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Folk Art

Folk Art Article

Folk art describes a wide range of objects that reflect the craft traditions and traditional social values of various social groups. Folk art is generally produced by people who have little or no academic artistic training, nor a desire to emulate "fine art", and use established techniques and styles of a particular region or culture. Along with painting, sculpture, and other decorative art forms, some also consider utilitarian objects such as tools and costume as folk art.

Antique folk art is distinguished from traditional art in that while it is collected today based mostly on its artistic merit; it was never intended as a category to be art for art's sake. Examples include: weathervanes, old store signs and carved figures, itinerant portraits, carousel horses, fire buckets, painted game boards, cast iron doorstops and many other similar lines of highly collectible "whimsical" antiques.

Characteristically folk art is not influenced by movements in academic or fine art circles, and for the most part, folk art excludes works executed by professional artists and sold as "high art" or "fine art" to the society's art patrons.

The turn of the 21st century saw an increase in work by self-taught folk artists, possibly because of the growing number of retired people with time to spend on new ventures. This 'grassroots art' movement is most visible in the states of Kansas and Wisconsin. The movement has been popularized on public television by the show Rare Visions and Roadside Revelations produced by KCPT in Kansas City, Missouri.

Other terms that overlap with folk art are naive art, popular art, outsider art, traditional art and even working class art. As you would expect, all these terms have different connotations; but they are all at times used interchangeably with the term folk art, for which a satisfactory definition has proven hard to come by.

Folk Art Items