Florida is home to many talented artists whose work reflects the state’s diverse traditions and cultural heritage. From clown shoes and diving helmets to memory paintings and metal outdoor sculptures, Just Above the Water: Florida Folk Art explores the diversity and mastery of artistic expressions in the Sunshine State. Kristin Congdon and Tina Bucuvalas have produced a comprehensive, thoughtful, and beautiful work that is accessible to a general reader and contributes greatly to folk arts scholarship.

While working as a folklorist in Florida, I often complained that there was not a good text on Florida folk art and material culture. The former Bureau of Florida Folklife and the Florida Folklife Program produced many fine brochures, booklets, and artist monographs, but a comprehensive and insightful book did not exist until this work. Much in the same way that Stetson Kennedy’s Palmetto Country and Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men broke new ground in Florida folklore scholarship, Just Above the Water has cut inroads into the discussion of the individual artist and how concepts of tradition and innovation provide the necessary contexts for understanding the complexities of “folk art.” This work motivates the reader to think critically about the work of individual artists within their traditional communities.

As the authors note, this work builds upon a statewide survey and exhibition produced by the Historical Museum of South Florida in 1998. On the whole, however, this book differs greatly from the exhibition catalogue, Florida Folklife: Traditional Arts in Contemporary Communities. First, the present work includes a broader range of artists. Where the exhibit focused primarily on the makers of nets, boats, musical instruments, quilts, and other crafts, this text includes painters and sculptors. This addition contributes to the book’s ability to broaden the lens of folk art and challenge assumptions that are sometimes held by folklorists and art scholars.

The book divides into two distinct sections. The first section includes a pair of essays which overview the geography, artistic traditions, and theoretical approaches of the work. The first essay, “Florida’s Land, People, and Artistic Traditions,” explores the communities and groups surveyed through their artists and traditions. The authors highlight home arts, occupational traditions, and the built environment, as well as a category they call “community traditions,” in which they include musical-instrument making as well as objects made for recreational purposes, such as surf boards and racing saddles. This essay mentions in passing dozens of artists, but most are not profiled in the “Artists” section of the book. In some cases this becomes frustrating. The point of the entire book seems to be that the artists’ stories, contexts, and aesthetics are important, but this first essay often reduces an artist to a sentence or to part of a passing reference. In all fairness, though, the introductory essay does reflect the amazing diversity of traditions in the state and the authors note that they wished they could included more artists; still, their cursory treatment of some of the artists in this introductory section does not do justice to the artists or to the writers’ definitional arguments, which are presented in the following essay.

The second essay is concerned with the definitional issues associated with “folk art,” which the authors construct through the rubric of tradition and innovation, asserting that folk art is both. The authors’ clarification of terms makes this work a must-read for folk art historians, material culturists, and folklorists. Through numerous examples, the authors demonstrate how the artistic expressions they describe, often called “folk art,” are “innovative traditions.” Also, they explore the problems associated with terms such as “self-taught” and “outsider” artists and artfully reclaim the concept of “folk art” through specific artists’ stories, perspectives, and words.

The second section of the book is a wonderful sampling of the exceptional artists working in Florida. This section includes beautiful photographs and well-crafted profiles of each artist. However, this book is much more than the typical survey of the traditional arts found within the folk groups and ethnic communities of a state. Congdon and Bucuvalas approach their work with a refreshingly expansive and inclusive understanding of folk art, which succeeds by keeping the individual artists at the center of their study, while they explore how each artist’s work reflects the cultural, historical, and creative contexts in which the artist works. I especially enjoyed the fact that artists were listed alphabetically rather than artificially grouped by genre, ethnicity, or region.

The photographs deserve separate mention. Bud Lee and other photographers captured artists in their natural contexts. Often posed in their yards, studios, and homes, most are portraits in situ, as if the artists paused from their work just long enough for the picture to be taken. The book also includes a generous forty-eight pages of color plates.

This is an essential book, not just for those interested in the folk and traditional arts of Florida, but also for anyone interested in material culture or folk art in general. Congdon and Bucuvalas succeed in contributing to the “better understanding of the complexities of individual creators and the many dynamic cultures which they belong to and break away from in their arts” (42).

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[Review length: 858 words • Review posted on April 5, 2007]