Folk Art and American Modernism

In the early years of the twentieth century, a group of young and pivotal American modernists began to equate the straightforwardness, abstracted forms, and delight in color of early folk art with the new modernist art they had studied in Europe and were pioneering in America.

The exhibition highlights folk art owned, collected, and exhibited by early art-world luminaries. In regarding folk art as art and as evidence of a “usable past,” these trailblazers led their generation in preserving a continuous American artistic tradition of which they considered themselves a living part.
Closed - Monday