Opening May 12 and continuing through July 1, the Georgia Museum of Art will display “A Bountiful Plenty from the Shelburne Museum: Folk Art Traditions in America.”
Vermont’s Shelburne Museum houses one of America’s premier collections of folk art, brought together by Electra Havemeyer Webb (1888-1960), who began buying before the first world war. Her passion for trade signs, cigar-store figures, weather vanes, ships’ carvings, carousel figures, scrimshaw, quilts and primitive paintings continued throughout her life and led, in 1947, to the founding of the Shelburne Museum.
This exhibition explores this complete spectrum of folk art through the eye of a connoisseur who was a central figure in the world of early collectors and dealers and who contributed to establishing American folk art as a serious and respected field. The exhibition includes works by, among others, Edward Hicks, Erastus Salisbury Field, William Matthew Prior, Samuel Robb, John Cromwell, Louis Jobin and Gustav Dentzel.
“A Bountiful Plenty” looks beyond the ongoing argument between folklorists and anthropologists on the one hand and art historians on the other. The display and interpretive material will address both aspects of the argument and will explore the multiple ways in which these works can be described and interpreted.
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