Folk art as a revelation of our common humanity—this phrase encapsulates the effort of Pravina Shukla and Henry Glassie in Folk Art: Continuity, Creativity, and the Brazilian Quotidian to show how people in Northeastern Brazil, as well as in other parts of the world, use material culture to express their being, passion, and devotion. As the authors state, the point is not to study the artists but to stand with them, thinking with people, grounding their approach in direct experience rather than theoretical abstraction: “We can proceed empirically, talking with people, watching them work, and letting them lead. Our aim is not to study them, but to stand with them in mutual appreciation of their creations” (7).
The poetic language used to describe space and the distinct temporality through which the environment shapes and influences the artists’ work reveals that the setting is not a mere backdrop but an active agent inspiring creation. The narrative moves sensitively through the artists’ daily practices, attending to the gestures, rhythms, and materials that compose their craft, endowing the text with a sensory depth.
Pravina Shukla is Provost Professor, Chair of the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, and Director of the Folklore Institute at Indiana University. Henry Glassie is a College Professor Emeritus at the same institution. This book resonates deeply with their other works, especially Sacred Art: Catholic Saints and Candomblé Gods in Modern Brazil, a previous and complementary volume to the present one. Although the authors initially conceived a single book, they decided to divide the project—much like Brazilian artists divide their repertoires—into sacred art and everyday art. Sacred Art focuses on sacred images of Catholic saints and Candomblé deities, while Folk Art turns to the repertoire of everyday life. Regarding this notion of the everyday, artist Severino Vitalino defines it as “the life that is lived here in Brazil, in Pernambuco, right?” (29). Despite this thematic division, the ethnographic data show how the sacred and the everyday intertwine in the artists’ experiences, as they often perceive their work to be a divine gift.
Several of Glassie’s books—such as Daniel Johnston: A Portrait of the Artist as a Potter in North Carolina, The Potter’s Art, and Material Culture—also inspired the composition of this volume, particularly in grounding the principles of creative performance as applied to artifacts and in framing the discussion of traditional ceramic art across different regions of the world. These works, along with the authors’ broader trajectories, position Folk Art within a wider emphasis on material culture and performance, which shape both the structure and the methodological focus of the book in its exploration of the universal creative impulse.
The ethnography and the making of the book were deeply affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors describe a dilemma between waiting for the safe moment to return to Brazil and the need to publish the book and deliver it to the people involved. Thus, 2019 serves as the main temporal framework of the book, expanded with data collected later, in November 2021, as well as with earlier materials reaching back to 2007.
Folk Art consists of an introduction and three major parts. Part I focuses on the ceramic artists of Alto do Moura, a small town near Caruaru, which serves as the book’s central setting. In this section, the authors provide a detailed account of the artists and the family lineages that have given rise to some of the region’s most renowned figures, highlighting the interplay between continuity and creativity. It is precisely this familial structure—used as a model for organizing the book into subsections according to artistic lineages—that ensures the survival of tradition, even in the face of the challenges encountered by each new generation. In Part II, the authors turn to the xilogravura artists of Bezerros, such as J. Borges and J. Miguel, demonstrating how the principles of continuity and creativity also manifest in another medium: the tradition of xilogravura, which reinforces the theme of everyday life in the Brazilian Northeast.
Despite belonging to different communities, Bezerros and Alto do Moura share representational repertoire and have a recognized progenitor of their tradition—J. Borges in Bezerros and Mestre Vitalino in Alto do Moura. In both places, family lineages include numerous prolific creators who work to satisfy the desires of a broad, indeed national, popular market. They also share central themes such as Os Retirantes, Lampião and Maria Bonita, the Banda de Pífano, and the Trio Nordestino, among others.
In Part III, the authors expand the comparative horizon of Folk Art by exploring how creativity and tradition unfold in different cultural contexts—including in Turkey, India, Nigeria, the United States, and Japan. The complex process of rural women weaving carpets in Karagömlek, Turkey, is juxtaposed with the modeling of clay in Brazil, both grounded in inherited techniques yet open to personal invention. Similarly, the production of stoneware in North Carolina—a type of high-fired pottery distinct from the low-temperature clay of Alto do Moura—illustrates the universality of artistic striving. In Japan, the masters of Hagi pottery embody this same pursuit, allowing their pieces to mature through phases of use, a metaphor for the evolution of art itself as a living process.
Continuity also connects and permeates the three parts of the book, which—together with creativity—form the essence of folk art that the work seeks to describe across different contexts, techniques, and geographies. On a universal level, continuity is ensured because art is, ultimately, self-learned through observation, allowing individual expression (creativity) to emerge without breaking collective inheritance. Tradition is defined as both the received resource from the past and the “subsequent process of creating the future out of the past” (525). Continuity is achieved through “acts of acceptance and transfer that can be traditionalized into collective heritage” (507).
As the authors explain, this process can unfold in multiple modes of transmission. Tradition can be passed on through shared living rather than formal instruction—a process of learning by observing, repeating, and internalizing the master’s gesture, as seen in the lineage that runs from Dona Zenha Paulino to José Bezerra in Ibimirim. Artists may also return to inherited methods to create new forms, as Manuel Eudócio and Luiz Antônio expand Mestre Vitalino’s legacy by incorporating images of modern life. A third mode emerges when tradition is preserved not through method but through theme—a symbolic continuity that crosses cultural boundaries, as in the works of the Nigerian artist Prince Twins Seven-Seven and Francisco Santos, who renew ancient cosmologies through new visual languages. Thus, tradition, far from being static, flows like the clay shaped by the artists’ hands: a living substance in which the past is continually reinvented in the present, and time itself moves toward art.
One of the main concepts emerging from this ethnography is the idea of dom, a key word in the vocabulary of Pernambuco’s artists. Dom is connected to the will of the creator and transcends innate talent—it is a kind of gift that draws people toward creation, the pursuit of perfection, an inner necessity that moves the artist even through difficult times. As Severino Vitalino says about his father, Mestre Vitalino: “He did not see a work of clay except the pots made by my grandmother. But for figurative work, he received a dom and made it (26).” This idea, as the authors explain, can be extended to the human creative capacity that allows us to transform a finite set (such as grammatical rules, musical notes, or design principles) into an infinite range of results—texts, melodies, artifacts. This ability is described as “our universally human dom” (405). Artists from other regions have developed poetic formulations to express a similar idea, such as the hava (“air”) described by Turkish artists: “Turkish artisans describe this complicated process as smooth, nearly natural, when they say that everyone is born into a place that has a distinct hava—an air—an environment of sounds and sights, of traditions. During growth that air is constantly inhaled. It circulates within, fusing with the self, so when it is exhaled in creation, the product, song or pot, inevitably and simultaneously represents the individual and the individual’s shared tradition” (406).
This inner creative force, demonstrated through the authors’ fieldwork on five continents, resonates with Noam Chomsky’s definition of humanity as complexly creative. It forms the foundation of Folk Art—a vision of creativity as a universal human faculty that unites humankind and invalidates any argument based on racial, gender, or caste superiority. In this sense, folk art is the realization of a deeply rooted and universally shared creative potential, re-creating and re-imagining the future through art and performance. Within this comparative framework, Alto do Moura emerges as a rare and revealing case that embodies the transformation of everyday life into art, capturing moments of devotion, work, and change. These figurines, like the sacred images of Tracunhaém, testify to the persistence of belief and creativity amid social transformation. The book concludes where it began, suggesting a circular narrative: as utilitarian pottery declines, figurative art rises—reviving the clay itself, which sinks into death only to be reborn as art. Time flows through their hands toward creation, and life goes on.
[Review Length: 1537 words • Review posted on November 7, 2025]