The celebration of American folk art in the Museum of Fine Arts’ exhilarating and frustrating new show enjoys an air of excited discovery, despite the fact that the recognition of American folk artists’ achievements is itself almost 100 years old. With its extraordinary range across peoples, materials, and time — from 18th-century oil paintings to decorated sewing boxes, from African-American pottery to Pennsylvania Dutch baptismal records — the exhibit is both a political and an æsthetic success. Radically diverse traditions are brought together in a harmonious display, suggesting that no matter how great our differences as people, the pursuit of beauty makes us all kin.

Further, some — no, many — of the objects prove breathtaking. I have never been as mesmerized by a quilt or a hooked rug as I was by some of those in this exhibit. Unfortunately, the considerable achievements of “American Folk” are undercut by flaws in its presentation. A style that could only be described as two parts Martha Stewart and one part Antiques Road Show — precious, sanitized, and yet slapdash — takes over by the end of this otherwise carefully choreographed exhibit. Go anyway.

At the base of the escalator that takes you up one flight of stairs to the Gund Gallery looms a large, black, “geometric” weathervane that’s attributed to the eastern United States around 1850. It’s a dramatic piece of pre-Industrial proto-abstraction, and it hints at the power of what’s to come. What’s first to come is nothing short of spellbinding, an eight-and-a-half-foot-square mid-19th-century “album quilt” by one Mary Simon of Baltimore. At eye level, its bursting expanse of brightly colored, meticulously sewn, appliqué’d and embroidered images — eagles and flower arrangements, hunters and garlands — against a backdrop of textured white cotton suggests an entire Fourth of July fireworks display captured in cloth.

Three other quilts in “American Folk” stand out. Whereas Mary Simon’s craftsmanship testifies to love of country (we learn from the catalogue that the Stars-and-Stripes motif pays tribute to the Baltimore boys who were marching off to the Mexican-American War), Celestine Bacheller’s “crazy quilt” from the last quarter of the 19th century pays analogous homage to love of home. Crazy quilts earned their name for the irregularity of their patterns, and though Bacheller’s qualifies as wildly irregular, each of the 12 better-than-foot-sized squares depicts a seacoast image of her home near Lynn. Beneath the glossy sheen of her silk landscapes and seascapes, boats rock, houses tip, land sways, and the firmament itself totters. It’s dizzying.

The charming sophistication of these two quilts is counterpointed by the equally charming simplicity of the exhibit’s other two quilt masterpieces, one by an Athens (Georgia) woman born into slavery, the other by an unknown artist from Peru, Indiana.

What’s captivating about Harriet Powers’s flattened, dreamy, featureless cutouts is that though each of the 15 square panels of her quilt illustrates a story, we no longer “speak” the visual language to read what she had to say. Without the catalogue or a headset to guide us, we’re left alone with narratives stripped down to the pure urge to tell. Only the urgency and clarity and compositional integrity come through unaided. And that’s enough.

If a quilt can have an opposite, then the 1888 pictorial quilt, a nearly six-foot square of white embroidered cotton with a railroad track running its borders and two trains chugging along its upper and lower quadrants, qualifies as Powers’s. Like the trains and their track, the various images within and beyond the railroad — small-town references to such things as a horse and carriage, a town hall, a caldron on an open fire, a Victorian woman in formal public garb — are nearly all one color (blue) and seem stamped as if from a cookie cutter, they’re that exact. The effect is of a giant picture negative, so that for all its homy (if transitory) imagery, the Peru quilt appears starkly modern, a neatly fitted jigsaw puzzle to which we still belong, whereas Powers’s 15 panels of Bible stories and powerful personal experiences look like pages laid out from an ancient book.

Unfortunately, “American Folk” does not present these extraordinary quilts near one another (so their intense similarities and dissimilarities may be appreciated), and only one of the four gets sufficient space. Instead, the show is organized along some loose and essentially bogus themes in which the quilts and all else have been grouped. One assemblage called “Birds and Beasts” allows the exhibit’s one carousel animal to share space with an oil painting of a child holding a cat; “God and Country” juxtaposes a wall devoted to images of George Washington with a wall of uneventful images related to mourning the dead.

Neither is this series of phony divisions (my favorites are “Bountiful Harvests” and “Land and Sea”) the most troubling shortcoming. In the “Birds and Beasts” room, an open wall (with simple, square wood pillars, placed perhaps six feet apart) separates the carousel animal from the egregious display of bird decoys. In other words, you see the wonderful giant greyhound against an unintended backdrop of marsh grass, pussy willows, and wooden geese.

As if that weren’t enough, the designer marsh, with its delicate decoys of swans and ducks, curlews and mergansers, proves both cheesy and stupid. The exquisitely wrought birds are surrounded by flora and rocks that look as if they’d come from the terrarium-display section of Petco, plastic only a two-year-old could believe in. Worse still, the show’s curators did not bother to get the seasons right; notice the autumnal maple leaves beside the spring pussy willows beside the summer marsh grass. In the same spirit of neglect (better not to dwell on the mirror that’s been enlisted as water), moss that actually grows on the floor of deciduous and pine forests has been arranged on the water’s edge. Such sloppiness verges on contempt for the very artists “American Folk” is supposed to honor.

And awful as it looks, the pitfalls of the decoy display are subtle compared with the nearby wall that’s been painted a spiffy Sherman Williams antique red and bordered in a glossy, light wood to make it look like the side of a barn from an MGM musical. The disparity between the burnished old weathervanes that grace the pinnacles of the barn’s roof and the movie-lot transparency of its context is plain hurtful. (Besides, since the weathervanes were all manufactured in Waltham, wouldn’t you expect a New England design to the roof?)

Such nonsense is all the more regrettable because in its objects “American Folk” proves enchanting. With its variety of arresting oil portraits by 18th- and 19th-century itinerant painters, with its vibrant hooked rugs and delicately painted furniture, the show holds up the wisdom of the unschooled, the expressiveness of the reserved, the fundamental place of art in daily life.

Issue Date: April 12-19, 2001