For Kith and Kin: The Folk Art Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago

The Art Institute of Chicago is home to one of the world's finest collections of American folk art. For Kith and Kin provides an introduction to that collection through more than sixty of its most outstanding objects. Selected by premier American art scholar Judith A. Barter, the majority of these objects have never before been published.

In a groundbreaking opening essay, Barter revisits the earliest days of folk-art collecting in Chicago, beginning in the 1890s. She pays special attention ...