‘Truths Be Told’ at MOIFA redefines folk art

SANTA FE — “Truths Be Told: Artists Activate Traditions” at the Museum of International Folk Art (MOIFA) made me reconsider what folk art really is. I’m used to curators making the case for why traditional artisans or “folk” artists should be seen as “real” artists, but this exhibition, curated by Laura Addison, was the first time I saw internationally renowned artists, including the British Nigerian art star Yinka Shonibare, presented as folk artists. Of the 15-plus artists in the show (14, plus an artist collective), only a few of them never attended art school. Can we erase the pejorative connotations that still cling to the label “folk artist” —naïve, unsophisticated, unmodern — by applying it to some of the world’s most respected artists? Yes, and this show does it.

“The Quilts of Gee’s Bend” was a watershed exhibition that singlehand55edly rewrote the canon of Western art. Organized in 2002 by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in association with Tinwood Alliance, Atlanta, the exhibition of 70 quilts by 45 Black women artists from the historically isolated rural community of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, traveled to 11 other venues, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

While some prominent tastemakers, including Vogue magazine editor Diana Vreeland and the artist Lee Krasner, had already begun collecting Gee’s Bend quilts in the 1960s, the quilters only became recognized by the wider art world with the 2002 exhibition. “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend” proved, once and for all, that the work of so-called “folk artists” could be every bit as sophisticated as abstract paintings made by people with master’s degrees from prestigious art schools. The Gee’s Bend tradition, which began in the early 19th century, during slavery, predates and anticipates modernist abstraction in European art. The quilters’ syncopated patterns and improvised color progressions have been likened to bebop jazz, against which the work of many white geometric abstractionists from Josef Albers to Sean Scully seem as stiffly mathematical as Baroque fugues — or paint-by-numbers paintings.

Mary Lee Bendolph, 90, is one of the best known of the Gee’s Bend quilters, and she's one of the only so-called “self-taught” artists in this show. She received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 2015, and her work has been exhibited in major museums around the world. So, classifying her as a “folk” artist at this point is a tad misleading, when she is one of the greatest living abstract artists, period — in my opinion, at least. Do we call the legendary jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker a “folk” musician, simply because he never studied music theory in college?

On the other hand, by elevating Gee’s Bend quilters to their rightful place in art history, do we risk obscuring the community-focused, “folk” origins of their practice? What’s novel about “Truths Be Told” is not that it shows folk artists as “real” artists; we’ve known that for decades. Rather, it demonstrates that many prominent, internationally-exhibited artists who went to good art schools remain connected to folk traditions, too.

In terms of quilters, in addition to Bendolph, “Truths Be Told” features quilts by the self-taught artist Sarah Mary Taylor (1916-2000); aerospace engineer and quilting curator Carolyn Mazloomi; architect-turned-quilter Kathryn Clark; and renowned artist Beverly Y. Smith. Bendolph, Taylor, Mazloomi and Smith are Black American artists whose quilts connect them to ancestral traditions. The figurative quilts of Mazloomi and Smith may have little in common with the experimental abstraction of Bendolph, but the mere act of quilting instead of painting is a political choice — a way of valorizing a uniquely African American tradition and aligning themselves with it.

Clark, a white artist who currently lives in the Netherlands, uses Gee’s Bend-inspired quilting techniques to map urban blight, as seen in “Foreclosure Quilt,” her recently commissioned quilt-map of Albuquerque’s International District. The International District, an area in Albuquerque that got its name from the waves of refugees, mostly from Vietnam and Central America, who settled there over the past 60 years, is one of the poorest parts of the city. But do the residents of the International District really need a white artist who lives in the Netherlands to tell them how many of their neighbors lost their homes due to foreclosure? Clark’s appropriation of a distinctly Black art form — Gee’s Bend-style abstract quilting — to tell about the hardships faced by other ethnic minorities for an audience of largely white museum-goers like herself just doesn’t sit right with me. Her lack of personal connection to the communities she seeks to represent makes the work feel distant and clinical — a rare sour note in this otherwise brilliant exhibition.

I would have rather seen the inclusion of artists like Sanford Biggers and Tomashi Jackson, who are consciously pushing the radical formal experiments initiated by the Gee’s Bend artists into even more radical directions today. Jackson’s project for the 2019 Whitney Biennial, in particular, dealt with the erosion of Black home ownership — a similar theme to Clark’s “Foreclosure Quilt.” But for Jackson, a Black woman, the stakes are personal. Yes, she has a Master of Fine Arts in painting and printmaking from the Yale School of Art, but the fact that the subjects of her Whitney piece look like her is enough of a “folk” connection to keep her work from feeling like a mere academic exercise.

Colectivo Subterráneos (Underground Collective) is a group of politically oriented printmakers in Oaxaca, Mexico, who trace their aesthetic lineage back to the days of the Mexican Revolution and the illustrated broadsheets of José Guadalupe Posada. Political art created for print publications is sometimes excluded from the “folk art” category, even when the artists view themselves as the voice of a people. “Truths Be Told” installs Colectivo Subterráneos’ life-sized figurative wheatpaste collages next to an anti-nuclear linocut that Leopoldo Méndez made in the early 1950s, allowing viewers to see the clear continuities across generations of Mexican printmakers, even as technological innovations and the influence of street art have led current practitioners like Colectivo Subterráneos to work at a much larger scale and in site-specific contexts. Their wheatpasted figures are collaged in the manner of the Surrealists’ Exquisite Corpse game — provocative mismatches of Indigenous heads and European-clothed torsos — which suggest the fragmentation of Mexican identity wrought by colonialism.

The fragmentation of cultural identity is a running theme throughout “Truths Be Told.” We see it in Sonya Clark’s (no relation to Kathryn Clark) diptych of braided sculptures. Clark, an American artist of Afro-Caribbean descent, uses the Euro-American language of minimalism to confront the continued stigmatization of natural Black hairstyles. We also see it in the work of Marie Watt (Seneca and European), Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit and Unangax) and Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota and European), whose fusion Indigenous and Euro-American art creates intentional aesthetic dissonance. Galanin’s “Language Removal Tools for Indian Children, Sheldon Jackson,” for instance, presents a pair of child-sized handcuffs etched with Indigenous designs — a pointed reference to the forced assimilation policies pursued by Canadian missionary and education official Sheldon Jackson in the late 19th century.

The fragmentation of cultural identity is a major theme in Shonibare’s work, as well. “Ms. Utopia” is a mannequin with a globe for a head whose colonial-era European dress is made from batik-printed West African fabrics. Although marketed as “traditional African textiles” in the 19th century, batik-printing was imposed by the Dutch colonialists who stole it from the Indonesians. In Ghana and Dutch West Africa, this faux folk art tradition was gradually absorbed into the culture to the point that some West African fashionistas today are completely unaware of the fabric’s colonial history. Is it folk art now, and is Shonibare a folk artist for his ingenuity in repurposing the fabric? Why not?

Ambreen Butt, a Pakistani-born artist who studied traditional South Asian and Persian miniature painting in Lahore, Pakistan, incorporates the ornate gilded borders and hunting motifs of medieval Indo-Persian court painting into her large-scale mixed-media works. Butt is not a folk artist in the traditional sense, nor were the courtly elites whose styles and methods she imitates. But she is a folk artist in the same sense as Colectivo Subterráneos. Like them, she uses a visual language, which — despite its aristocratic pedigree — has become ubiquitous and widely understood in her culture, and she uses it to call for collective action against racism and war. Butt also uses avant-garde techniques from Western art — nonlinear layering, collaging and radical cropping — which, to some, may seem like the contemporary equivalent of court painting: an esoteric language taught in ivory towers and far removed from the lives of ordinary people. But she uses those techniques, along with the medieval royal ones, to make art that’s both beautiful and accessible to a wide audience, despite its visual complexity.

The artists in “Truths Be Told” work in traditional forms that are widely known and understood within their respective communities, even in cases where the forms were originally imposed by colonial merchants or aristocratic elites, and even in cases where the artists themselves went to elite institutions for graduate school and are self-consciously repurposing the traditional forms for their own expressive ends. What makes a work of art “folk art,” this exhibition seems to say, is not who made it or where the art forms originated. What makes it “folk” is its connection to communities beyond the art world.

Most of these artists make their work for multiple audiences. They want it to be understood and accepted within predominantly white galleries and museums, but they also want it to speak to people from their own cultural communities, who may learn something about their own history through the art, or — in the case of the more politically oriented artists — may be inspired to take collective action.

I think all artists should strive to be folk artists, in this sense. If an artist makes work only to appease rich collectors, snobby art critics or the board members of museums, what good is that? For art to be culturally relevant, it must become part of a larger cultural discourse. Rabindranath Tagore and Bob Dylan were both enormously successful songwriters who both won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but they're also folk musicians — and not simply because they used folk songs as musical forms. What really makes them folk musicians is that ordinary folks from their respective countries know and sing their songs. To enter culture in that way isn't easy, but it's a worthwhile goal.