Winter 2016

Winter 112 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com T he most pressing agenda item for the American Folk Art Museum’s (AFAM) 2012 Strategic Plan was to find a director. With Anne-Imelda Radice, the museum got their wish——in spades. Within her first month, Radice successfully approached the Luce Foundation to fund a traveling exhibition to prove AFAM was alive and thriving: Self-Taught Genius: Treasures from the American Folk Art Museum . Opened in 2014 at AFAM, the show will complete its national tour in January 2017. The run has included six additional museum installations that inform, entertain, and educate visitors about the changing nature of self-taught art, material for which the museum is renowned. Radice has been a whirlwind since arriving, stating, “I wanted to break the mold of the AFAM of the past.” The past to which she refers involved a crushing debt resulting from the museum’s presence on West 53rd Street, in an 82-foot-high building designed in 2001 by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien for the museum’s exhibition spaces and offices. Though strikingly sculptural with its nonconformist, undulating copper-bronze façade, and an ode to contemporary architecture, the interior spaces did not lend themselves to exhibitions and the museum was unable to draw the expected crowds, even with its location Did You Know: The collection was launched in 1962 with the gift of the iconic Flag Gate. Since then, more than 8,000 objects, from the U.S. and abroad, have been acquired. Breaking the Mold The American Folk Art Museum’s Bright Future by Johanna McBrien