Martín Ramírez (1895–1963) was an itinerant Mexican laborer who, homeless in California in the 1930s and arrested for vagrancy, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent the rest of his life confined to state psychiatric institutions. Ramírez was also, by many lights, one of the more brilliant artists of the twentieth century.
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.
Folk fun in Williamsburg
As part of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum’s continuing celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of its founding, a new showcase of some fifty pieces from the museum’s permanent collection has been mounted for a long-term exhibition titled America’s Folk Art.
An art brut debut at the American Folk Art Museum
Zinelli painted for up to eight hours a day, producing nearly nineteen-hundred works of art.
Nurturing the spirit
Folk art and the designs of Alexander Girard.
Who are you calling a tramp?
A fresh perspective on tramp art at the Museum of International Folk Art.
Art Therapy
A dealer, a disease, and self-discovery.
Old Kentucky Home styles at the Frazier
Kentucky by Design: Material Culture, Regionalism, and the New Deal at the Frazier History Museum in Louisville is an exhibition eighty years in the making. The show examines the never-before-seen work of Kentucky artists who contributed to the Index of American Design, part of the New Deal’s Federal Art Project.
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.
Mourning Becomes Them: The death of children in nineteenth-century American art
“In the midst of life we are in death” These familiar words, which marched across sermons and samplers alike in the early decades of the American republic, surely resonated with sixteen-year-old Charlotte Sheldon in the summer of 1796. Sheldon was studying at Sarah Pierce’s Litchfield Female Academy when she heard the news: Polly Buel, another student, had died. Sheldon put down her studies …