In this program, AFAM’s Curatorial Chair for Collections and Curator of Folk Art Emelie Gevalt walks us through two current exhibitions: Anything But Simple: Gift Drawings and the Shaker Aesthetic and Playing with Design: Gameboards, Art and Culture, which both shed light on American early modernist aesthetics.
At the intersection of arts, design, and religion, Anything But Simple: Gift Drawings and the Shaker Aesthetic complicates understandings of Shakers’ minimalism with a series of vibrant, divinely-inspired drawings made by women in the mid-19th century. Similarly placed at a crossroads between arts, design, and popular culture, Playing with Design: Gameboards, Art and Culture reflects the emergence of a colorful abstract language through a rich selection of locally-made gameboards, many created at the turn of the 20th century.
This curatorial walkthrough will present the various artifacts on view in the galleries – including intricate drawings, handcrafted gameboards, furniture, utilitarian objects and archival materials – while exploring larger cultural themes including the emergence of modernism, the blurred boundaries between handicraft and arts, and the role of community in the development of American material culture in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Space is limited; advance registration is required. Please consider making a donation when you register to support ongoing virtual programming.
Instructions for joining with a Zoom link and password will be provided by email upon registration confirmation under “Additional Information.” Closed captioning will be provided in English. For questions or to request accessibility accommodations, please email publicprograms@folkartmuseum.org.
About the speaker:
Dr. Emelie Gevalt is Curatorial Chair for Collections and Curator of Folk Art at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City. Often looking at earlier material through the lens of twentieth-century histories of collecting and collective memory, her work encompasses research interests in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American art and material culture including especially portraiture, textiles, decorative painting, the Colonial Revival movement, and African American representation. Her research has been supported by grants from, among others, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Craft Research Fund, the Decorative Arts Trust, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She publishes and lectures widely.
Gevalt’s exhibitions at AFAM include the critically acclaimed What that Quilt Knows About Me (2023) and Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Absence in the Early American North (2023), heralded by The New York Times as “vitally important” and “deeply moving.” She received her BA in art history and theater studies from Yale University (magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa), her MA from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, and her PhD in art history from the University of Delaware. Her two decades of art-world experience include positions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Christie’s, New York, where she served as a Vice President in the Estates, Appraisals & Valuations department.
Images:
Left: Polly Jane Reed, A Type of Mother Hannah’s Pocket Handkerchief, New Lebanon, New York, 1851, Ink and watercolor on paper, 23 5/8 x 26 in. (framed), Andrews Collection, Hancock Shaker Village, Massachusetts, 63.126.1.
Right: Parcheesi Board, late 19th / early 20th century, Paint on wood, 18 1/4 x 18 1/4 in. American Folk Art Museum, Promised gift of Doranna and Bruce Wendel.