I wasn't sure what to expect. The show was titled Urban Folk Art , and those were not two concepts I would have put together. All the self-taught art I've ever seen had the same primitive line that always seemed bucolic.
Folk art is rural art.
Even if a city guy tried it, it would all come out the same. That's what a genre means, or so I thought. But Adrian Swain, the curator at the Kentucky Folk Art Center, had a different idea or at least he wanted to explore the possibility that artists from urban environments would add a new dimension to the genre. Then I walked into the gallery and found bucolic blasted away. Metallic sculptures shone under the track lights.