Folky Quilts and the Term Folkart

The term Folk Art is often used to describe quilts or other forms of artistic expression. But it's complicated.

I feel the term Folk Art is so vague with so many possible meanings and connotations that it is useless as communication. Is the above, crudely-stitched version of Marie Webster's commercial design "Wind Blown Tulips" folk art or "folky" as the seller describes it?

This "folky" style of quiltmaking was extremely fashionable in the 1980-2010 period: Muted colors, exaggerated, distorted star shapes, asymmetrical floral arrangements far from traditional Germanic repeat formats and lots of plaids. What an art historian might call manneristic or highly stylized. Quite the commercial success.David Hackett Fischer in his book Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America makes a distinction between the words "Folkways" and "Folklore," which encompasses folkart.

"The word folklore was coined by British scholar William Thoms in 1846 as 'the generic term under which are included...arts...and the like current among backward peoples."

Fischer goes on: "The idea of folklore was modified...biases still survive." Dell Thayer Upton, looking at housing types coined the word "Vernacular Architecture," in the early 1980s, a language term that does seem to specifically describe housing styles without reference to class.When I was in the business of documenting this category of expression we called it Grassroots Art, a term coined by Gregg Blasdel in a 1968 article in Art in America. It's also called Outsider Art (Outside the Academy???) and in French Art Brut, which means Raw Art. Other terms: Self-Taught Art---again alluding to the the lack of high-faluting art school influence.