Troubled folk art museum optimistic at 50

The American Folk Art Museum, long plagued by financial problems, is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a new exhibition, renewed optimism for its future and its collection intact.

At a preview of a new exhibition celebrating its anniversary Tuesday, museum officials discussed its financial status and projection of its future.

The museum in September received a $2 million pledge from a longtime trustee and an additional $1 million commitment from other trustees and supporters, said Monty Blanchard Jr., president of the museum board of trustees. Those pledges gave the museum "significant runway to continue the operations of the museum and built it to new heights of artistic greatness," Blanchard said.

In addition, he said, the museum has received $500,000 from the Ford Foundation.

As late as this summer, the board had been in discussions about possibly turning its collection over to another institution but with the goal of keeping it in the city. But "the pledges and other money we had put us in a financially solvent position," Blanchard said. "The pledges provided that ballast for future operations" and allowed the museum to remain independent.

He identified the longtime trustee as Joyce B. Cowin.

The museum, founded in 1961, houses traditional folk art dating to the 18th century, including 5,000 quilts, weather vanes, textiles, sculptures, paintings and decorative arts in a 6,000-square-foot space in Lincoln Square, across from Lincoln Center. It also has a large collection of works by self-taught artists, including thousands of drawings, watercolors and unpublished manuscripts by Henry Darger.

The institution has faced financial challenges for a long time but they took a turn for the worse in 2009 when it defaulted on a $32 million debt. It had taken out the money for a new midtown Manhattan museum near the Museum of Modern Art. To pay off the debt, it sold the building to MoMA in July, but continued operating at its Lincoln Square branch, a location it has owned since 1989.

The museum's anniversary exhibition, "Jubilation/Rumination: Life, Real and Imagined," features nearly 100 highlights representing traditional folk art and outsider art, or works by self-taught artists. It includes a Darger illustration, "Gigantic Roverine with Young" from his 15,000-page manuscript, "In the Realms of the Unreal," and a metaphorical self-portrait by Nellie Mae Rowe, "Cow Jump Over the Mone."