Curators and academics, long-time dealers and serious collectors all tend to fret over the future of folk art.
When Steve and Amy Slotin launched Folk Fest in 1993, the South was a haven for self-taught artists of all stripes who created in relative geographic isolation, uncorrupted for the most part by market forces. Most of the best-known makers from that era, however — including Howard Finster and Lanier Meaders of Georgia and Jimmy Lee Sudduth and Mose Tolliver of Alabama — have long since passed.
What is and isn’t legitimately categorized as folk art today is the subject of growing debate.
One of the last of that golden generation of self-taught creatives, Alabama artist Charlie Lucas prefers to sidestep the debate. He doesn’t even call himself a folk artist, preferring “toy-maker.” He believes artists should be measured not by how they learned but by the inspiration in their hearts.
Chris Beck, the Georgia sculptor mentored by Lucas, will hardly will be the only artist at North Atlanta Trade Center this weekend who draws inspiration from earlier folk artists. A few examples:
- With his vessels' folded, twisted and pinched shapes, Bill Clark from Clark House Pottery of Greenville, S.C., draws directly from the work of George Ohr, the self-proclaimed "Mad Potter of Biloxi." Ohr died in 1918 but his works seem thoroughly modern today, showcased at the Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art in that coastal Mississippi town. In a handwritten declaration, seven of Ohr's descendants even welcomed Bill and his potter wife, Pam, into the family in 2011.
- Sam Ezell, a North Carolina handyman from Hillsborough, N.C., was inspired to paint his childlike compositions of chickens and baseball players and the like by his friend, Alabama painter Bernice Sims. Now being cared for in a Pensacola, Fla., nursing home, Sims is best known for memory paintings of civil rights protests she witnessed firsthand, but she also captured sweet rural scenes from her life around Brewton, Ala.
- Though neither emulates his style of expression in a direct way, the late northwest Georgia folk artist the Rev. Howard Finster encouraged wood-worker/sign-painter Bebo (John Paul Daniel) of Kingston Springs, Tenn., and preaching painter "Missionary" Mary Proctor of Tallahassee, Fla., among many others, to pursue their muses.
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