Folk art in Pennsylvania.(Current and coming)

The often brilliantly colored examples of folk art created in Pennsylvania in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are immensely varied--the work of immigrant craftsmen and other artists who drew heavily on their European, particularly German, origins, and yet managed to produce something that even today remains identifiable as wholly "Pennsylvanian." Over the years, a good deal of research has been conducted on these objects, and numerous previously anonymous artisans have been identified. Some are still elusive, however, and to them scholars have assigned charming names, often based on the motifs peculiar to their bodies of work. For example, the Star School of needlework is named for the proliferation of starlike devices found on three nearly identical samplers that were clearly wrought at the same girls' academy.

Pennsylvania folk art is the subject of a large exhibition entitled Made in Pennsylvania: A Folk Art Tradition, which is on view at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, until October 14. Featuring almost four hundred examples, it includes textiles (samplers, coverlets, and quilts), fraktur, painted furniture, and ceramics--specifically stoneware and tanware.

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Samplers were the work of schoolgirls who were taught at a very early age how to sew in order to mark their linens and other textiles. The first recorded school for girls in Pittsburgh was established in 1786 by a Mrs. Pride, who offered a wide variety of needlework skills as part of the curriculum: "plain work, coloured ditto, flowering, lace both by bobbin & needle, fringing, Dresden, tabouring and embroidering." By 1826 there were some forty academies there. Harley N. Trice, guest curator of this section of the exhibition, has selected samplers from eight academies in western Pennsylvania.

Fraktur are among the most colorful of all mediums explored by Pennsylvania folk artists. R. David Brocklebank and Barbara L. Jones, guest curators of this section, have selected eighty examples divided into two parts. The first includes forty works by nine Westmoreland County artists working between 1784 and the 1870s, and the second highlights works created by eleven artists working elsewhere in the state: Washington, Somerset, Bedford, Allegheny, Fayette, and Indiana counties.

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Charles R. Muller, guest curator of the painted furniture section, has selected eighteen pieces made by Jacob Knagy and his son Elias, ...