Editor’s letter, October 2009

Editorial Staff Opinion

A few months ago Eleanor Gustafson and I spent a day as guests of Historic New England. We had wanted to see what I like to think of as the bookends of that organization’s historic houses­—the 1938 Gropius House in Lincoln, Massachusetts, with its spare, modernist decor and bracing use of industrial materials, and the rambling, mysterious Beauport in Gloucester, …

Editor’s letter, September 2009

Editorial Staff Opinion

One of the things I admire about Electra Havemeyer Webb was her instinctive sense that the cultural designations of high-, low-, and middlebrow were silly.  I do not mean to suggest that Webb was a prophet of late twentieth-century multiculturalism or that she could have argued for the relative merits of a beautifully carved duck decoy vis à vis a …

Editor’s letter, August 2009

Editorial Staff

We have grouped a promiscuous array of things in this issue under the broad umbrella of “folk art”: schoolgirl drawings, trench art, manufactured advertising signs, as well as objects more conventionally agreed upon as “folky,” such as carved walking sticks and weather vanes. While it is common to worry about the vagueness of the term folk art, I am inclined …

Editor’s letter, July 2009

Editorial Staff

While withholding its authentic treasures for serious seekers, New Mexico, the Land of Enchantment, makes nostalgia bordering on kitsch easily available. Fortunately, when we embarked on our own West by Southwest migration in this issue we had the benefit of some clear-eyed guidance from Laura Beach, who comes from Santa Fe, and Frederick Turner, who has lived there for thirty …

Introducing the annual guide

Editorial Staff

Like many visitors who enjoy unfamiliar cities I like to make my own discoveries. Guides cannot take me where I want to go because their job is to spoil the surprise of a chance encounter. Getting lost in Milwaukee, for instance, once brought me to a Greek Orthodox church by Frank Lloyd Wright on the city’s edge. Vienna on foot …