In 1800, an advertisement for a peculiar device appeared in a Salem, Massachusetts newspaper. The ad stated that the device was also in use in New York, Baltimore, Boston, and Philadelphia. It promised to bring “innocent pleasure” and “great...

Folk art often has its roots in the popular culture of its time, and as often as not the folk artist surpasses his or her source material in aesthetic power. Such is the case with the Fenimore Art Museum's unforgettable shop figure “Colonel...

Some time ago I wrote a blog post about our large seated carving of Abraham Lincoln by the woodcarver Frank Moran of Vermont. That post caught the attention of a fellow blogger Kevin Duffy, whose blog, Candler Arts, is one of my favorites. Kevin wrote...

Well, we're a few days into the voting for the Blog-Readers' Choice exhibition and early results are coming in nicely. There are still alot of people visiting this site and not voting; I'm going to assume that you are waiting and thinking about how to...

It’s hard to describe the first time I met Karolina Danek. I had heard from a colleague in the field that she created unique religious paintings and had them all gathered together in a large room in her house. This was the early 1990s, and I was on...