In Search of Authenticity: Public Memory, Living History, and Folk Art in Modern Canada

ion – seemed to be progressing to nowhere, save to irony. The advantage of folk art as a cornerstone of the new AGNS collection was that, aside from being local, it was also economical. It was far cheaper to collect Collins Eisenhauer than Pablo Picasso or even Arthur Lismer (75). At the same time as the AGNS was born, with a folk art focus that would most likely have appalled Elizabeth Nutt, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) was being reinvented as an avant garde fine arts institution specializing in conceptual art, where the idea rather than the material form of art was emphasized. The highly material practice of folk artists would seem antithetical to this trend. But, in practice, as Morton explains, the narrative of Nova Scotia as a cultural “blank slate,” with no fine arts tradition but where nevertheless original creative work was possible, was one that suited both NSCAD professors and folk art promoters alike. Gerald Ferguson, professor and promoter both, was a conceptual artist who collected the work of Nova Scotian folk artists including Collins Eisenhauer. Ferguson’s intellectual understanding of art provided legitimacy for the celebration of works such as Eisenhauer’s life-size carving of Kentucky Fried Chicken’s Colonel Sanders. “The Colonel,” Ferguson observed, “is an idiosyncratic expression to satisfy Eisenhauer’s’ creative energies . . . and in this respect, is very close to the individualistic spirit in much of contemporary art” (94). There was a certain symbiosis between the stories sustaining both a conceptual art future and a folk art past: both needed to imagine that Nova Scotia was a cultural backwater, unburdened by a history of modernism or of modernity. Like Marxism, folk art’s death has been announced many times. As Morton documents, one of the consistent themes in discourse surrounding contemporary folk artists in Nova Scotia was the trope that they were one of the last of a dying breed. Akin to the “Vanishing Indian,” the folk artist, eking out a living in rural labour but expressing creativity through original art, was an endangered species doomed to extinction in the late capitalist present: these pronouncements were repeated from the 1970s through the 1990s. Despite being always near death, government cultural programs of the late 1960s and 1970s sponsored regional efforts to preserve and promote cultural production, Public Memory, Living History, and Folk Art 253 14 This intention was evident in other Canadian contexts where art galleries and museums were created in the first half of the 20th century. For cases in Western Canada, see Anne Whitelaw, Spaces and Places for Art: Making Art Institutions in Western Canada, 1912-1990 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017). particularly in places such as Nova Scotia that were, in the eyes Gerard Pelletier, federal minister of Cultural Affairs from 1968 to 1975, “cultural deserts” (135). These programs, supporting institutions such as the AGNS, spurred what Huntington regarded in retrospect as a “golden age of contemporary folk art” (134). This kind of funding began to disappear in the neoliberal 1980s and 1990s, and so new corporate sponsorship and revenue-generating strategies were required to make up the shortfall. Morton illustrates this trend in the second part of her book, which studies the case of Maud Lewis (1903-1970) and the way in which the AGNS has and continues to capitalize on the legacy of her life and work. In the wake of the film Maudie, the broad strokes of Lewis’s biography are perhaps now better known than ever; but even during the last few years of her life her story was circulated widely by print journalists, the CBC, and the NFB. Hers was a story of uplift. In the public version of her life, Lewis “seemed to triumph over obstacles such as disability, gendered economic marginalization, and rurality through the joyful optimism of her small painted panel board landscapes” (176). Living with her marginally employed husband Everett beside a highway in a tiny house without running water or electricity, Lewis was content, telling an interviewer in 1964 “I don’t need anything much more than I’ve got” (184). Early biographical narratives stressed this optimism: even if her life was an obvious anachronism and even if she, like many other rural Nova Scotians, lived with economic insecurity, she was, after all, happy and, through her art, modestly self-sufficient. After Maude’s and Everett’s deaths, biographies took on more tragic tones, acknowledging her social isolation, and questioning the degree to which Maud was supported by Everett. But the upshot of the narrative was still to celebrate Lewis’s success in overcoming adversity and creating through her paintings a “world without shadows” (177). By the late 1990s, the AGNS was presenting Lewis as “Canada’s best loved folk artist” – a status achieved through several decades of promotion and collection by the AGNS among other state and private cultural intermediaries. After her death, efforts began to preserve the house she had lived in and decoratively painted both inside and out. These efforts originated in the local Digby community, but ultimately AGNS took possession of the house. With the significant corporate sponsorship of Scotiabank, it ultimately came to be displayed in a newly expanded gallery space in Halifax. The house display followed a touring retrospective of her work, The Illuminated Life of Maud Lewis (1997), also sponsored by Scotiabank, that AGNS CEO (note the job title) Bernard Riordan hoped would make Lewis the “Anne of Green Gables of Nova Scotia in terms of tourism and cultural industry” (248). As Morton observes: “By the neoliberal 1990s, it was clear that folk art promised an expanded source of revenue for both the gallery and the province as a whole and, at the same time, offered branding benefits for corporate sponsors” (252). Maud Lewis as a brand had become valuable in ways that Maud Lewis as a person selling paintings at the roadside for $5 each could never have imagined. Lewis was in some ways a piece worker. On a daily basis she produced paintings for sale – sometimes made-to-order, sometimes reproducing her own work. In the era of mechanical reproduction, however, control over the copyright of Lewis’s images, which the AGNS obtained, allowed for the mass production of souvenirs, Acadiensis 254