The American Folk Art Museum presents a fascinating collection of quilts made by men at arms.
Acquisitions & mergers
A new exhibition at the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles is the latest showcase for the powerful work of assemblage artist Betye Saar.
Thoroughly Modern Moses
What did Grandma Moses have in common with the likes of Jackson Pollock? Arguably, plenty.
Of troughs and trophies
A collection of silver prizes sheds light on America’s proud agrarian past.
The bouillabaisse of design influences on an early American silver soup tureen
A few years ago, one of two silver soup tureens ordered by Thomas Gibbons in 1810 came on the market, after remaining for nearly two centuries in the possession of his descendants.
Lone star
How Ima Hogg brought modern art to Texas.
Revisiting The Art of the Common Man
The exhibition American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America, 1750–1900 was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City from November 30, 1932, through January 14, 1933. Presenting American folk art as part of a continuous artistic tradition reaching back to the eighteenth century, it was the most comprehensive, illuminating display of the subject held up to that time.
Missing pieces
Scholars hope to reunite all thirty paintings in Jacob Lawrence’s Struggle series, his epic of early American history. But the whereabouts of several panels is unknown.
From specimens to souls: The evolution of early portrait photography at the Cleveland Museum of Art
Every photographic portrait confers on its subject some degree of immortality. We take for granted the ability to know what a person looks like, since images of family, friends, and famous strangers dead and alive are at our fingertips through a Google Images or Facebook search. But until 1839 only the wealthy could have a likeness recorded, share it with others, and leave it behind for future generations.
Of Meissen men…and women at the Frick
Vitreous, white, and often delicately translucent, porcelain was invented in China as early as the seventh century, but Western attempts to reproduce the Chinese miracle failed until the dawn of the eighteenth century, when the Saxon ruler Augustus the Strong pressed into his service the young Berlin alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttger and commanded him to enrich the Saxon coffers by …