When is art Art is an age old question. It is hard to imagine now that at one time a Van Gogh was not considered art. I came of age after the heyday of figurative sculpture. Dada artists such as Marcel Duchamps had already made the first "ready mades" by mounting a unicycle upside down on a stool and lining a coffee cup with fur. Pop artists such as Claus Oldenburg had already made their giant clothes pins, and Campbell Soup cans.
In the seventies, while still in grad school, I was just beginning to define what my art was to be. I struggled with the fact that figurative art seemed to be the only work that my hands made, but they came out in such a way that fellow figurative artists rejected and refused to claim them because they never were just about form. 
One day a fellow student brought several pieces by Russell Childers to our graduate seminar and asked, "Is this art?" Childers had been confined to the state mental hospital as a child and released to a group home/ work center as a middle-aged man. He was making sculpture with scrap wood chronicling his childhood before and after being placed in the institution. After much debate, our class decided it was folk art, not fine art.
Shortly afterwards I learned that the university art museum was mounting a show of his work. I took money saved for tools and drove to Lebanon, where his work was displayed in a jumble on a dusty table in the lobby of the work center. I bought his Dog. I knew that when the show opened, people would see his work and respond, and they did; all his pieces sold within the first hour of the exhibition. His work spoke to people. I used to go to museum and watch people going through his show. I knew that is what I wanted for my sculpture. But I also remembered that the art world judged it to be folk not fine art. 
A decade later, I saw history repeat itself with the work of Elizabeth Layton. In an earlier post I wrote about my discovery in the 80's of her work. Layton's early drawings were dismissed by the art world and only given a second look when it became clear that her work had the power to move, and the public saw its value and importance.
It has only been in recent years that I have been able to reconcile the way I make sculpture with my concept of what I had been taught sculpture should be. I stopped questioning whether I make art or ART. I acknowledge that it is Russell Childers and Elizabeth Layton that I feel to be my closest art kin, but I also value my fine arts training and the long line of artists that have left behind their work to enrich and inspire me. I am finally content to spend my time searching for a balance, for a way to merge both legacies by making "educated folk art."
