Who Gets to Be an American Artist?

Who gets to be an artist? Or rather: who gets to be called one? These and other questions are present but unarticulated in ‘American Folk Art’ at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Drawing from the collection of MoMA co-founder Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, this mid-size, two-room exhibition provides a decent overview of the diverse forms that, in the first decades of the 20th century, were alternately known as vernacular, primitive or folk art. There are a number of portraits painted by the itinerant artists known as ‘limners’, as well as social scenes, memorial watercolours and product advertisements. There are carved figures, wooden toys, cast metal weathervanes and a hunting decoy in the form of a slipstreamed crow.