Folk Art: Continuity, Creativity, and the Brazilian Quotidian by Henry Glassie and Pravina Shukla

IU press recently released Folk Art: Continuity, Creativity, and the Brazilian Quotidian by Dr. Henry Glassie and Dr. Pravina Shukla. The book is a gateway to listening to the artists of the Brazilian Northeast. Their work, they say, comes of continuity and creativity. Continuity runs along lines of learning toward social coherence and creativity brings challenges and deep personal satisfaction.

What they say and do in Brazil aligns with ethnographic evidence from New Mexico and North Carolina; from Ireland, Portugal, and Italy; from Nigeria, Turkey, India, and Bangladesh; from China and Japan.

This book is about that, about folk art as a sign of human unity.

Praise:

“When considering Folk Art: Continuity, Creativity, and the Brazilian Quotidian there are no words adequate to describe it. The unadorned clarity of both the author’s narrative and that of the artists with whom they worked in Brazil is absolutely stunning. Glassie and Shukla honor the generations of artists in families as they sculpt the processions of people and animals which walk across time and into our hearts. And then in a sweeping motion, like brushstrokes on a canvas, they transport us into homes around the globe where they have worked as they reveal their common bond of creativity and reverence for tradition. This is a book for the ages that places folk art, and the artists who create and nurture it at the center of life itself. “

~William Ferris, Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History Emeritus, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Authors:

Henry Glassie, College Professor Emeritus at Indiana University, received the Haskins Prize of the American Council of Learned Societies for a distinguished career of humanistic scholarship. Three of his books—Passing the Time in Ballymenone, The Spirit of Folk Art, and Turkish Traditional Art Today—were named among the notable books of the year by the New York Times. The film by Pat Collins, Henry Glassie: Field Work, was named the best Irish documentary of the year in 2020.

Pravina Shukla, Provost Professor, has won six teaching awards including the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. She is the author of The Grace of Four Moons: Dress, Adornment, and the Art of the Body in Modern India, winner of the Coomaraswamy Prize of the Association of Asian Studies and the Davenport Award of the Costume Society of America. She also wrote Costume: Performing Identities through Dress and co-authored The Individual and Tradition.

You can check out the book or buy it via this link: https://iupress.org/9780253067210/folk-art/