2008 Exhibit

Finest Kind: Folk Art of the Penobscot

Finest Kind displayed a range of items; for example, professional carvers,working out of studios whose products could be considered fine art, will be included along with carvings by boat and ship builders whose training resulted in the ability to make anything they wanted out of wood. Marine carvings, from trail boards to figureheads, showed their skill and talent. Other carvers made decoys for both birds and fish; folk art museums and collectors consider some of these folk art, while others are considered just tools. Hunters and fishermen, of course, don’t care; they just want these decoys to work.

In the more formal art area, we explored the range of non- “tutored” art in areas like painting, by looking at the products of several artists who started as sign, carriage and house painters and later turned their skills to marine painting. On loan to us was a splendid painting by Jurgen Huge which shows a Rockland schooner and would be considered folk art by any student of the genre. He was a sailor turned grocer turned artist. We were also showing paintings by Percy Sanborn, a Belfast sign painter turned artist, whose work might be considered by some as too structured and formulaic to qualify as folk art.

The exhibit included practical and not so practical products of seafarers’ leisure time, ranging from scrimshaw to mackerel plows. There were half models that have been transformed from design tools to decorative wall art. There were sailors’ fancy ropework, decorative and practical, but which some would not consider art. Other textiles came from the shore; these range from embroidery to coverlets and rugs, decorated yet practical.

For me folk art is not a very useful term. Even the folk art museums can’t agree much beyond “you know it when you see it.” For Penobscot Marine Museum, doing a folk art exhibit let us display some of the collection that is usually hidden or is usually seen in another context.