Marshalltown 101

Everett's Underwear, rug hooking, Laura Kenney



Marshalltown 101, Poor House Miser, oil on masonite, Steven Rhude

"The development of folk art for a museum audience in the late twentieth-century Nova Scotia coincided with changes in art education and the sales market more generally. Much like conceptualism, contemporary folk art in Nova Scotia became a site for new, academically trained arrivals to explore an artistic counter culture set quite apart from the elite collecting circles across North America that had so marked the early twentieth century and the foundation of most metropolitan art museums, include the NSMFA. The late 1960s and early 1970s had seen an influx of new MFA - degree programs across the United States - fifty three programs in studio art were inaugurated between 1965 and 1974. "  - Erin Morton, For Folk's Sake


 Many trained MFA holders at NSCAD were convinced to rally around alternatively distinctive forms of art - thus folk art became a focal point for artistic discourse within the educational institution. Gerald Ferguson and others brought a framework of folk art to the fine art world while the 1967 Centennial spurred on, along with  government funding, the new AGNS on Hollis Street. However concurrently, Chris Huntington and his collector influence transformed folk art into a museum industry for the AGNS, and, as one can confirm it is still going strong through the profits earned through marketing efforts and Maud Lewis sales today. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/maud-lewis-movie-marketing-campaign-boost-agns-visits-1.4248929

  As Erin Morton says: " an abundance of graduate - trained artist - professors who had a much different experience with the art market than collectors did and struggled to get their own artwork out to commercial galleries. Ferguson found himself at the centre of all these nodes. "

 One could say that the new academy was being formed - one where as Erin Morton pointed out : "Ironically, liberation from the privileged hierarchy of elite collectors and critics also spurred on new class of patrons and institutions around contemporary folk art; in "circumstances antithetical to folk culture itself, a folk art field  - with critics, galleries, collectors, scholars, and even a canon of it's own master works - would be cultivated." [1]



[1] Karp quoted in Ardeny, The Temptation 157

Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS

   

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