Art: Crafts Across the Sea

Above the doorway of the big modern building in Santa Fe, N.Mex. is lettered an appropriate motto: “The art of the craftsman is a bond between the peoples of the world.” The building is Santa Fe’s new Museum of International Folk Art, and both museum and motto are the gift of a wealthy Chicago art patron named Florence Dibell Bartlett, who has spent 20 years collecting the folk art of 50 countries. On her travels, she noticed that most of the ancient crafts seemed to be dying out. Collector Bartlett decided to build the museum as a showcase for the works of the world’s craftsmen.

Collector Bartlett’s showcase is enough to delight any museum visitor. Planned by Director Robert B. Inverarity, 44, a wartime Navy artist and part-time anthropologist, the museum’s building is clean and functional, all on one floor and with plenty of well-lighted exhibition space. There is a comfortable auditorium with a stage and movie screen, a wing of workshops with special looms for reweaving damaged fabrics, photo labs and a microfilm room, a complete research library and special workrooms for visiting scholars. The building is air-conditioned, and when visitors get tired of looking at the exhibits, they can relax in the museum’s handsome lounge, or wander out onto a flagstone patio for a view of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

When the museum opened last week, visitors could see just how well the craftsman’s art links the peoples of the world. One display of shoes showed the common ingenuity of the world’s cobblers: a wooden Dutch shoe for the wet lowlands, a cool leather sandal for Arabia’s hot sands, a warm quilted-cotton boot for Manchuria’s bitter winters. Wooden manikins wore beautifully embroidered costumes from the Andean highlands and a fascinating suit of woven palm-fiber armor made for a South Sea island warrior. There were tiny statues, ceremonial masks, hoes and puppets from such widely separated areas as Borneo, Europe and Africa, all done with the same careful skill. And outside, the museum will soon set up its most ambitious project of all: a complete fisherman’s cottage brought over from Sweden, the first of an international village to show how different peoples of the world solve their living problems.