Defining folk art is no easy feat. Wikipedia reports that it covers “a wide range of objects” that dwell on the craft traditions and traditional social values of social communities worldwide. Made by people who did not have artistic schooling, folk artists are in pursuit of social identity in their art more than any other motive, and utilize techniques unique to their region or culture. Along with painting, sculpture, and other decorative art forms, some also consider utilitarian objects such as tools and costume as folk art. Rugs, quilts, paintings, furniture and accessories are also among the wide variety of objects produced by folk artists.

As Jackie Kalman and Nora Sterling wrote in “Canadian Folk Art” (http://www.folkartcanada.ca/Article_CanFA.html), folk art is essentially “universal truths - realities which will always be voiced by untrained people with a creative urge.”

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“What is Folk Art?”

Stacy C. Hollander, senior curator

American Folk Art Museum

Full text here.

Around 1850, a young man in upstate New York, suffering from tuberculosis, carved a beautiful bust-length portrait of a young girl. Her quiet face and precisely rendered pleated red dress give no hint that the phrenological delineations on her scalp are anything out of the ordinary. Her father was a doctor who practiced alternative therapies, and the carving was probably intended for the water-cure clinic he planned to open in the small town of Erie, in Buffalo County. The artist was living with the doctor and his family when he carved the phrenological head, hoping, perhaps, that the doctor’s treatments would prolong his own short life. None of this, of course—except the phrenological markings—is immediately apparent upon viewing the sculpture, yet these were potent personal forces for both the artist and the recipient. And they are neither more nor less complex than those confluences that inform every other work of American folk art.

... In 1824, artist John Vanderlyn derided the “mass of folk,” as he termed the art-buying American public, for being “cheap and slight” in its taste. This was, in part, bitterness on the part of a European-trained artist who failed to gain the commissions he felt he deserved. Vanderlyn was instead forced to watch artists such as Ammi Phillips, whose work was edited of any European signature, flourish among the prosperous doctors, merchants, farmers, and politicians whose patronage he so avidly sought. In a sense, Vanderlyn missed the point, for it was not that the mass of folk did not possess the sophistication to appreciate his talents. In fact, they consciously rejected the European pretensions he offered in favor of their own plain and solid values, which Phillips was able to reflect in his portraits.

Vanderlyn articulated a tension that existed then and that still exists today, between the folk and fine arts. These disciplines have nevertheless developed as parallel traditions, deriving from a single well of national experience, and have conducted an ongoing dialogue that is increasingly vital as distinctions between artmaking communities and strategies have blurred. It was precisely this mass of folk whose interests, patterns of behavior, and active participation in government, religion, community, education, and local economies were determining factors in the directions of the society at large. And it is largely, though not exclusively, from this sector that folk art has emerged as the embodiment of ideas and influences that fluidly follow the rhythms of their own time. Now, as we look through this book or stand in the museum’s new building, the hopes of the “mass of folks” who came to America seeking these ideals, the version of America they created for themselves, and the aspirations of the generations who have followed, are palpable, captured forever in the very material they fashioned to fill their lives...

To sum up, folk art is more than just aesthetics, but also “symbolism, utility, individuality and (at the same time) community” (in the words of the same Museum's 2004 installation press release).

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