Elaine Eff’s The Painted Screens of Baltimore: An Urban Folk Art Revealed is a masterpiece of folk art scholarship that represents the culmination of decades of thought, cultural activism, archival research, and fieldwork by one of the most gifted folklorists of her generation. This work fulfills the demanding humanistic commitments developed in folklore—fully realized portraits of real people, careful and thorough care to present and understand contexts, representational strategies that open up accessibility and engagement. Her book is a work of love and care, and a deeply crafted expression, as much art in itself as scholarship, though bursting with authoritative and far-ranging research and a seemingly effortless demonstration of theoretical sophistication. Eff doesn’t argue for an approach to folk art here, she performs one, and in so doing sets a standard for anyone concerned with ethical, transformative practice and representation that contributes to both scholarship and the well-being of the communities that we work in.
The book is gorgeous and almost shockingly affordable, and if for no other reason than these, it is a book that every folklorist should have in his or her collection. Its design is exquisite, from its hard cover sheathed delightfully in a screen-style jacket, to its crisp typography and spacious uncluttered layout. Inside, hundreds of images share space comfortably with informative and engaging text boxes and ten chapters arranged into three main sections.
The first four chapters set the stage, introducing us to this Baltimore tradition, and tracing the histories of wire and screens. We leap back to the fifteenth century to track the development of these technologies, and move forward into the nineteenth-century heyday of the mannered well-to-do screen-painting practices of Europe and New England. Chapter 3 stands out in this section for me, taking us into a fascinating and rich chronicle of the development of Baltimore’s urban landscape and working-class architecture. Here we see a patterned life-world formed through economic and social forces, and the vigorous cultural pride of Baltimoreans creating well-kept communities as they made these spaces home.
The second section, The Screen Painters, is the heart of this work. Drawing from historical materials but mostly from her sustained and extraordinarily deep fieldwork, Eff recounts the birth of the Baltimore painted-screen tradition and its growth and development. Central to this story is the father of Baltimore painted screens, William Oktavec, who painted his first screen in Baltimore in 1913. Oktavec’s screens caught on in a big way, and by the 1960s dozens of painters influenced or trained by Oktavec had covered tens of thousands of screens with their artwork. Eff is masterful in this section at allowing these artists to tell their own story, whilst deftly sharing their interrelationships and colorful personalities. She reveals a lively and engaged folk art scene, connected through technique and iconic motifs like the ubiquitous “red bungalow,” but bristling with rivalry, innovation, and strongly held aesthetic opinions. Here, gracefully, she accomplishes an authoritative, definitive, and enduring account of this tradition that will stand the test of time, and that sets a standard for other work claiming to do justice to a vernacular artistic scene. This is a portrait of a creative world told through vivid personal stories of real people who are known in that deep way only possible through fully committed engagement.
The final section, New Directions, ends the work on a hopeful note, showing how despite demographic and technological change that shrank the painted-screen tradition from its mid-twentieth-century glories, screen painting is alive and well in Baltimore with new painters and sustained interest. What Eff humbly understates in this book is the enormous impact she herself has had in this interest. With this book, Eff confirms her gifts as an erudite scholar and an accomplished and accessible writer, but she has long distinguished herself in the field of folklore and folk arts through her extraordinary service as a cultural worker and activist. Her journey as a professional has been the journey of our field, from analysis and presentation in an academic mode to partnering commitment and ethical solidarity, and she has been a pioneer, inspiration, and mentor for so many of us.
Her work has been to not only document the screen tradition, but tenaciously to support and care for it, in genuine fellowship and connection with those who also care for it who she has come to know as friends and equals. This has been Eff’s modus operandi not just with painted screens but with the range of communities she has worked with, from lighthouse keepers to waterwomen to quilters and on and on. She sets a standard for folkloristic engagement that belies facile critiques of practice. In fact, the logics of critical social and cultural theory arc toward an engaged collaborative holistic scholarly activism, just the sort of dynamically grounded work that Eff has been doing for so many years.
This book is a definitive painted-screens bible, a beautiful object in its own right, an exemplar of folk arts scholarship, and a chronicle of and a contribution to a lifework of sustaining cultural partnership and care. The book will have an enduring legacy and happily is seeing a second printing, with I hope many more printings to come, but it is the legacy of folkloristic cultural action so powerfully realized in Elaine Eff’s life and work that may be the greatest legacy of all.
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[Review length: 891 words • Review posted on April 1, 2015]