Becoming America: Highlights from the Jonathan and Karin Fielding Collection of Folk Art ed. by James Glisson (review)

There is something wonderfully refreshing about this volume, which documents, analyzes, and celebrates the folk art collection that Jonathan and Karin Fielding donated to The Huntington in 2016 for exhibition in the newly constructed Fielding Wing. Perhaps it is the stimulating design, which intersperses scholarly essays with large, color photographs of objects as diverse as quillwork baskets, rachet lighting devices, hearth forks, and top hats. Choreographed before vibrantly hued backgrounds of coral, teal, mustard, rose, and green, artifacts march, swarm, hover, and dance across double-page glossy spreads. The catalogue is a Technicolor spectacle, its sensorial allure especially gripping to readers facing extended museum closures during the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, the book recalls the brightly colored walls and sculptural display of select artifacts from the collection in the Huntington's Becoming America exhibit.¹

But the images also make a potent visual argument for the Fieldings' "eye" as collectors: Their discriminating choices about what to purchase built a collection with high historic and aesthetic appeal. As John Demos notes in his essay on the Fieldings' furniture, "there is the matter of its look—its sheer beauty. Damn! These makers, these creators, knew what they were about . . . handmade meant personal, and so, too, is our appreciation personal—that is to say, heartfelt, emotion-driven" (69). The Fieldings' path to becoming major collectors began with their purchase of an eighteenth-century house in Maine. Furnishing it with period-appropriate pieces awakened their passion for "everyday objects that have both utility and beauty" (16). The resulting collection, amassed over twenty-five years and encompassing some nine hundred objects, consists of artworks and artifacts made between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, primarily in New England, often by rural makers (some self-taught) for middle-class consumers. The Fieldings' belief in the democratic appeal of these artifacts, and their commitment to making them accessible to a large audience on the West Coast (where there are few public collections of early American artifacts), emerges clearly in their essay. Volume editor and former interim chief curator of American Art James Glisson shares the Fieldings' excitement over the potential of objects to tell histories of the everyday lives of middle-class Americans in the past. In their animation and vibrancy, these artifacts belie longstanding assumptions that early American artifacts are stodgy, elitist, and conservative.

To some extent those associations are deserved. Many major museum collections of American decorative arts formed through the donations of private collectors who began amassing artifacts in the 1920s. These men and women, such as Henry Francis du Pont, Francis P. Garvan, and Ima Hogg, were guided by principles of collecting shaped by the Anglo American Colonial Revival and a "great white men" version of American history; they sought out high-style artifacts from major urban areas produced by famous craftsmen and used by the eighteenth-century political and social elite. Though sometimes they included provincial styles, typically Pennsylvania German fraktur or chests, the majority of their collections testified to eighteenth-century users' quest for wealth, civility, and the attainment of British style ideals. A coterie of historians, art historians, material culture specialists, and curators have demonstrated that early American artifacts can be read against the grain to tell different stories of transatlantic exchanges, of gendered contest, and of dispossession and enslavement.² However, many collections continue to preserve a skewed version of the American past through their initial formation.

The Fieldings' collecting interests offer a different model for whose stories can be told through the study of American material culture and which objects are most important for public interpretation. The scholarly essays included in Becoming America offer rich case studies of artifacts organized by media (furniture, textiles, landscape and still-life painting, portraiture), unveiling the multiple...