of the Museum’s goal of expanding our profile by bringing our collection and exhibitions to other institutions around the nation. And this spring, we are continuing to offer loans from our collections and to travel our exhibitions widely with Mystery and Benevolence: Masonic and Odd Fellows Folk Art on view at the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Wall Power! Spectacular Quilts from the American Folk Art Museum on view at the Susquehanna Art Museum in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. As we look ahead to the future of even further loans and more exhibitions in states where we have yet to introduce AFAM and our collections, I am excited to welcome more of the country into the American Folk Art Museum community.
All of these accolades in the press are a testament to the amazing staff at the Museum whose commitment and hard work have elevated our profile and reputation with our renowned exhibitions and programs, as well as so much more work being done behind the scenes to support all that we do. I am truly grateful to work alongside such dedicated colleagues, and believe there are only bigger and better things for AFAM to achieve on the horizon.
On that note, I would like to share a few recent changes in staffing that reflect this excellent work. Earlier this year, we announced that Emelie Gevalt was promoted to Deputy Director and Chief Curatorial and Program Officer. In her expanded role, Emelie will oversee all aspects of the Museum’s exhibition programs, art collections, and learning and engagement activities, while continuing to curate exhibitions and maintain and expand the Museum‘s holdings through strategic acquisitions. Emelie’s curatorial vision has brought our exhibitions to new heights in recent years, and she has earned recognition within the field as a leading curator of American art whose perspectives on folk art and American history advances new interpretations and perceptions in the 21st century. With Emelie’s expanded role, Valérie Rousseau now assumes the role of Curatorial Chair and Senior Curator of 20th-Century & Contemporary Art in recognition of her own achievements and area of focus, as well as the importance of contemporary self-taught art in the Museum’s collections and exhibition program.
Additionally, Kailee Faber recently joined the Museum as our new Rapaport Archivist, a position generously supported for many years by our Trustee Peter Rapaport. Kailee brings several years of archival experience to AFAM, including most recently as a librarian at The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and archivist at Visual AIDS, a vital arts organization committed to raising AIDS/HIV awareness. Among Kailee’s responsibilities at AFAM, she will oversee the Healing Arts Initiative (HAI) archive digitization project and supervise a new project manager in a position funded by a grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR).
At the Museum, our spring exhibition, Madalena Santos Reinbolt, a Head Full of Planets, which celebrates the life and work of the Brazilian self-taught textile artist, is in full swing and receiving wonderful praise from our guests. Best known for her large-scale embroideries made from hundreds of vibrant colored threads, which Santos Reinbolt referred to as quadros de lã (“wool paintings”), the exhibition represents approximately half of all known works created by the artist and examines the artist’s work through a variety of lenses, including gender, race, and socio-economic dynamics. It is an eye-opening and thought-provoking presentation that examines Santos Reinbolt’s extraordinary body of work through the pluralities of her life as an artist, domestic worker, and Black woman, tracing her path from her younger life growing up on a small, rural farm to her migration to the wealthier cities of southeastern Brazil, such as Petropolis, where she spent her professional life as a live-in housekeeper and cook to Brazil’s high society from the 1950s to her death in 1976.
A Head Full of Planets is a daring exhibition, as it marks the first-ever solo museum presentation for Santos Reinbolt organized in the United States. For the American Folk Art Museum to introduce Santos Reinbolt to a global audience is a privilege and a perfect example of the types of boundary-pushing exhibitions we seek out. We are honored to present this exhibition in partnership with the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP), who have entrusted AFAM with the important responsibility of being the first institution outside Brazil to celebrate Santos Reinbolt in a dedicated exhibition.
This partnership with MASP also continues the Museum’s strong track record of collaborating with leading international institutions, as we did last year when we were the only North American museum to host the much-celebrated exhibition Francesc Tosquelles: Avant-Garde Psychiatry and the Birth of Art Brut, following its presentation at the Reina Sofía in Madrid.
MASP is also generously co-presenting the upcoming symposium, organized by AFAM, dedicated to Santos Reinbolt, which will present new scholarship and research on the artist and her work. The symposium, which will take place virtually on April 13, is a first-of-its-kind for the artist, and will mark a watershed moment in studies of her body of work. Stay tuned for more information, including the full lineup of speakers, and registration details to be announced soon.
The virtual symposium is only the latest example of the many outstanding programs organized by AFAM’s Learning & Engagement team. In fact, in only a few years since the Museum first shifted much of our focus to virtual programs, we have hosted 500 virtual programs that have engaged nearly 70,000 people from 68 countries in our talks, lectures, panel discussions, and much more. The numbers are an astounding reflection of the Museum’s reach globally and to the dedicated audience interested in folk and self-taught art.
Also currently on view at the Museum is the third and final interaction of our ongoing collection-based exhibition Somewhere to Roost. With a refreshed curation, the exhibition continues to offer new explorations of the idea of ‘home’ through a variety of works spanning many different media. It has been such a thrill to see the positive reactions from Museum visitors since the exhibition debuted in early 2024, and it was recently the subject of a favorable review in The Wall Street Journal in January.
While our galleries are humming this spring, we will soon be embarking on a transformative renovation over the summer that will usher in a new era for the American Folk Art Museum–one that will significantly enhance and upgrade our galleries and guest experience. Beginning in early June, after A Head Full of Planets closes on May 25, the Museum will close to the public for the summer as we completely overhaul our mechanical systems, including installing new HVAC throughout, renovate the Museum Shop, expand and enhance back offices for staff, remodel our public restrooms, integrate a new facade facing Columbus Avenue, and much more. When we welcome back the public this fall with our next exhibition, An Ecology of Quilts, you will see firsthand how transformative these renovations are in modernizing the Museum for decades to come. We will announce a detailed plan and timeline in the coming weeks.
Lastly, (but surely not least), we recently announced a new gift of dozens of works from the estate of our beloved former Trustee and patron, the late Audrey B. Heckler. The gift, which includes masterpieces by renowned self-taught artists of the 20th and 21st centuries such as Aloïse Corbaz, William Edmondson, Madge Gill, Morris Hirshfield, Martín Ramírez, and Adolf Wölfli, among many others, will significantly enhance and expand the Museum’s collection of self-taught art. It is the latest of many significant gifts–now totaling nearly 150 works of art–to the Museum by Audrey within the last decade, and is a further testament to her decades of commitment and support of AFAM. I had the pleasure and honor of toasting Audrey at a memorial celebrating her life, organized by her sons Jim and Andrew Heckler, at the Outsider Art Fair in February. It was a moving reminder of Audrey’s irreplaceable spirit and absence we all feel now that she is gone.
This gift also gives me pause to reflect on those from the AFAM family who are no longer with us. As with Audrey’s passing in May 2024, last year also marked the loss of another major force in the Museum’s family: Richard Parsons. Richard, along with his wife Laura, a Museum Trustee since 1999 who served as President of the Board from 2004 – 2010 and Chair of the Board from 2011 – 2019, has been among the Museum’s most generous benefactors, who helped shape the trajectory of AFAM for decades. Richard and Laura generously gifted the Museum 40 works in honor of the Museum’s 60th anniversary in 2021. Richard was a model philanthropist, and AFAM is forever indebted to all his contributions.
I hope you are as inspired as I am about all of the exciting developments taking shape at the Museum. As we get closer to America’s 250th birthday next year, we are well-positioned as the nation’s leading institution dedicated to folk and self-taught art, and one that will play a significant role in reshaping the public’s perception of what we traditionally understand as folk art on the eve of the America250 commemorations. Much like how the bicentennial in 1976 was a pivotal moment for scholars and the general public alike to reflect on American history and culture, next year’s semiquincentennial will mark another moment to reexamine our past and change the conversation for the next 50 years–an opportunity we greatly look forward to.
See you at the Museum!
With gratitude~
Jason
Jason T. Busch
Becky and Bob Alexander Director & CEO
Photo of Ambassador Ganem, Consular General of Brazil in New York, Jason T. Busch, and Valérie Rousseau, AFAM’s Curatorial Chair and Senior Curator of 20th-Century & Contemporary Art, during the opening reception of Madalena Santos Reinbolt: A Head Full of Planets. Photo by Jason Lowrie/BFA.com