This month's museum pick...

Small Wonder: Santa Fe’s  Museum
Of International Folk Art
by Dea Adria Mallin

Straw Horse Bankura District, West Bengal, India Photo by Michel Monteaux Girard Collection, Museum of International Folk Art

Among the museum wonders of the world, the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, the Louvre in Paris, the Uffizi in Florence, and the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg leap to the foreground. These are bastions of Western art, where we celebrate the breakthrough artist, the one original -- the Michelangelo, the Raphael, the El Greco, the Cezanne, the Picasso, the Matisse, the Brancusi. Could any other art stand up to such masters?  But indulge me here, for I have just revisited the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and my heart knows that this is, indeed, a treasure.

Statistically, this museum is both the first of its kind and holds the world’s largest cross-cultural collection of folk art, vast and deep, with over 130,000 objects chosen from over 100 countries. Here, the fusion of individual creativity (the “art”) and collective order (the “folk”) bounce, cross over, and rebound with amazing grace. The communal aspect of the art is unifying, the folk are participatory, fluid, and spiritual, and there is a refusal to surrender to the modern world’s industrialization, waste, competition, and stark individualism if not fragmentation.

The adobe-style museum, designed by preeminent Southwest architect John Gaw Meem and opened in 1953, is framed exquisitely against white cumulus clouds and cerulean sky, with gardens of lavender and yucca and sage --  much like the other museums now gathered but distinct on Museum Hill -- high above the Downtown Plaza of Santa Fe, with wrenchingly beautiful views of five mountain ranges and their foothills.

One enters the enormous spaces within and moves to the Girard Wing, home to a collection which radiates the vitality of folk art with dozens, even hundreds of examples from each given tradition. All the interior spaces are luminous with vivid color and light, and the theatricality and exuberance of the displays is beguiling as well as instructive.

Doll Girard Burma Photo by Michel Monteaux Girard Collection, Museum of International Folk Art

In the Neutrogena Wing, opened in 1998 to house the folk art collection of the founder of the Neutrogena Corporation, Lloyd Cotsen, exhibitions change frequently, and the soon-departing “Carnaval!” is riotous with color and sound from eight traditions of carnival, from Venice to New Orleans to Trinidad and Tobago.

Then, in contrast, there is the more scholarly Hispanic Heritage Wing, the first permanent gallery in a U.S. museum dedicated to traditional Hispanic arts, opened in 1989. Its quietude seems to spring from a dark sense of fate involving faith, Christ, saints as protectors, family, death, and miracles. As you walk the floors, you begin to merge with the somber lighting and the artifacts so that you fairly leap towards the wooden loom, about eight feet deep and wide and twelve feet high, as if it were your particular task to complete the weaving.

Behind the celebratory museum are two visionaries, the founder, Florence D. Bartlett, and Alexander Girard. Bartlett (1881-1954), the daughter of a prominent Chicago businessman, spent her life in Chicago but summered for the last twenty years of her life in northern New Mexico, and in 1949, built a museum in Santa Fe to house her collection of folk art and books, gathered over thirty years. Like her parents and siblings, Bartlett traveled the world assembling important art pieces, and like them, she called herself a “civic worker” who considered her wealth as a trust to use for others. Her older sister founded the Heard Museum in Arizona in 1929, one of the first American museums devoted to Native American art. Florence Bartlett, as witness to two world wars in her lifetime, wanted to promote cultural understanding and underscore commonalities as a pathway to peace. And instead of the hushed and reverent atmosphere of the great museums, Bartlett wanted liveliness, discovery, interaction, and voices.

At the opening ceremony, in latticed letters above the entrance was Bartlett’s great hope: “The art of the craftsman is a bond between the peoples of the world.” Absent from the inscription and the museum’s name was Bartlett’s name, allowing the museum to, in a sense, come from and belong to everyone.

Alexander Girard (1907-1993), gifted the Girard Foundation Collection to the State of New Mexico in 1978, and in 1982, the Girard Wing of the museum opened. “Tutto il mondo e paese” (“The whole world is home town”) reads the inscription at the entry, a saying often quoted by Girard, whose father was Italian and who grew up between Florence, Italy and the United States.

Girard called the collection “Multiple Visions: A Common Bond,” and said, “My thought in this collection is to present opportunities for connecting with people all over the world while avoiding the bromide of ‘one world.’”

Girard was himself an architect and designer, having completed buildings for John Deere and Braniff International, and in the Girard Wing he challenged the conventions of exhibition design. He placed objects both above and below eye level,  and even overhead. He made innovative use of color, and he refused written text on the walls. Girard wanted the rich and complex folk art and the cultures that produce it to communicate wordlessly, visually. And so they do.

You wander the terrain in the meaningful silence of works of art and simply drift with them, unburdened by concept or art historical annotation. This art is imagined, made, and loved – all without words.

If, however, you must have explanation, a guidebook is available, free for the duration of your visit, and most guests get about forty yards in when they turn to each other to ask, “Where do you get a guidebook?” and “How are we supposed to know what this is?” The answer lies with the children who simply wander the spectacular mazes of material culture exclaiming, “Look! Oh, look!”

The journey starts under a lintel (Look up!) from India of woodcarved snakes, elephants, and birds. Walk on, and there is a finely embroidered Indian wedding garment. And next, a carved horse from India. Are not Everyman’s hopes carried by the liberated spirit of the horse, powerful and noble? From late 19^th century Bangladesh come cotton embroidered quilts salvaged from pieces of worn-out clothes – a restitution of wholeness from fragments.

Helen Cordero, Cochiti Pueblo, New Mexico Photo by Michel Monteaux Girard Collection of Museum of International Folk Art

Now the locale shifts to Mexico and to a ceramic montage of about 120 musicians, perhaps eight or ten inches high, some in necktie or bowtie and sombrero, proceeding through the plaza playing their instruments with such visual vibrato that you can “hear” their music.

Because Alexander Girard and his wife Susan traveled often to Mexico and collected, there is a plethora of Mexican folk art. A ceramic Mexican hacienda kitchen shows savory enchiladas and steaming frijoles, kettles, and a pot of turkey mole, its sauce flavored with chile and chocolate, surely. Stare at the diorama long enough, and you will need to get lunch.

Among my favorite displays is “The Christening” by the Aguilar family of Ocatlan, near Oaxaca, collected in the 1960’s. This family of artisans once made only utilitarian stewpots of clay, but as the demand from tourists for decorative ceramics grew, so grew the Aguilar production. Today, three sisters, the children, and the grandchildren are all ceramicists. The Aguilars produce mercaderas, or groups of figures of market vendors, as well as weddings and wakes, where each figure has individualized emotions as they lean in towards the ceramic coffin. In “The Christening,” every painted clay figure in the village crowds the baby in order to be both observer and participant, just as the museumgoer, looking through the glass onto this ritual, crowds the window to see the event. “Hey! What do you see? What are they doing?” It’s an extended family, all the way -- from the aunts and uncles to the villagers to the museum visitors from Philadelphia and Milwaukee and Santa Barbara. How’s that for a living museum.   

Interestingly, for most summers in the 1980’s and 90’s, Irene Aguilar, one of the sisters, traveled from Oaxaca to Santa Fe where, at the Jackalope marketplace on Cerrillos Road, she and her extended family would form the clay figures before your eyes, shaping and firing and painting them to sell. Mark Miller bought three-foot “ladies of the night” figurines to enliven his famous Coyote Café. On many of my visits, I would buy “an Irene” -- a villager with armloads of garlic and a pineapple on her head, a woman balancing a basket of calla lilies on her head, a beautiful two-foot corn maiden with a soulful expression on her face and a pumpkin on her head. One year, an Aguilar nephew made an irresistible sax player that came home with me. Soon, the seven or eight pieces began to take over my living room with a warming narrative over which I seemed to have little control but at which I regularly smiled when I opened the door. To discover the Aguilar ceramics in entire villages at the museum, making lots of people “hear” stories just by looking, fulfills Bartlett’s and Girard’s idea of connectedness in a living museum.  

From across the world comes a clay Moroccan street scene where pattern and color explode as technology in the form of bad boy motorcyclists, straining forward, race through the traditional Moroccan street architecture, vroom-vrooming past men and women in traditional Moroccan garb, and it is not clear who will win this “race,” who will prevail in the Moroccan future.

There is a market scene of painted cactus-wood figures from Peru. There is a painted clay market scene from Puebla, Mexico of streets, archways, cactuses, homes, baskets of fruits and vegetables, and men, women, and children. There is a Portuguese village of about 700 ceramic figures, each piece made and painted by hand, using local clay deposits, by three Portuguese women in the 1930s. The Pueblo potters of the Vigil family of Tesuque in New Mexico crafted a feast day which is, as in real life, a multi-dimensional collection of corn, beans, squash, adobe houses, Pueblo Indians, masked kosharis, lines of Corn Dancers, Eagle Dancers, and a Catholic church intertwining Spanish influence and native ritual.

The world, Mr. Girard seems to know -- for he had traveled its breadth -- is one. Girard packs the exhibition with assemblies of objects that tell us that people are united by faith and by the ordinary acts of playing, eating, and going to market. Humans have bodies that want food, hearts that want play, and souls that want nourishment. Girard shows particularly the procession – the public ritual motion that gathers people and unifies them and orients them in a single direction, towards the sacred.

With a Chinese village plied by waterways of sampans and junks, with dolls from Swaziland and dolls from Louisiana, with African beadwork and American Indian beadwork, with furniture, textiles, masks, toys and more toys, paintings, jewelry, and majolica, from Lapland to Turkey to Tibet and home to the Southwest for legendary Chimayo weaver David Ortega, Taos santero Patrociño Barela, and Hopi jeweler Charles Loloma, the Museum of International Folk Art is a world map without boundaries, a collection of static folk art that paradoxically teems with life.

Today, even as we are more and more the global village, we are also more and more polarized, separated. Folk art, whether fully alive in its places of origin or collected joyously in Santa Fe’s Museum of International Folk Art, is one road to international understanding.

For one of the finest discussions of folk art, see “The Spirit of Folk Art: The Girard Collection at the Museum of International Folk Art” by eminent folklorist Dr. Henry Glassie (Harry N. Abrams in association with The Museum of New Mexico, 1989). Glassie’s understanding of the artistic process, of the freighted terms, “folk art” and “art,” of material culture, of verbal traditions, and of vernacular architecture are not only scholarly but are wise and clear. The book has nearly 300 outstanding color plates, allowing the reader to experience the Girard Collection again and again. For the history of the museum, there is “Folk Art Journey: Florence D. Bartlett and the Museum of International Folk Art”( Museum of New Mexico Press, 2003). For a fascinating exploration of 20^th century Hispanic New Mexican artists’ enormous contribution to New  Deal art projects, there is “Sin Nombre: Hispano and Hispana Artists of the New Deal Era”by the museum’s curator of Hispanic and Latino collections, Tey Marianna Nunn, (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2001).