Art

Detail of Interior of a circular building, Giovanni Battista Piranesi

Drawing Near To The Divine

"SUPPOSE ONE COULD CATCH THEM BEFORE they become ‘works of art?’ Catch them hot & sudden as they rise in the mind.” In her diary, Virginia Woolf examined the stuff of thought, its shape and contours as well as its inherent slipperiness. While she was largely concerned with literature, her questions apply just as well to the visual arts. What does an idea look like before it is labored over, crafted, and shaped into a finished piece? [...]

Vietnam 1968

Vietnam, the televised war, the war that divided us, the war we did not win. Some of us unavoidably served in it, others protested it, many young men died. There is no shortage of photographs documenting the horrors of this “police action.” Military photographers and the free press took millions of photographs of the Vietnam conflict between 1962 and 1975. [...]

Trunk Show

I have watched as visitors to the Museum of International Folk Art stop in their tracks before a wall of cut-paper silhouettes, intrigued and perplexed. Perhaps they are recalling the snowflakes they made in grade school by folding and snipping paper in simple patterns. They recognize that this is something else, not only in the complexity of design, but also in the content of the imagery. [...]

Beyond Labels

A tour through Out of the Box: The Art of the Cigar [...]

Falling Apart and Coming Together

Making pots whole doesn’t necessarily mean filling holes. [...]

Lloyd’s Treasure Chest

After a four-year hiatus, our special open-storage gallery, Lloyd’s Treasure Chest, is reopening with a fresh face. Visitors can take the Vehicle to the Vault (formerly known as the elevator) to the new Treasure Chest, a place for visitors to explore, interact, and create folk art. [...]

Defining Moments

In 1919, a Native art show at Santa Fe’s Museum of Art just happened to revolutionize American modernism. [...]

A Certain Point of View

I’ve noticed that we don’t witness anything firsthand any longer. Our first reaction to anything that happens in real life is to record it, post it, snap it, share it. [...]

Misunderstood, Maligned, and Divine

Some people consider tramp art one of the homeliest dust-gatherers that the human mind and hand have concocted,” Michael Cornish noted in a 1993 essay titled “Tramp Art: A Personal Appreciation.” [...]