We asked five curators at major institutions: How are you installing and considering folk and outsider art in the coming years?
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Sylvia Yount, Lawrence A. Fleischman Curator in Charge of the American Wing, and Alyce Perry Englund, Associate Curator of Decorative Arts
Sylvia Yount: The Met’s American Wing is committed to collecting, displaying, and interpreting expansively defined American art and design by a variety of makers, including those without formal training. From Joshua Johnson to Thomas Cole to Mary Sully and from Indigenous artists to Dave Drake to Bill Traylor—among countless others, known and once known—the artists visitors encounter in dialogue throughout our galleries encourage a broad and complex understanding of vernacular artmaking in North America.
Alyce Perry Englund: The American Wing has long embraced nuanced definitions of “folk,” or vernacular, art and design. With major gifts including early “Americana” donated by American Wing founders Emily Johnston and Robert de Forest within the first decade of its 1924 opening and the landmark 1965 gift of paintings from William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, the department has valued this work if not always displayed it in breadth across our full scope of galleries.
In 2016 the American Wing purchased its first major vernacular painting—Joshua Johnson’s Emma Van Name—and, in more recent years, has pursued acquisitions of vernacular sculpture, including an early twentieth-century Daniel Muller carousel horse and Blériot Model XI monoplane weathervane, in addition to continuing to grow our varied decorative arts holdings by untrained and/or unidentified figures from different regions of the country and continent, both rural and urban.
In the American Wing’s most recent collection reinstallation—marking the department’s 2024 centennial anniversary—curators installed examples of key vernacular production alongside works by highly trained artists, underlining shared historical time periods, regions, collectors, and subject matter.
We also created focused areas in our new first-floor introductory galleries featuring so-called women’s work—quilts, samplers, painted Indigenous baskets—in conversation with bronze and carved and painted sculpture by Bessie Potter Vonnoh and Wilhelm Schimmel. Juxtaposing these works near a painting by Edward Hicks, after John Trumbull, we raised questions about “trained” and “untrained” designations in museum collections.
In American Modernisms, another new gallery space, on the second floor, we combined painting, drawing, sculpture, and design by artists with different training and backgrounds, exploring the considerable influence historical vernacular expressions had on a generation of early twentieth-century modernists, including so-called modern primitives such as Morris Hirschfield, Grandma Moses, and Horace Pippin.
This approach to creating broader conversations among works in varying styles by a range of makers—rather than isolating vernacular art in its own distinct gallery—will continue to shape our collection displays going forward, just as it informs our balanced exhibition programming. Recent American Wing projects have foregrounded works on paper by a self-taught Native American (Dakota) artist working in New York City in the early twentieth century (Mary Sully: Native Modern, 2024) as well as mid-nineteenth-century stoneware by Black American potters from the American South (Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina, 2022).
An upcoming exploration of the early twentieth-century craft revival of Eleanor Roosevelt’s Val-Kill Industries, established in the Hudson River valley of New York, will similarly explore cross-medium dialogues in various art forms.
It is scheduled to open in the American Wing next summer.
