Santa Fe Magazine Features IFAM’s New Executive Director
The latest edition of the Santa Fe Magazine, now available to purchase, highlighted a fabulous interview with our leader and Executive Director, Stacey Edgar.
FOLK ART IS UTILITARIAN. And it is decorative. Its materials are cloth, metal, clay, recycled materials. It is transitory, and perishable. It is dance, music, spoken word, food. It is not pyramids or a symphony. It does not aspire to live for the ages or high in the heavens.
Art is often created for patrons of all stripes, usually for royalty, the elites, for the rich, or for God.
Folk is for everyone else. It is inherently democratic, gender indifferent, age irrelevant, color agnostic. It is about something, not for somebody.
Every year, The International Folk Art Market brings together dozens of artists from the four corners of the earth.
They are entrepreneurs who have a uniquely and exclusively tactile relationship with what they create. They need feedback, they need to talk to their customers, they need capital, and they need a community of local and international entrepreneurs.
That’s what IFAM does. So it is totally logical (and totally unusual for a not-for-profit) to hire a new CEO from the start-up world. Someone who started all alone in her basement and reinvented how folk artists come to market.
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