"Folk art emerged in twentieth-century Nova Scotia not as an accident of history, but in tandem with cultural policy developments that shaped art institutions across the province between 1967 and 1997. For Folk's Sake charts how woodcarvings and paintings by well-known and obscure self-taught makers--and their connection to handwork, local history, and place--soothed the public's nostalgia for a simpler past. Addressing modernism as it pertains to the genealogy of folk art and late twentieth-century crises in capitalism, Erin Morton places artists like Maud Lewis and Collins Eisenhauer within histories of cultural and economic development in the province. Engaging the national and transnational developments that moulded public and academic criteria, she examines the ways in which a conceptual category took concrete, material form. As folk art entered the public collection of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and the private collections of professors at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, it evolved under the direction of collectors and curators who sought it according to a particular modernist aesthetic language. Illustrated with over seventy images, For Folk's Sake interrogates the emotive pull of folk art to radically reconstruct the relationships that emerged between relatively impoverished self-taught artists, a new brand of middle-class collector, and academically trained professors and curators in Nova Scotia's most important art institutions."--Provided by publisher.