Immerse yourself in more than 425 previously unpublished colour photographs of Canada's disappearing traditional folk art. The authors' discovery of distinctive objects from across Canada inspired them to re-classify folk art, and to analyze and interpret their examples in 17 thematic chapters. The "aesthetic of the everyday" of Canada's material heritage is presented through paintings and carvings, quilts and rugs, tables and trade signs-just to mention a few. These traditional art forms of diverse community groups express a decorative cultural identity, documented through the unique lens of photographer James A. Chambers. Historians, curators, collectors, designers, and dealers, as well as anyone who appreciates material culture, will want to have this collection in their libraries.

Inspired by the 150th anniversary of Canadian confederation, Quebec author and antiques professional Peter E. Baker brings life to Canadian history and demonstrates how antiques and folk art can successfully be incorporated into a contemporary lifestyle, providing a home with a unique identity.

This book presents the first overview of craft activity, as an integral part of Canadian culture between 1900 and 1950, and reviews the tone and focus of contemporaneous writing about craft. It explores the diversity of all aspects of craft, including makers, production, organization, education, and government involvement.

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 - fed the public’s nostalgia for a simpler past. The folk artists examined here range from the well-known self-taught painter Maud Lewis to the relatively anonymous woodcarvers Charles Atkinson, Ralph Boutilier, Collins Eisenhauer, and Clarence Mooers. These artists are connected by the ways in which their work fascinated those active in the contemporary Canadian art world at a time when modernism – and the art market that once sustained it – had reached a crisis. 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 out according to a particular modernist aesthetic language. Morton engages national and transnational developments that helped to shape ideas about folk art to show how a conceptual category took material form. Generously illustrated, For Folk’s Sake interrogates the emotive pull of folk art and reconstructs 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.

Set in the 1960s, Judy Fong Bates’s much-talked-about debut novel is the story of a young girl, the daughter of a small Ontario town’s solitary Chinese family, whose life is changed over the course of one summer when she learns the burden of secrets. Through Su-Jen’s eyes, the hard life behind the scenes at the Dragon Café unfolds. As Su-Jen’s father works continually for a better future, her mother, a beautiful but embittered woman, settles uneasily into their new life. Su-Jen feels the weight of her mother’s unhappiness as Su-Jen’s life takes her outside the restaurant and far from the customs of the traditional past. When Su-Jen’s half-brother arrives, smouldering under the responsibilities he must bear as the dutiful Chinese son, he forms an alliance with Su-Jen’s mother, one that will have devastating consequences. Written in spare, intimate prose, Midnight at the Dragon Café is a vivid portrait of a childhood divided by two cultures and touched by unfulfilled longings and unspoken secrets.

Identifies and summarizes thousands of books, article, exhibition catalogues, government publications, and theses published in many countries and in several languages from the early nineteenth century to 1981.