We asked five curators at major institutions: How are you installing and considering folk and outsider art in the coming years?
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Elizabeth Smith, Joyce Linde Assistant Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art
The Museum of Fine Arts’s collection of folk and self- taught art spans works on paper, paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts—a large portion of which were acquired by Maxim Karolik (1893–1963), an Eastern European Jewish immigrant with a self-described “ferocious enthusiasm” for American art. Karolik’s collecting interests act as a window into shifting claims on postwar American identity and the cultural climate of New England in the mid-
twentieth century. It is often supposed that his enthusiasm for work that fell outside an established mainstream reflected his own status as an outsider within Boston’s elite circles. He collected work by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists, some unidentified, many without formal academic training, whose subject matter he interpreted as democratic and unpretentious. At the time, Karolik’s vision for a more egalitarian American art was viewed with suspicion by the MFA’s curators, who were reluctant to display such works alongside “fine art.” In the decades since Karolik amassed its foundational collection, generous gifts to the MFA, in addition to museum purchases, have broadened our understanding of how and where people receive artistic training.
A global museum comprising more than half a million objects, the MFA is in a unique position to display works by folk and self-taught artists alongside their peers. As the incoming Joyce Linde Assistant Curator of Folk and Self -Taught Art, one of the most exciting projects I will steward entails working with colleagues to integrate the
folk and self-taught collection into our existing galleries. This endeavor is at the heart of the museum’s Folk Art Initiative, begun in 2021, which brings together curators, conservators, and educators to collectively reassess the display and interpretation of folk art for contemporary viewers. Future reinstalls might showcase the ways artists across the Americas learned from family members or taught themselves new skill sets through popular media—educational models not limited to the folk and self-taught art collection. These experiences—for example, a grandparent teaching a grandchild to sew or an individual learning to paint through Bob Ross’s instructional television show, The Joy of Painting—are familiar to many.
Like other historic collections of folk and self-taught art, the MFA examines the ways both terms are socially constructed, and bound to race, class, gender, geographic, and material hierarchies. One of the most rewarding aspects of stewarding our future is strategizing with my colleagues about how we should tell these myriad (and often conflicting) narratives simultaneously. Our forthcoming projects will establish that artists considered folk or self-taught are not marginal figures, but central to the story of art and culture across the Americas.
