Folks; a new home for unsung artists.(American Folk Art Museum, New York, New York)

The new American Folk Art Museum, on West Fifty-third Street, is a pleasure machine, and its two inaugural exhibitions are strong delights. One, entitled "American Radiance," is a collection of more than four hundred objects given to the museum by Ralph Esmerian, the chairman of AFAM's board; the other is a selection of works from the museum's voluminous cache of visual and written material by the Chicago recluse Henry Darger. The Esmerian collection is an epic poem of connoisseurship. Darger was one of the singular artists of the twentieth century. Taken together, the building and the shows make for lively philosophical trouble. Each word in AFAM's name -- "American," "folk," "art," and "museum" -- acquires fresh, wobbly spin. Formerly called the Museum of American Folk Art, this reborn institution challenges conventional thinking about whirligigs and needlepoint samplers, among other artifacts, and a mad Chicagoan's midnight lucubrations.

Designed by the New York firm of Tod Williams Billie Tsien, the skinny building's lobby and four gallery floors are dominated by service facilities. Stairways, a balconied atrium, and the elevator housing occupy space that might appear absurdly disproportionate to the nooks and corridors that are left over for exhibits. But the elaborately accommodating, modestly palatial arrangement whets a viewer's powers of attention. At most museums, solid encounters with two or three works make my day. In two visits to AFAM, I've been jolted by scores of things -- sometimes one after another, bang bang -- that normally I would be tempted to ignore. The architectural strategy is jazzlike. Displays occur on offbeats of the space's perambulatory rhythms -- each object feels like an unexpected discovery. The effect suggests a hip retail store, like Comme des Garcons or Prada, but with a beautiful irony: AFAM's goods are the opposite of glamorous. Rather than mirror a shopper's lust, they absorb the beholder in work by people who are orphans of history.

"Folk" are vitiated citizens. They belong to communities at odds with society. They may be set apart on religious principle, like the Shakers; by clannishness, like the nineteenth-century Pennsylvania Germans, who are a special focus of the Esmerian collection; as the result of ostracism, like racial minorities; or because of poverty or other ill fortune. Folk status may crystallize around objects that were once ordinary products of cottage industries but have since become obsolete -- exotically old-fashioned. "Outsider" artists, like Darger, are folk cultures of one, oblivious of professional standards and peers. The terms "folk" and "outsider" -- never mind the spineless euphemism "self-taught" -- are hard to use without condescension, affirming a superior knowingness. The stereotypical folk-art fancier is both conservative and patronizing. Folk art can be to art as pets are to the animal kingdom.

AFAM's curators confront the basic problem -- otherness -- by scrupulously acknowledging their role in cherishing relics that have bygone or eccentric purposes. "American Radiance" begins on a carefully chaotic note, with three items: a small Pennsylvania slipware dish that, in 1966, was Esmerian's first acquisition; a tin tuxedoed man that was made in Long Island City in 1930; and a wooden sled decorated with the painted scene of a fancy-dress party by a New York amateur artist, June Ewing, in 1983. Only a collector's irrational certitude explains the grouping, which accents the oddity of its components. I wasn't sure I liked how that natty tin man was looking at me, with a complacent air of knowing something I'll never know. I felt a tremor of intimidation -- the emotional signature of otherness that doesn't deign to ingratiate itself. Nearly everything on view possesses similarly obdurate dignity.

The show has eleven sections, each of which amounts to a sparkling mini-show. Portraits by itinerant artists vivify a genre that was scuttled by the invention of photography. Outdoor paintings include one of the finest of Edward Hicks's "Peaceable Kingdoms" and an anonymous, smartly tidy view of an industrious harbor captioned "Situation of America, 1848." Every object holds its own in arrays of painted furniture, Pennsylvania ceramics, decorated wedding documents, narrative watercolors, scrimshaw, and ...