On the Trail of the Past

Maine Museums Show Off Stuff

Fetched From Their Basements

By Edward Shanahan

   The waning days of summer prompted a getaway trip out of town where among other activities we hopped aboard something called the Maine Folk Art Trail.

  We had been alerted to its existence by articles in the New York Times and the Boston Globe, and happily so.

  While our schedule and Labor Day holiday did not allow us to make stops at all 11 of the museums participating in the folk art displays, we managed visits to five, the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath, the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, the Colby College Museum in Waterville, Bates College’s Olin Arts Center in Lewiston, and the surprisingly  wide-ranging  historically deep  Maine  State Museum in Augusta.

  As the literature at the Augusta museum notes, folk art is essentially  the work of “self-taught makers who created varied objects … and (through them) have expressed  their observations,  inspirations,  enterprising spirit and humor.”  It is also referred to as vernacular art, imaginative or whimsical passions  rendered in various easily  available media such as rope, wood, paper, metal, ink, paint, textiles, and scrimshaw . And, indeed, much of the art we encountered revealed a refreshing sense  of humor in the works of these amateur  artists whose lives were not easy in the harsh world where life was fragile and often very short.

   Among the items catching my attention at the Bates stop were  those produced by 18th century  homemakers  whose hand-made  200-year old  document boxes contained fascinating memorabilia  including meticulously  detailed birth certificates,  family histories,  including obituaries —one of the most moving was for a pair of twins  who were born and died the same day—as well as colorfully  illustrated and artfully designed  paperwork.

 The cursive writing and calligraphy skills of our ancestors are amazing in this day and age of scribble and illegibility.

  The Maritime Museum offers splendid  examples  of how the sailors fought tedium brought on by  the hours,  days, weeks and months  aboard ship by the patient producing knotwork,  both common and never before imagined, or the  confounding carving of scenes,  symbols and stories on scrimshaw., and delicately   precise  wooden models  of their sailing ships.

  Each museum offered up its own special folk art specialties, drawn from its collection, which in many cases had been kept in storage for years. At the Farnsworth, the work of early primitive painters, including Grandma Moses, as well as portrait painters were highlighted,  a 50-foot painted town panorama  stretched along three gallery walls. There were fanciful textile offerings and colorful quilts, weathervanes and crowing roosters.

  The state museum concentrated on aspects of the rugged Maine experience with examples  of blanket chests, a child’s  sled and pair of skates,  a painted tin-plated trunk, a spruce gum box  for storage and chewing  as the spirit  moved,  and a drawing on sand paper.

  The reach of the artists was limited only by the materials that were available at the time, but what inventive artists these were.

    Behind the idea of the trail event was one Charles Burden of Richmond, Maine, himself a collector of antique nautical items. With rare organizational effort and adequate funding, the museums,  acting in concert and with timeliness,  have been able to offer a singular summer-long  art experience.  By joining forces, and by unearthing some of their most unique possessions,  the participating  museums  in the Maine Folk Arts Trail project  can claim to have  made a valuable  contribution  to our deeper understanding  and appreciation of the Maine experience and the surprisingly  creative lives of many of the early Mainers.

  A secondary  pleasure of hitting the Maine trail is that at each of the museums  we are able to view other important  aspects of their collection  like a personal favorite of mine—the room of John Marin watercolors at the Colby Museum— or the collection of art, sculpture  and theater design by Louise Nevelson, who grew up in Rockland,  at the Farnsworth,  and the art and contributions  to both the Colby Museum and the Farnsworth of Alex Katz, an artist with whom we were totally unfamiliar, and his foundation which has committed both money and art to several of Maine’s museums. The Maine State is worth several return visits to absorb the rugged span of Maine history and its early development of the logging, fishing, shipbuilding  and quarrying industries.

Maine State Museum, Augusta

   All in all, it was an eye-opener of a journey and museum experience.  It will continue until at least the end of September and some museums will keep their material on view even longer. So if you are interested click on www.mainfolkarttrail.org