The Folkvine project did not merely make folk art accessible, but also used folk art and practices to influence how we did public scholarship. For example, the term vine described a new rhizomatic organization of our site (vines versus tree-like outlines); it also alluded to hearing “it on the grapevine” as another way of presenting materials. With those allusions, our project used a popular danceable song, and the folk artist’s sensibility, to impact our way of working and presenting folk art as a lens, not merely an object of study.
Near the start of the project, animator-artist-scholar Lynn Tomlinson and I interviewed former circus clown Diamond Jim Parker, who made miniature model circuses and had an important archive of clown, sideshow, and freak show history, paraphernalia, and photographic records. Sadly, Diamond Jim passed away during the work on this project only a few weeks after we interviewed him. Museums and private collectors divided up his circuses and archives. He knew he was not well; so, he wanted to make sure we protected and cultivated his legacy. In his interview, he specifically asked us and the entire Folkvine team to portray his circus-y sensibility. He was particularly concerned that we not decontextualize his life and work for hanging on four white walls of a museum’s gallery. This resistance to the dry museum-like exhibition resonated with me as it was part of a larger movement in my scholarship away from what art theorists called the “white cube,” fixed and decontextualized findings. We would not sacrifice these folks’ sensibility. The site instead uses that sensibility in all aspects of design and approach to the materials. It is a folk vine not a sterilized catalogue of materials.
– Craig Saper
“Folkvine.org attempts to demonstrate design approaches, and scholarly methods, that serve the needs of three different audiences. First, the website seeks to serve a general-public looking for greater access to often inaccessible folk life and art. Second, it appeals to folklorists and ethnographers looking for scholarly studies of folk life. Third, and most relevant to this essay, the site demonstrates methods and approaches that take advantage of the specific tools available online. The images, and the entire site, document and examine the atmosphere of these, now fading, roadside scenes and situations. The tourism industry’s publicity, and developers’ campaigns, favor the shiny-new, and safely managed, theme parks and gated communities rather than community-based traditions, making do with what’s at hand, idiosyncratic themes, and artisanal production processes. Florida has become a contested ground, environmentally, meteorologically, and culturally. Folkvine began as an effort to enlighten ourselves about that other culture – a culture of outsiders – and became a way to allow an international audience access to this cultural milieu.” – Craig Saper, “Toward A Visceral Scholarship Online:
Folkvine.org and Hypermedia Ethnography” https://journals.dartmouth.edu/cgi-bin/WebObjects/Journals.woa/xmlpage/4/article/285
