Dossier: Decentered Folk Art. Contemporary points of view and narratives in Art History, curatorship and collections  

The practices that have come to be recognized and named as “folk art”, as a way of outlining specific productions, have been outlined by various events, agents and strategies. This category is often associated or accompanied by other terminologies, such as “naïf”, “primitive”, “virgin”, “regional”, “local” and “peripheral”. Many of these productions were historically crystallized by enunciating agents in the fields of art collection, art criticism, art history and curatorship who, by categorizing them in this way, attributed specificities and imagined singularities to these objects, supposedly related to their origin, producers and respective contexts. Generally, these values are marked by representations of temporality and spatiality that denote both temporal and geographical distance, expressed in terms associated with “tradition” and “authenticity”. They also mobilize racial, class, gender, and geographic markings, among others, often with intentionally archaic effects.

The intention behind this call for the decentered Folk Art dossier: contemporary views and narratives of art history, curatorship and collections is to reflect on how notions related to “folk art” have been tensioned, reconfigured and folded into new nuances by agents, institutions and contemporary art circuits, affecting and reshaping views related to the perspectives of art history, curatorship and museological processes. Sometimes questioning and decentering, sometimes celebrating and reaffirming—a political position that does not escape the risk of condescension and voluntarism—these initiatives result in new disputes, problems and homogeneities that we are interested in discussing. We do not want a debate in the field of ontology, but on points of view that are modeled culturally, socially and historically and relate mainly to the interests and values of agents and institutions that collect, display and narrate.

Here, we invite research that is interested in: curatorship and exhibitions that explore exchanges between “contemporary art” and “folk art”; institutions and agents that research collections initially classified as “folk art” and that propose new points of view and narratives for these objects and their producers; studies in the fields of art history, culture history and art theory whose approaches offer new ways of understanding the transit of “folk”—as places, agents and knowledge—in the processes of creating artists in the contemporary world.

Contributions must have between 25,000 and 35,000 characters and must be submitted in the system by 06, 30, 2023. The template and guidelines for authors can be found on the website of the Estado da Arte magazine. http://www.seer.ufu.br/index.php/revistaestadodaarte/index

Submission deadline: June 30, 2023.

Organizers: Emerson Dionisio Gomes de Oliveira (UnB); Pedro Ernesto Freitas Lima (Unespar).

Contact: revistaestadodaarte20@gmail.com