Beyond American folk art: The emergence of folk art as a museum object, 1924--2001

Folk art, the aesthetic material culture created by everyday artists working outside of the mainstream and without the formal training of the artworld, has been the focus of two competing interests in the twentieth century, each of which baptizing vernacular creativity based upon the reach of their own intellectual, institutional, and financial means. The first of these interests is represented by the collectors, art galleries, and museums, which have appropriated folk culture and vernacular creativity for the possession and presentation of it in foreign cultural contexts (meaning those elite contexts that are by definition "non-folk"). The other actors in this intellectual drama are folklorists and material culture scholars who have placed their appreciation of vernacular creativity within the emic realm of natural context and have, through this turn towards native cultural contexts, have intellectually and morally positioned themselves in strict contrast to the cultural capitalists'---to turn on Bourdieu's phrase (1984)---of the elite artworld.; Folklorists, in particular, have embraced a disciplinary "perogative of representation" (Cantwell 2001: 63) as a space for advocacy and intervention on behalf of the folk artist and vernacular creator in ethical and philosophical response to inequities in social and political power facing everyday artists in the mainstream artworld. In telling the intellectual and institutional history of folk art's genesis as a object of museum display and artworld collection, this dissertation illustrates the rote folklore might play in on-going conversations concerning the vernacular's place in public culture.