Join IFAM in collaboration with Collected Works Bookstore and Coffeeshop in welcoming local author Ann Murdy for a reading and presentation of her new book, “On the Path of Marigolds: Living Traditions of Mexico’s Day of the Dead,” a bilingual book that features nearly 100 photographs illustrating Dia de Los Muertos celebrations and remembrances in Huaquechula, Puebla, […]
Please check this page for updates and more information. Stay tuned for news and updates on ticket sales for IFAM 2021!
As new details come out about Market we will be posting them here:
Updated 5/3/2021:
Volunteer registration is OPEN! If you’d like to get involved CLICK HERE!
When you sign up to Volunteer by May 10 you’ll receive:
A commemorative […]
Bev Schmidt and Steve Morrell
Our love affair with folk art began in 1977 during our first trip to Mexico as a couple. We were in Mexico City in one of the government sponsored craft stores where we saw these fantastic natural clay dolls. They were three feet tall and covered with clay flowers and small […]
What a joy to be asked to write something under the rubric “Living with Folk Art,” allowing me to reflect on my long engagement with the handmade and the many things I have loved (and sometimes lost) that give me pure delight, pause, and wonder.
Looking around my home today, the accumulation of things that surround […]
I am a story junkie. I have to finish every book or movie I start as curiosity would kill me otherwise. Even as a young girl I would hide novels inside my science books pretending as if I was doing my biology homework. My family, like any self-respecting Indian clan, hoped their daughter would be […]
I had never realized my lifelong love affair with folk art until I began attending the International Folk Arts Market over a decade ago. And I never wondered why I was so drawn to the art form until I was asked to write this brief essay.
Like any other collector’s passion, my connection to folk art […]
My parents bought me McCall’s Giant Golden Make-It Book when I was 8 years old. Within the pages of this beloved book, I learned to scout and gather common household materials and transform these materials into useful objects. A thin dowel with a wooden clothespin glued to the top and the opposite dowel end sunk […]
I grew up in a home with my father’s academic library on the top floor and my mother’s windowless sewing room in the basement. He was an orator, a man of the word; she a couture-worthy seamstress and homemaker. I perched in-between. Early on, I followed my father’s path into the study of religion at […]
In the early 1970s, my parents moved us to the outskirts of Fredericksburg, Virginia, on the Fall Line between the Piedmont and Tidewater regions, an area with a rich farming tradition dating back to the founding of our nation. Having grown up in rural communities in the deep South, they wanted my brother and me […]
Our fascination with masks started in 1994 on a family trip to San Miguel de Allende during Semana Santa. My husband Michael and I fell in love with a mask of a hornblower with a feathered headdress and couldn’t wait to see more masks. At a local mask shop, I had to rein in our […]
I live by the mantra “everything is personal” so writing about living with folk art is simply a description of my own life´s journey. Let’s start from the beginning, I was born in Colombia and grew up in a family that valued the handmade in all its forms: food was grown in the countryside farm, […]
When asked about favorite folk art, people love to tell stories. I first began hearing these stories 35 years ago when my family lived in Malaysia for a year. The Director General of Kraftangan Malaysia, a government ministry focused on tourism and arts, invited me to join as a researcher for marketing initiatives. My task […]
There’s a bit of sacredness involved anytime I invite an object into my home, particularly a decorative element. It isn’t allegiance to a style or movement, or that I’m a ‘collector’ of particular things. I’m speaking of energy — the magnetism of an object generated by its beauty, function, and the story that led up […]
