2008 LOWELL FOLK FESTIVAL CRAFTS AREA

Puerto Rican Vejigante Masks
Holyoke, Massachusetts

Angel Sánchez Ortiz, known as Junior, is a master artist in the Puerto Rican tradition of vejigante mask-making—the colorful spiky papier-mâché mascara worn during carnival.
His striking, fantastical masks of boldly painted papier-mâché depict animals, legendary people, and sometimes spirits and monsters that are imbued with cultural meaning. Forms and imagery come from the blend of African, Spanish, and native Táino cultures that is expressed in Puerto Rican carnival celebrations. Junior grew up experiencing the traditional carnival festivities held every February. During this time, family and friends were immersed in the celebration that heralds the beginning of Lent.

Wildfowl Decoy Carver
Essex, Massachusetts

It makes sense that the best decoy carvers also tend to be lifelong hunters. Successful hunters have to be keen observers of waterfowl in its particular habitat. Today, decoy carving has evolved to a fine and collectible art, yet its origins are practical: the pursuit of wildfowl as a food source.

Bob Brophy is a wildfowl decoy carver and lifelong hunter. He grew up on a small farm in Easton, Massachusetts, and remembers working on cranberry farms, harvesting wild berries and storing them between layers of salt hay in the farmhouse attic. He began decoy carving and hunting in his early teens, as his family hunted for both fowl and game, especially deer, in the nearby Hockomock Swamp. Hunting was a natural part of the calendar year and a necessary food source during the winter months.

Ship’s Wheel Maker
Halifax, Massachusetts

Bob Fuller may be the only one in Massachusetts who makes traditional hand-turned ship’s wheels, which he has done since 1977. He is the third generation to do so, having apprenticed to his father and grandfather, and today carries on the family tradition of woodworking and boatbuilding, as well as designing custom interiors.

Each ship’s wheel is handcrafted using tropical hardwoods such as teak and mahogany with ebony and holly accents, and finished by hand with a high-gloss varnish. Bob uses a lathe to turn the mahogany spokes. A minimum of five coats of varnish is required to achieve the high-gloss finish.

Puerto Rican Santos [saints] Carver
Amherst, Massachusetts

Santos, literally “saints” in Spanish, represent a centuries-old tradition of religious devotion practiced by Latino artisans who are called santeros. Historically, these small wooden carvings of religious figures associated with the Catholic Church were made to be used in the home for prayer or to ask for a cure.

While related representations of the saints are present in most of the former Spanish colonies, Carlos Santiago Arroyo’s work reflects the classical style of Puerto Rican santo carving popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries, with its symbolic sense of proportion and nearly expressionless facial features. Reflecting the physical isolation of many living on the island at that time, these three-dimensional figures were sized to fit home altars instead of churches. The identity of the saint is expressed through the “attribute” that accompanies and defines the figure, such as the book and quill pen of Saint Teresa or the dove of Saint Francis.

Polish pysanki (painted eggs)
Montague Center, Massachusetts

Among the most cherished cultural expressions among those of Polish descent is the tradition of decorating eggs, known as pysanki. In pre-Christian Eastern Europe, the egg symbolized the source of life; decorated eggs heralded a good harvest and were used as talismans to ward off evil spirits. While many of Eastern European heritage (and Americans generally) continue to decorate eggs at Easter, Carol Kostecki works year-round creating spectacularly detailed designs on spheres, which range from quail and miniature chicken eggs gathered for her by a local farmer to huge, imported ostrich eggs.

Carol was born in Greenfield, Massachusetts, of French-Canadian, German, and Abenaki descent, but married into a family of Polish heritage. She and her husband William took a class in pysanki-writing (drawing) in the early 1990s from a Ukrainian parish priest in the Pioneer Valley, and Carol became “hooked.” She soon worked year round in the evenings and between clients in her beauty shop. Since retiring, she has taught her own workshops including at the Descent of the Holy Spirit Ukrainian Church where she first watched pysanki being made.

Quill Work & Native Regalia
Petersham, Massachusetts

The use of porcupine quills to decorate baskets, boxes, garments, and other items was practiced by Woodlands and Great Plains Indians prior to European contact. The tradition has been revived by Dave Holland, who makes a form of regalia that dates back to the early 18th century. The designs are inspired by the Anishanaabe peoples of the Great Lakes region.

Growing up in Concord and Lincoln, Massachusetts, and later in Maine, Dave was inspired by living on sites of historic and cultural events that most people only read about in history books. So it was natural that he would be attracted to historical re-enactments and their related material culture and worldview. Much of his work also reflects items that Native people in this region also carried or used. When asked how he got started making regalia, he replied, “I used to do some re-enacting myself, but I couldn’t afford to buy the regalia. [Once] I found a road kill—and the rest is history.” A friend from the Penobscot tribe in Maine recently gave Dave a huge box with 80,000 quills in it.

Wooden-boat Builder
Essex, Massachusetts

Harold Burnham is an 11th-generation wooden-boat builder whose ancestors arrived in Essex, Massachusetts, in 1635. He credits his familial heritage as well as the maritime heritage of his hometown for his ability to develop his skills as a traditional wooden-boat builder. “Given that the shipbuilding industry has continued uninterrupted in Essex since the town’s first settlement, the number of vessels built here, their average tonnage, and the town’s relatively small population, it is hard to imagine a place on earth where shipbuilding is more deeply embroidered into the fabric of the community.”

Rug Hooker
Westford, Massachusetts

As a child Jeanne Fallier learned embroidery from her grandmother, but found her calling in hooking rugs, which she finds is “faster and more satisfying,” adding that a good “hooker” combines “artistic ability” with a “versatile craft.” She learned hooking through the Home Bureau, a more urban version of the Grange, on Long Island. After moving to Massachusetts in the 1970s, she was the first president of the Massachusetts chapter of the Association of Traditional Hooking Artists (ATHA), the national guild of rug hookers of which she was one of 35 founders.

Aquinnah Wampanoag Twined Basketry
Falmouth, Massachusetts

Before wood-splint basketry became widespread, Native peoples throughout New England made soft-form baskets out of other natural materials such as corn husks, rushes, bark fibers, and grasses. Few of these survive save for archaeological fragments, but there has been a revival of twining among the Wampanoag and Narragansett tribes.

Julia Marden is an Aquinnah Wampanoag who grew up in Falmouth. She learned the art of twined basketry while working at Plimoth Plantation. Twining is a technique in which one wraps and twists two weft strands around a warp strand.

Metalsmith
Hawley, Massachusetts

When the site of James Hook & Company, purveyors of live lobsters since 1925, burned down earlier this summer, all eyes were on the six-foot, gold-leafed lobster weathervane on the roof of the main structure, which was a landmark on Boston’s working waterfront. Metalsmith Marian Ives considered that weathervane her masterpiece and hopes that enough of it was salvaged that she can repair it for the Hooks. She also made the vane on top of the renovated Massachusetts Mill in Lowell.

New England Pounded Ash Basketry
Chesterfield, Massachusetts

Milt Lafond continues a style of basket making that has been passed down for three generations in the same shop, using the same molds, tools, and method of construction. His pounded white-ash baskets are noteworthy for their lasting sturdiness, the uniform quality of their weave, and the beauty of their form.

The sturdiness of Milt’s baskets reflects the history of their use in rural agricultural communities like the hill towns west of the Pioneer Valley, where he was born and now lives and works. With farming as a primary livelihood for the majority of families, baskets were essential utilitarian tools for harvesting crops. Baskets were also used by women to do their shopping and to carry food items, but they also needed to be especially well-constructed and strong enough for loading, carrying, and storing potatoes, onions, cucumbers, squash, and other local produce.

Hand-Carved Signs
Halifax, Massachusetts

Nicholas Lonborg is a woodworker who specializes in hand-carved signs. He learned the trade in an informal apprenticeship, starting at the age of 13, with Scituate, Massachusetts, woodcarver Paul McCarthy. The following year, Nick became a paid employee at Paul’s shop and worked there until he turned 17 and joined the Navy. Four years later, Nick went to work for William Rowe on Nantucket as a carver. After college, he set up his own shop in Halifax.

Retired, Local #17, Sheet Metal Workers International Association
Dorchester, Massachusetts

The day after the 2006 Saint Patrick’s Day Parade in Boston, a photograph in the Boston Globe showed two men dressed up as tin men handing out lollipops and identified them as members of Local 17 of the Sheet Metals Workers International Association, located in Dorchester.

Figurative sculptures known as tin men were made by sheet metal workers long before the tin woodman in the Wizard of Oz appeared on the screen. Metalsmithing is an ancient trade and for centuries, tin men have been used as trade signs advertising a metalsmith’s shop or wares. Including tin men in the annual Saint Patrick’s Day parade is a way for Local 17 to celebrate union pride and pride in their community, as well as recruit apprentices. The making of tin men is taught in apprenticeship classes and uses skills necessary to become a journeyman in the trade: layout, scribing, cutting, folding, rolling, bending, riveting, soldering, and filing. A tin man is emblematic of trade skill, calling attention to the craftsmanship required in fabricating metal products.

Chinese Seal Carver & Calligrapher
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Wen-Hao Tien?s earliest memory of practicing calligraphy is as a 10-year old in an after-school program back home in Taiwan. “It was a rainy afternoon in a full classroom with the smell of smoked pine from the ground ink thick in the air. We had to „copy the work of the ancient masters. But regardless of how diligently we practiced, our strokes seemed awkward and immature. I remember these afternoons as being simultaneously deep, mysterious, meditative…and frustrating. The teacher reminded us, however, that it takes a lifetime to perfect this ancient art form.”

Wen-Hao came to the US from Taiwan in 1987. She learned of master Chinese calligrapher, seal carver, and scholar Qianshen Bai—originally from Taiwan too and now a professor at Boston University--in 1998, when she began working as a program officer at Harvard University's Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, and assisted him at a community workshop on calligraphy hosted by the Chinese Culture Connection in Malden a few years later. Three years ago, Wen-Hao became Bai's formal apprentice with support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council's folk arts and heritage program.

Cambodian Master Ceramicist
Lowell, Massachusetts

A Cambodian master ceramicist, Yary Livan came to Massachusetts just seven years ago. He is the sole survivor of his generation of artists trained in traditional Khmer ceramics at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh. Forced to hide his education to survive under the Khmer Rouge, ironically it was his knowledge of traditional wood-burning kilns that saved him from certain starvation.

Yary’s mother, a fashion designer skilled in both traditional and contemporary creations, first inspired his interest in art. He was among the top 10 applicants from throughout the country in the entrance exam to the Royal Academy in the early 1970s, where he was assigned to specialize in traditional Khmer ceramics, which included knowing how to build and operate a kiln and how to make molds. He learned firsthand from traditional Cambodian master artists and craftsmen, and he has kept their traditions alive despite the intense persecution of artists that eradicated the cultural and economic life of Cambodia.