rt Review
Downsizing in a Burst of Glory
"Quilts": At the American Folk Art Museum, a show of quilts from the collection. More Photos »
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: May 12, 2011
The American Folk Art Museum’s radiant quilt exhibition will probably be the last of its kind at its unwelcoming, decade-old building on West 53rd Street. On Tuesday evening, while the show’s opening reception was under way, the trustees voted to sell the building to its prominent neighbor, the Museum of Modern Art, for an undisclosed sum.
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After months of financial trouble, the sale came as no surprise. It will enable the Folk Art Museum to retire a $32 million debt on the building, designed by the architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. Although no departure date has been set — the quilt exhibition is scheduled to close Oct. 16, but who knows? — it will also force the museum to retreat to its cramped, uncongenial branch at Lincoln Square. That 5,000-square-foot space across from Lincoln Center was its home for the dozen years it struggled to build the structure it now is giving up.
The vote to sell and the quilt show’s opening, occurring almost simultaneously, stand in tragic contrast. Folk art, so fundamental and so beloved, seems unable to get a stable foothold in New York City, in spite of this museum’s great collection. No other institution has been quite so thorough in accounting for American folk art, from its amazing beginnings in the 18th and 19th centuries through the 20th century and up to the present, even as the term folk art has been superseded by “self-taught” and “outsider” art. At this point the museum’s collection contains around 5,000 objects, not including its holdings by the great 20th-century outsider Henry Darger, which number 4,000 to 5,000 items (drawings, books and related material).
The Folk Art Museum has never had an easy time. Its Web site provides an unusually forthright and detailed account of the shifting fortunes and habitats it has endured since its founding in 1961; this is not the first near-death experience in its 50-year history.
It’s hard to know who or what is to blame for the latest fiasco, but three culprits come to mind: lackluster, visionless leadership; the weak economy; and inappropriate architecture. A small, historically fragile museum can perhaps manage one or even two of the above, but evidently not three. The debt was not enormous, and the trustees should have been able to pay some or all of it down. But maybe they did not want to throw good money after bad.
The building, in particular, casts a pall. Occupying a double brownstone plot, it is notable for a blank, vaguely lunar, metal-clad facade that is armored and fortresslike, positively foreboding. It makes perfect sense that attendance figures never met expectations. Things turn considerably more folksy inside the museum, in ways that crowd the art and often feel forced and over-busy. The most egregious touch is a broad stairway connecting the third and fourth floors that takes huge bites out of the narrow, already limited galleries.
The current exhibition, “Quilts: Masterworks From the American Folk Art Museum,” is a kind of elegy to the museum’s potential. It is the second half of a two-part show; like Part 1, which opened in the fall and closed in April, it presents about 35 works, nearly all of them singular.
As with other areas of the museum’s collection, its quilt holdings are deep and broad, as evidenced by a thick book cataloging more than 200 of them, published in conjunction with these shows. The ones on view now confirm what a vital role quilts have played in the amazing history of American folk art. They effortlessly combine personal and national histories with an exceptional kind of down-home formalism, all the while using available, often humble, fabrics. Like painted furniture and ceramics — only more so — they encourage a free-range pictorial expression outside of painting’s traditional boundaries. Like Navajo blankets, many can be counted among the earliest abstract art in post-conquest North America.
Amish quilts are generally considered the most purely abstract and have long been appreciated as precursors of Minimalism’s rigor and scale. That thinking is confirmed here by the “Diamond in the Square Quilt,” made in 1903 by Rebecca Fisher Stoltzfus of Groffdale in Lancaster County, Pa. Using only three colors and nothing but squares, this work consists of a red diamond (or tilted square) on a blue square banded in red on a green field banded in blue, all pinned down at the corners with four large blue squares. The resulting spread-eagle composition — worthy in its boldness of the young Frank Stella — is a marvel to dissect and reassemble with the eye.
Part of the power of quilts stems from the infinite ways they elucidate the nature of geometry, simply by constantly demonstrating how smaller shapes add up to larger, different ones. An especially simple example here from early 19th-century New England is a “whole cloth” quilt made from one large sheet of tan wool with a blocky eight-pointed blue star appliquéd to its center. It is somehow wonderful to realize that the star is pieced together from a square with two spindly triangles affixed to each side for points. After piecing, the other marvel of quilting is the act itself, that is, the stitching by which the front and back are made one: usually in profuse and intricate patterns. For example, the quilting on “Diamond in the Square” includes an elaborate eight-point star in its central red diamond.
Many quilts in this show, though, leave plain geometry in the dust. They can be divided between, to borrow phrases from painting, those that strongly contrast figure and ground and those that merge everything into densely frontal all-over patterns. The great figure-ground examples include a blue-on-white quilt featuring feathered stars within stars made by one ECB, possibly in New York State in the decade before the Civil War; and an “English Flower Garden Quilt,” which presents starchy rows of potted plants using several solid colors and printed patterns, made in the 1930s by Jennie Pingrey Stotts of Yates Center, Kan., who was born just as the Civil War started.
In the all-over category, the show includes several species of crazy quilts, with their jigsawing irregular geometries, as well as a splendid “Soldier’s Quilt,” fashioned from wool felt (red, black, yellow, cream and olive) in the late 19th century; it has abbreviated insignia designs and the tautness of a game board. The insignia is quite a bit more real in a striking Hawaiian flag quilt that frames the Hawaiian coat of arms with repeating flags that recall the state’s history as a sovereign nation.
Quilts, like any art form, have a life of their own. Their open-ended language proliferates in the Folk Art Museum’s soon-to-be former home on 53rd Street and also in an additional display of quilts — all involving stars — that can be seen at its Lincoln Square branch. They challenge anyone who loves them to help this museum thrive.
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