From Library Journal
Featuring art from the Colonial period to the present, this book represents the second major exhibition at the new building of the American Folk Art Museum in New York. Cocurators Hollander and Brooke Davis Anderson have assembled an impressive compilation of material from the permanent collection that will be on display between June and December of this year. Spectacular illustrations are sandwiched between erudite essays that define this very inclusive collection, which offers everything from paintings, quilts, and weather vanes to furniture and contemporary works by self-taught artists. Also included are extensive notes on each piece that are both interesting and informative. However, what makes this an excellent choice for pubic libraries on a tight budget is its inclusion of art forms that have often been separated in the past. The work of Horace Pippin, Grandma Moses, and Ammi Phillips is right alongside that of Henry Darger and Bill Traylor, bringing together in one source the genuine "big picture" of self-taught art in America over time. Recommended for all collections. Susan Lense, Upper Arlington P.L., OH
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
American folk art embodies the American spirit at its most spontaneous and intuitive. With the advent of New York's new American Folk Art Museum, readers are being treated to a series of new books celebrating the tradition's inventiveness.
American Radiance came first, and now in
American Anthem, Senior Curator Hollander and his expert contributors survey the museum's varied holdings in their dazzling entirety and designate as masterworks exemplary examples of colonial-era painted furniture, weather vanes, and quilts, most of them the work of unidentified artists. They then move on to the provocative creations of so-called naive, or self-taught, artists, including Henry Darger, Howard Finster, and Sister Gertrude Morgan, potent and original works that have had enormous influence on educated artists, often to the degree of blurring the line between insiders and outsiders.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
