Folk Fest 2009

  a favorite at Alcove Arts by Sergio Mora

Betty and I went on our annual pilgrimage to the Slotin Folk Fest looking for affordable new pieces to add to our respective collections. Very quickly we realized that things had shifted slightly; many of the dealers and artists from last year were not present. It is a curious situation. The mission statement on the Slotin website states that this festival is to promote the art of mostly rural, untrained, self-taught artists who dont have access to traditional art venues. With a booth fee of 900 dollars its a bit difficult for those authentic artists to exhibit. And the hall was chock full of MFA's and, looks like, anybody who can pay the freight to get in the show. 

I saw a lot of what i call "style memes" there: God help the artist that gets out a unique vision because next year there will be copy artists. You can just see that whatever sold well has been examined and then art is made to fit the market. Then there are sellers in there that mystify as to how they could have been included as folk art.

Back to the art school people: this post is not a dig on them. while i would like to see more self-representing self taught artists at this show (most primitives are represented by dealers and their work is very expensive), i am delighted with the trained artists' work.  Many of them are finding their way back to a pure expression. William Skrips said it best when he detailed how he had worked to undo all the training and instruction that he had received from Art in America style giants at his NYC art school.


I think he has been successful. His assemblages are simultaneously raw and polished and infused with some hint of classical art; in some of the pieces i could feel my mind traveling to a pieta or crucifixion stone or odd-wheeled contraptions you might find in a Bosch painting.

             the raggedy fabric, the nails, the bondage wraps and anxiety grimace on this piece are perfection.

I met Karl Mullen last year and loved the work. I wasnt disappointed this year. He remains a favorite at this show, representing the best of the primitive totem people drawings. The drawings are on large paper -like 40 x 60 - and are drawn with a combination of powdered pigments and wax crayons. But what he does to the paper really makes the surface sing; he coats the pieces in walnut oil which makes them appear and feel like heavy animal skins. A true outsider artist from ireland his resume reads like a traveling jack-of-all-trades just like a folk artist of old might have been. His subjects are musicians and kings and circuses and figures from another time that you know from intuition or memory rather than actual experience.

 Mullen's frenetic line work somehow portrays a 

figure with a look of slightly melancholic introspection

I found Randy Tobias early and picked out a new piece. I love Randy's work; his take on classic southern religious vernacular is my favorite of the clay work. Randy is a real outsider artist: he doesnt even have a website for me to link to. or a dealer. he can still be found at the "Turn n Burn" clay weekend where potters come out to a certain highway in north georgia to sell their wares by the roadside.


Angels, devils, snake-handlers, parsons, empty-souled demons and hybrid face jugs in amazing glaze combinations are shelved like a police line up.

Some of the figures remind me of characters in popular culture, for instance this angel with a red glaze stigmata is a dead ringer for Yoda.


some of the "preachers" reminded me of the weirdo preacher in Poltergeist II who is actually Satan in a terrible transparent pale corpse suit; you could sense there was more to what you saw on the surface. In the end, i chose this piece to keep the one i bought last year company:



there was so much to see and my notes were poor. i cannot tell you who made this lobster girl; she was quite small and secured inside an abalone shell. there was a table of these small sculptures that i liked and i regret now i did not buy this.

Betty liked this wire dress. It was one of many dresses at the show: dresses of wood and bottle caps, dresses of tin and wood, dresses of plaster - many dresses by many artists all without any flesh to fill them out.

The guys from minivan (They call themselves minivan because they travel around the country to show selling work - out of the minivan) were back and they had, once again, one of the strongest exhibits in the show. The always seem to have their pulse squarely on the collective zeitgeist with edgy works made with and on unconventional materials - perhaps the kind of salvage all of us will employ someday in the post land of plenty america. In the image above you can see what i mean: people in struggles; fights; parachuting "out"; surviving; falling.

Casey McGlynn is my favorite of the minivan artists. This little red pig is a good example: he has written "the living piggy bank" on the painting which is so absolutely correct in an age where money is precariously teetering on the verge of having no value at all. His work is very personal and narrative with messages scrawled into available spaces around the figures. His interest in playing the guitar is evident in the portraits of players and he continues with a vocabulary of animals interacting with people. The surfaces of his paintings are richly layered and messy but still surprisingly clear.



Anthony Pack continues to delight: i bought a piece last year: a paprika man that flies over my kitchen like one of those indonesian spirit protectors. Anthony is out of Kansas City and did his time at Hallmark before finding his way to this:




Each figure is infused with amazing personality and life and his craftsmanship is King. He is the best of the kitchen gadget junk sculptors - and there were quite a few at this show.

I liked Steven Chandlers drawings on plywood. He calls them Georgia Red Mud paintings. They are very much in the style of early southern primitive artists only more linear.



*note: steven chandler visited this blog and left a comment about his video on the show. . its an interesting look at folk fest from an artists POV with some undeniable damning evidence of another artist's goat painting that was copied (exactly-like a stencil) from Stevens original work; which addresses the issue of the increased copy cat situation at the show. if you are interested in art and commerce and what is "folk", check it out.

Overall, this show remains one of my favorites of the year. I subscribed to Art in America in a two for one deal when i ordered it for a friend as a gift; and rarely saw work within those pages that i actually wanted to read about, much less liked. I could say the same thing about some of the shows at the name brand galleries in town. At this show its fun to see the favorites but theres always that chance of finding something really good at an affordable price and the possibility of seeing an artist emerge fresh before a dealer gets a hold of them. I wish that somehow the pricing could be dropped on the booth spaces and that the dealers could be kept out. With an honest jury, the show could be restored to its earlier manifestation: that of a tent revival of outsider art.