ART REVIEW : NEA Recipients’ Crafts Celebrate Folk Traditions

The White House has lately spouted a good deal of agit-prop, knocking single mothers and extolling the virtues of America’s traditional family values.

When people who live in the vast anomie of the megalopolis hear this they are inclined to think our leaders are living in some retro Norman Rockwell fiction. Don’t they know that men and women are barely speaking these days, much less raising cheery “Father Knows Best” sorts of families?

Then the cynical cosmopolite runs across an exhibition like the one just opened at the Craft and Folk Art Museum. He gets all dewy-eyed, longing for summer picnics in small towns where everybody knows everybody because they are all related.

The show is “America’s Living Folk Traditions.” It’s a multiethnic exercise including work by citizens honored for practicing timeless folk forms like storytelling, quilt-making, blues singing, wood carving and basket weaving, among many others. The creative categories are the kinds passed down through generations. All of the artists in the show are recipients of National Heritage Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Installing an exhibition around so many forms is a bit daunting, but the museum handles it with energy and good humor in its cramped temporary quarters in the May Co. building on Fairfax. There are sections for watching videotapes, listening to audiotapes and peering at objects through vitrines.

That’s a bit high-tech and detached for such a loving-hands-at-home theme, but what are you going to do?

Well, museum director Patrick Ela had it all warmed up with colorful graffiti wall murals and blackboards where visitors can join in, sharing reminiscences of family life and conjuring questions of aesthetics versus togetherness.

In a way, the whole show questions the advantages that are supposed to come from city life. The most quietly startling thing about the work here is the way it seems to grow out of conception of time foreign to urban types, even though some of the artists live in sizable cities. Look at a horn of plenty carved in traditional Scandinavian style by Leif Melgaard. Observe a Germanic hammered dulcimer by Albert Fahlbusch, a quilt by Mealii Kalama or the chain carved from a single piece of wood by Earnest Bennett.

All waft forth a soothing aura of calm and security because each bespeaks dozens, if not hundreds, of hours lavished on work without thought of imposed deadline or economic inefficiency. City people claim they never have time for anything, but actually waste most of it.

But what about individuality? Small communities supposedly specialize in minding each others’ business. Maybe, but you’d never know it from from the highly individual work of Elijah Pierce. His painted wood carving, “Saint John in the Wilderness,” is a magical exercise in being one’s self. It shows John preaching to a star while a peaceable kingdom of animals looks on.

Pierce’s work looks generically like all other folk art, but you’d never mistake it for anyone else’s. While art school students agonize over “developing a personal style,” folk artists know all they need to do is be themselves.

But what about freedom and originality? Aren’t these artists somehow imprisoned in tradition? Could be, but they are not imprisoned in categories. Harry V. Shourds carves duck decoys. Alex Stewart fashions churns. There is no trouble recognizing them as simultaneously being functional objects and works of sculpture.

Stanley Hicks bills himself as a perfectly sensible combination of banjo maker, musician and storyteller. Paul Tiulana makes masks then wears them as a dancer and singer.

Something medieval binds the look and spirit of this work. We are reminded that in the Middle Ages, art was made as a community activity where everybody pitched in, doing their best. The crowning result was the great Gothic cathedral.

These artists do likewise within their various ethnic groups. They do not produce cathedrals, but people not unlike them work together to produce the great high-rise buildings that are the cathedrals of this global culture.

This exhibition leaves one feeling that, with luck and effort, there is a way for people to get along.

* The Craft and Folk Art Museum, May Company, 4th floor, corner Wilshire and Fairfax; through Sept. 6, (213) 937-5544. Closed Mondays . The exhibition was organized by the Museum of International Folk Art, a unit of the Museum of New Mexico.