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Encyclopedia of American Folk Art. Ed. by Gerard C. Wertkin. New York: Routledge, 2004. 611p. alkaline $125 (ISBN 0-415-92986-5).
American folk art often brings to mind images of quilts, basketry, pottery, and woodcarvings. Certainly, these art forms fit a narrowly construed definition linking folk artists to social class, community, and tradition. But as Wertkin, Director of the American Folk Art Museum and editor of Encyclopedia of American Folk Art, explains in his introduction, classification of folk art in American scholarship has, through debate and evolution, broadened to encompass the fine arts of painting and sculpture by artists who have little training in art techniques and no academic education. Such classification regards the artist's training rather than social class, medium, or content. These producers of art may draw from community and traditions or may be idiosyncratic. Works of the latter are often referred to as "outsider art," a term coined in 1972 as a "palatable equivalent" to the European term "art brut"...