Wisconsin Folklore

42 Work at Rest

42 Work at Rest Janet C. Gilmore Women's handwork retains signi~cance even in an era of ready-made artifacts and machine production . No longer compelled by necessity, many Wisconsin women still find abundant reasons to wield needles and weave in ways that sustain old traditions. Janet C. Gilmore's 'Work at Rest" provides insights into the varied lives, methods, and motives of eight such women. Herself a handiworker, Gilmore earned a ph.D. in Folklore from Indiana University in 1981. Since then she has worked on numerous public folklore projects, including, from 1986 to 1997, nineteen surveys of folk arts and traditional culture and as many exhibits. She collaborated in 1986 on the John Michael Kohler Arts Center's pioneering survey of Wisconsin Folk Art, the resulting statewide exhibit From Hardanger to Har/eys: A Survey of Wisconsin Folk Art, in 1987, and the signi~cant 1997-1998 exhibit Wisconsin Folk Art: A Sesquicentennial Celebration. Affiliating with the Wisconsin Folk Museum in 1989, Gilmore annually designed and installed an exhibit there through 1995, when the museum closed. From 1993 to 1995 she served as the museum's chief exhibit curator and public programming administrator. 'Work at Rest" is based squarely within the tradition of folk arts exhibits that folklorists began producing in the 1970s, with support from the Folk Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts. These exhibits combined aspects of, but also departed from, museological models favored at the time by anthropologists, historians, and art historians, with their respective emphases on the collective aspects of cultures, on distinctive chronological periods, and on material objects in isolation . Presenting a range of traditional artifacts arranged thematically, folklorists expanded artifact identiRcations and often added photographs to convey more fully the context in which a traditional object is made and used, the creative process and materials involved in making it, and the background and philosophy of the maker. Distinctively, folklorists keyed on the individual as the primary unit for the sustenance of cultures, on the dynamic, often overlapping, relationship between the present and the past, and on the ways in which objects communicate their maker's experience and essence. Based upon extended interview and photography sessions with the traditional artists featured, 'Work at Rest" combines Gilmore's commentary with photographic portraits of the artists , verbatim quotations from some of them, and examples of their work. Recent exhibits by folklorists, including Gilmore, on Wisconsin's folk arts have also flourished under the leadership of Robert T. Teske. A Milwaukeean, Teske earned a ph.D. in Folklore from the University of Pennsylvania. After teaching stints at Wayne State University and Western Kentucky University, he served as a grants officer in the Folk Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts before returning to Wisconsin in 1985 as an associate curator of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan. Currently the director of the Cedarburg Cultural Center, Teske has curated four major traveling exhibits of Wisconsin folk arts, while editing their catalogues: From Hardanger to Har/eys: A Survey of Wisconsin Folk Art (Sheboygan, Wise.: John Michael Kohler Arts Center, 1987); In Tune With Tradition: Wisconsin Folk Musical Instruments (Cedarburg, Wise.: 407 Part Five. Material Traditions and Folklife Cedarburg Cultural Center, 1990); Passed to the Present: Folk Arts Along Wisconsin's Ethnic Settlement Trail (Cedarburg, Wisc.: Cedarburg Cultural Center, 1994); and Wisconsin Folk Art: A Sesquicentennial Celebration (Cedarburg, Wisc.: Cedarburg Cultural Center, 1998). Curator's Preface, by Janet C. Gilmore like any work of art, the Work at Rest exhibit represented a moment in time, in the development and ideology of the exhibition process at the Wisconsin Folk Museum, and in a particular folklorist 's experimentation with exhibit design. The exhibit arose just after three major semipermanent exhibits were in place, altogether occupying three-quarters of the exhibits gallery. The earliest of these, an exhibit of Norwegian American rosemaling in the Upper Midwest, presented thirty-eight rosemaled pieces in three major thematic groups, each ofwhich also reflected an important historical period in the development of the tradition in the region. Generous interpretive text introduced sections and subsections, but artifact labels were minimal, and only a few photos were included. In conjunction with the exhibit, the chief curator, museum founder and director Philip N. Martin, published Rosemaling in the Upper Midwest: A Story ofRegion and Revival (Mount Horeb, Wisc.: Wisconsin Folk Museum, 1989). Next in the creation sequence, the second semipermanent exhibit displayed the prolific output of three woodcarvers, one "whole...