At home with the past

Exhibit of Massachusetts folk art highlights cultural traditions

August 22, 2008|Sebastian Smee, Globe Correspondent

LEXINGTON - People make stuff. That much we know. Why they make stuff is much harder to say.

The kind of "culture" that routinely gets written up in newspapers and is taught in school - I'm talking about fiction and poetry, fine art, the movies, music, the performing arts - is one kind of making stuff. Its agents place a premium on originality and aim to communicate to a broad audience.

But there is another kind of making stuff that, though it also falls into the category of "culture," tends to thrive away from the roving, jittery, inconstant flashlight of the mass media.

This kind of creativity is concerned less with originality than with maintaining time-honored traditions, and it speaks, for the most part, to a small audience - anyone, that is, who feels connected to those traditions and the communities they bind together.

A lot of people are starting to worry about this kind of making stuff, which we may as well call folk art, though the category embraces more than just embroidery and baskets: It includes the making of weather vanes, decorated duck decoys, mortar-less fieldstone walls, musical instruments, sacred art, festival costumes, tin men, and decorated eggs.

The people who worry most about this kind of stuff are called folklorists, and their fear is that people today lead busy lives, are constantly moving from place to place, and watch too much television.

Their fear seems well-founded to me. I worry along with them. I think, for instance, of my father, who loves boats and so decided, with a friend, to build a yacht from scratch while his children were still young (it's still sailing); who loves weaving and so built a loom (still in use); and who loves carpentry and so built half of the furniture in my childhood home (OK, that one couch was a bit uncomfortable). I, on the other hand, watch television and do a lot of lying around reading. I don't make anything.

I may be an extreme case, but I think I am symptomatic: None of my friends makes anything either.

The good news is that a lot of people out there are still making stuff. Not just old people, and not just people who live in rural Peru or eastern Uzbekistan and make stuff for a tourist market. A great many of them live in Massachusetts, and folklorists in this state have been working hard over the last two or three decades to find out who they are, what they do, and why they do it.

If you want a taster, you should see "Keepers of Tradition: Art and Folk Heritage in Massachusetts," an exhibition at the National Heritage Museum in Lexington. The show, which is modest in size but rich in content, was organized by the state's chief folklorist Maggie Holtzberg, working in tandem with the museum and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.