The first thing object visible upon entering Judith Espinar’s home in Acequia Madre is her fireplace. It’s no longer functional, covered as it is in Mexican and Peruvian crosses, retablos and bultos and Ethiopian metalwork. Beside it is an altar filled with candelabras, urns and ceramics. Her living room is a dense quarters for works of many nations. At the foot of the door sit “The Ladies,” an assortment of female figurative candlesticks and pitchers from Sicily, Peru and France. “They’re my favorites,” Espinar says. “They always watch everything.”
Espinar, a co-founder of the International Folk Art Market, has spent her adult life amassing a collection of the world’s most esteemed folk art, more than enough to fill a home to the brim. The upcoming Museum of International Folk Art Museum exhibition, A Gathering of Voices, will recreate Espinar’s domestic arrangements, called “vignettes,” this December.
“While this isn’t going to have a period room effect, we are trying to recreate domestic interiors, the feel of what the social spaces are in a home, and how she has crafted that in her own home,” says Laura Addison, curator of North American and European folk art at the museum. Take the hearth, which is symbolically central in the home, a place for people to gather and converse, and around which Espinar has centered her collection. The exhibit also tries to highlight the eye of the collector, which MOIFA Director Khristaan Villela says means “knowing what are great things, and what to do with them.” This includes what one chooses to buy and how they choose to put it together, he says. “Even the color of the walls.”
Additionally, the exhibition celebrates Espinar’s promised gift of her full collection, left to the museum in a will. The process of moving Espinar’s belongings to Museum Hill begins in August, and A Gathering of Voices opens Dec. 16.
"I think folk art can tell you things about objects that other art forms can't. You're seeing the voice of a culture," Espinar says. In some instances, she explains, the piece reveals the passing of a tradition from one culture to another when motifs reoccur in altered forms. Espinar is also interested in how folk art commands 3-D space; say, using a painted design to show the depth of a bowl. "A folk artist understands that he's never dealing with the picture reality, the photograph reality," she adds. "Right away the personality of the maker becomes an amazing part of the way a horse looks, the way a saint looks, the way a flower looks. It's very joyous."
Folk art is, by its nature, utilitarian, rarely made purely for the sake of aesthetics; Espinar abides by this, freely using her objects in daily life. "I don't really care if a tablecloth gets stained or something, because I think it's about living with things and using them the way they were originally meant to serve," she says. "I just make friends with them." She takes pleasure in the look of use, which she believes is valorized in European media but not in America, where things are supposed to look like "a hotel lobby." With great enthusiasm she inspects a kitchen bowl. "When you use [clay] and you wash it and it gets hot and cold," she explains. "Over time the clay and the glaze come together in a way that gives the color a feeling that you can't get any other way."
It’s rare to see someone glean so much joy from their objects. Passing by shelves full of trinkets, Espinar says giddily, “You can see that they almost say, ‘Can you please put folk art in here?’”
She likes use the architecture of the home in arranging pieces, often organizing borders around doors and windows. For this exhibit, she says, she had to study her own methods in order to describe them, since she’s spent so many years relying on intuition. “I just put things down together and keep putting them down together until I love the way they look,” she explains.
One of Espinar’s core philosophies as a collector is to avoid antiques—“Because it is my heart’s dream to support living artists,” she says. Addison points out that this is a common misconception about folk art: “That the traditions are past and not present and not future,” she says. “Our mission is to communicate to the public what some really vital traditions are around the world and how they continue today.” She tries to put living artists in every show. This ties in with the notion that folk art is artifact and not art, which Addison also tries to dispel. “We regard folk art as art, but there’s a way in which we engage with conversations that happen at ethnographic museums also.”
Espinar got her start collecting on a trip to Mexico years ago, just after she finished design school. She visited a market and saw rows of terra cotta pots. “I just really couldn’t believe that this wasn’t one of the main things we should have been studying. Where it came from and why and what it was doing, and with all its brothers and sisters there,” she recalls. “It said Mexico. Definitely a tourist thing. Unbelievably beautiful. I bought that and my whole life changed.”
