The American Folk Art Museum's "Self & Subject"

Assignment: Go to The American Folk Art Museum's "Self & Subject" Show and using a blogging tool of your choosing, write and post a response to the exhibit.



Let me just start off by saying that The American Folk Art Museum and self portraits do not appeal to me. Most of the art work looks like the junk I see at garage sales or the discount bin in Wal-Mart. This exhibit did not change my mind on this.

It was interesting though to see the various interpretations of what a portrait looks like. Usually portraits are paintings, but in this exhibit there were sculptures, collages, architecture, embroidery and the usual paintings. Here are a few that I found particularly interesting:

William Edmonson’s sculpture was interesting because I thought it looked a bit Egyptian with the pyramid-like ends and what looks like a snake in front. It wouldn’t make sense to have an Egyptian sculpture in an American folk art museum. I guess he was influenced by it even though that wasn’t in the description.



Mose Tolliver’s self-portraits were great because they reminded me of Leonardo daVinci’s sketches of ugly people, but uglier. All the people are patch worked and monster-esque.



Harry Lieberman’s painting of The Most Orthodox Rabbi was really amusing to me because I lived in Hasidic Williamsburg for a few years and my Jewish friends always said that the Orthodox Jews would always give them evil looks.

Ray Materson's embroidered baseball cards of Ted Williams, Joe Dimaggio and Hideki Matsui were nicely done.

A.G. Rizzoli’s Mother Symbolically Recaptured/The Kathedral seemed to be stretching the definition of portrait, but it was excellent draftsman work.

Overall though, I don’t see how most of the works in the museum were any better than this work of art that I saw outside of the museum: