For generations of Virginia musicians, dulcimer (or dulcimore) has described a family of instruments with three characteristics
Discoveries in Self Expression
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, July/August 2013. For people on the islands and along the coast of Downeast Maine in the 1920s, the era of postwar prosperity and jazz age exuberance might just as well have happened in another country. Their lives were circumscribed by hard work, poverty, and most of all isolation. Just after the turn of the century, in …
Pas Banal: A collection of folk, self-taught, and outsider art
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, July/August 2013. They met again on a Manhattan bus years after they first knew each other from the Chapin School, where their children were friends. Between them they have five daughters, the youngest then still in college. By 2010 Edward Vermont Blanchard Jr., a financier who serves as president of the American Folk Art Museum board, …
The game is a foot
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, July/August 2013. In this Connecticut household, the game’s the thing. Behind the front door of the large stately house lies an unexpected and dazzling world of color and geometry. Displayed throughout the interior and arranged from floor to ceiling are almost 250 hand¬made game boards of various types, sizes, and patterns. But the promise of hours …
The Lunder Collection is unveiled at the Colby College Museum of Art
On July 13, the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, reopens, unveiling its nationally-acclaimed collection of more than 8,000 works of art. The addition of the Alfond-Lunder Family Pavilion, a sparkling glass structure designed by Frederick Fisher and Partners Architects, on the quintessential New England college campus, will display the impressive inaugural exhibition, The Lunder Collection: A Gift …
Micah Williams
Micah Williams is best remembered as a gifted colorist who portrayed the middle-class residents of New Jersey and, briefly, New York City with an eye for telling detail. Active only from about 1815 to 1835, the prolific artist has long interested the Monmouth County Historical Association in Freehold, New Jersey, home to the largest public collection of his work. Museum …
Angels & tomboys
Much to our chagrin, we are late in drawing attention to an important exhibition originally organized by the Newark Museum. Angels & Tomboys: Girlhood in 19th-Century American Art opened in Newark last September and has since traveled to the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in Tennessee and to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, where it remains …
French Twist: Masterworks of Photography from Atget to Man Ray
As with painters and sculptors, ambitious young photographers from around the world flocked to Paris between the World Wars. Some used photography to document the old ways of life; others, to celebrate the new. Some have enjoyed continuous acclaim, while others were forgotten for decades. Some saw themselves as part of a movement, such as surrealism, modernism, or a new …
Reginald Marsh’s New York
Just when twenty-first-century New York has all but erased its louche past-dives, burlesque halls, raffish markets, and public spectacles-with well-mannered parks, high-rise condominiums, and corporately branded entertainment venues, the New-York Historical Society has resurrected it in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and Thirties New York. It’s nice to have the old New York back. Marsh was born far above the city’s …
Editor’s Letter, July/August 2013
Is it so surprising that New York has long been a center for folk and outsider art? From Electra Havemeyer Webb, founder of the Shelburne Museum, who started out in the glossy precincts of Park Avenue in the 1940s to Monty Blanchard, current president of the American Folk Art Museum, whose Tribeca loft is a geyser of the self-taught, the …