SANTA FE, N.M. — Who gets to make art? The question was posed recently on Instagram by Luke Syson, director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England. In asking it, Mr. Syson was adding his voice to a growing chorus of museum professionals who are challenging traditional hierarchies of art production. He was talking, in this instance, about the obscure craft of scrimshaw, subject of a fine study show at the Fitzwilliam, but more broadly about the importance of recognizing and celebrating those gifted artists whose work is so often relegated to the stepchild status of crafts.
As I stood in a tent on hot July afternoon in this high desert city, I was nagged by Mr. Syson’s question. Planted in sand on three folding tables were the creations of Leandro Gómez Quintero, one of 178 individuals from 52 countries gathered for the 16th annual edition of the influential and popular International Folk Art Market.
Mr. Gómez’s artworks had made the trip to the United States without him since visa restrictions prevented the one-time history teacher based in Baracoa, a small city on the eastern tip of Cuba, from attending. And yet the artist’s presence could be felt in the works he’d sent — eccentric and vaguely obsessional scale models of the vintage vehicles that have come to stand as visual shorthand for Cuba’s anachronistic position on the global stage.
Politics, history, and the irresistible urge to create from the most meager of resources were all coded into the miniature versions of vehicles such as the once-ubiquitous Jeep CJ, or the customized flatbeds responsible for transporting cattle, lumber and humans along the rutted roads that remain the lifeline of the island nation. Each had been created from refuse and materials Mr. Gómez scavenged: foam core, paper clips, scrap plastic, Duct tape, Styrofoam packing materials, Popsicle sticks and twine.
“For me, this is the essence of folk art,” said Stuart Ashman, my guide that afternoon. A former cultural affairs secretary of New Mexico, Mr. Ashman now serves as chief executive officer of a market whose goal is to bring exposure both to practitioners of traditional crafts as well as visionary eccentrics like Mr. Gómez. “It comes out of nowhere, out of nothing,” he added. “There’s not a tradition for it. It’s just some guy saying, ‘I want to make this thing.”
Often enough, as it happens, the person with that driving desire to make something new and untested is a woman. Consider, for instance, the celebrated pineapples of Carapan. So closely are these powerful objects identified with Mexican folk art at its highest levels that when in 2001 the cultural arm of Banamex bank organized a show titled “Great Masters of Mexican Folk Art” and published a hefty 551 page book to accompany it, one of the craftsman Hilario Alejos Madrigal’s pineapples was chosen for the cover.
Mr. Madrigal, 53, is an acknowledged master of the form and yet it was his mother who originally devised it. “His mom made the first ones,” Tomas Aguirre, Mr. Madrigal’s agent, said. (The artist had been unable to make the trip from his home in Michoacan.) “The whole village where they live made pottery for cooking,” Mr. Aguirre added. “His mom, Elisa Madrigal Martínez, used to make those things, but had a lot of competition so she was looking to stand out and started the pineapples.”
Boldly sculptural, of no utilitarian purpose, the pineapples are imposing even when not built on the massive scale favored by Ms. Madrigal’s son, who expanded the craft learned from his mother when he married and moved to San José de Gracias in the 1970s. There, he forms and glazes the pineapples in hand-built open air kilns.
“They feel they are artists instead of crafts makers,” Mr. Aguirre said of works now made by Mr. Madrigal and his wife, Audelia Cerano, and their five children. “Some people don’t appreciate it as art,” he added. “They’re surprised by the prices. They say, ‘My trip to Europe costs less than that.’”
In reality, even the largest of Mr. Madrigal’s vessels, at $1300, may set a buyer back by less than the cost of a drawing by an artist showing in a gallery on the Lower East Side. And, for a starkly abstract room-sized rug by the Oaxacan weaver Juan Isaac Vásquez García — a textile whose every element, from the shearing, carding and spinning of the wool to the vat-dyeing of the yarn and the weaving itself, which is all done by hand — the price is just a few dollars more.
“I’ve been weaving since I was 7,” Mr. Vásquez, 84, and widely known by the honorific Don Isaac, said in a moment of quiet before the hordes of visitors rushed in (more than 20,000 people attended this year). For generations, Mr. Vásquez’s family had practiced a craft that dominates Teotitlan del Valle, a village in the foothills of the Sierra Juarez mountains just outside Oaxaca.
By Mr. Vásquez’s estimate, there were over 800 weavers from which to choose when, in the late 1960s, the painter Rufino Tamayo came in search of someone to collaborate in making tapestries. “All of a sudden, maestro Tamayo showed up, and I didn’t know who he was,” Mr. Vásquez said. What first drew Mr. Tamayo to Mr. Vásquez was his unconventional use of natural rather than synthetic dyestuffs.
“He asked me what red I was using, where did I get this in the wild?” Mr. Vásquez added. “At the time I was going to stop working with the natural dyes because nobody was buying,” Mr. Vásquez said. Encouraged by Tamayo, Mr. Vásquez entered into a decades-long partnership with the famed muralist. “I still didn’t know if I was doing a good thing or a bad thing,’’ said Mr. Vásquez. “I really never thought of it as art.”
For the master embroiderer Asif Shaikh, 51, his identity has seldom been in question, he explained one afternoon at the market. Born and raised in Ahmedabad in northwestern India, the self-taught artist has actively campaigned for a revised understanding of what constitutes art, using his knowledge of Indian embroidery techniques to promote innovation in a craft that, as he put it, “was on its last legs at the end of the 20th century.” For a recent traveling exhibition of his work, inspired by the Sufi saint and poet Farid ud-Din Attari’s allegorical masterpiece “The Conference of the Birds,” Mr. Shaikh created embroidered panels using beetle wings, peacock feathers, silk thread no wider than a human hair.
“My dream is to put crafts in the same conversation when we talk about art, because artists always get full mileage” in the cultural conversation, Mr. Shaikh added, whereas — in India, at least, “They never made craft into a brand as a branch of art.”
ONE POTENT FACTOR in shifting perceptions is social media, according to Senia Jugi, a traditional master basket maker from the Iban tribe of Borneo.
Although these days Ms. Jugi travels the world to conduct workshops on the traditional Iban baskets of split bamboo, arrowroot and rattan and the topi tunjang hats — known as “sky pointers” for the crenelated crowns said to draw cosmic energy down like rabbit-ear antennas, she had grown increasingly pessimistic about the survival of a craft she first learned in childhood. “In our community, the younger people — when they weave — they don’t want to be anonymous,” she said. That all changed, she added, when young weavers started posting online to Instagram and accumulating followers and likes.
Social media in all manifestations has proved central to the practice of a Peruvian folk art collective called Amapolay, a profit-sharing cooperative founded by Carol Fernández Tinoco and Fernando Ernesto Castro Chávez, who met as anthropology students in Lima. Not relying on crafts fairs to hawk their graphic and political T-shirts, posters and caps, they deploy a range of platforms to promote their activist work, which confronts head-on the displacement, poverty and racism blighting the lives of Peru’s indigenous peoples.
“Our kind of work got branded as chicha, but it’s much bigger than that,” Mr. Castro, 34, said, referring to a pop culture fusion of urban and indigenous folkways that found expression in music, theater, dining and art. “Chicha is too easy because it’s based on this romantic picture of indigenous people — all chullos and mantas and polleras,” he added of the elements of traditional Andean dress. “But culture is not static, populations are not static and we found that we wanted to take on these issues and make that our art.”
Perhaps inevitably politics intrude on a market that generated an estimated $3.1 million this year and one that, for many participants, represents the bulk of their annual earnings. Navigating a maze of travel bans and visa restrictions. the organizers assembled artists from Kazakhstan to Haiti. And they welcomed back prized practitioners like Porfirio Gutierrez, 40, a weaver from Oaxaca, whose journey to Santa Fe was starkly different from the border crossing he made into the U.S. at 18. Speaking no English at first, Mr. Gutierrez spent the next decade working at fast food restaurants, scaling the social ladder until, by the time he was drawn back to Mexico in 2008, he had his green card and was managing a cement plant north of Los Angeles.
“You know, growing up, no one really told us we were artists,” said Mr. Gutierrez, who was accompanied to the market by his sister and collaborator, Juana. For a family of what Mr. Gutierrez’s father called “artisans and farmers,’‘’ the pursuit of art for its own sake was inconceivable.
The tapestries and rugs he now produces, while rooted in the traditions of his Zapotec culture, are liberated rather than bound by them, abstracting elements of life in Mexico’s high central valleys such as the mesh of a straw petate — that woven straw mat so much a constant of rural life.
“It was going north that gave me a perspective on what it means to embed how you see the world, anything that concerns you, into the narrative you create and make that your canvas,” Mr. Gutierrez said. “When that happens, at that moment craft gets shifted into art.”
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