Today marks the launch of the American Folk Art Museum’s online archive of the magazine Folk Art (formerly known as The Clarion). The New York museum published 118 issues of the magazine between 1971 and 2008. A widely respected source of scholarship and original research on American folk art, the publication focused on traditional arts such as portraiture, painted furniture and pottery, and championed under-recognized artists.
The digitization project, announced in March, was completed with the help of matching $17,500 grants from Los Angeles-based organization Friends of Heritage Preservation and museum trustee Karin Fielding and her husband Jonathan Fielding, as well as a $5,000 gift from the American Folk Art Society. The museum’s editor and director of publications, Tanya Heinrich, a publisher of the magazine during its run, oversaw the project with the assistance of Elena Terhune, a researcher from Smith College in Northampton, Mass.
More than 10,000 pages featuring scholarly articles, photographs, illustrations, calendars and advertisements are now accessible via www.folkartmuseum.org under the “Publications” section. The archive is organized chronologically, and each individual issue is searchable; the museum plans to implement an archive-wide search function by the summer of 2014.
