Vintage Tramp Art
Don't Call Them Bums: The Unsung History of America's Hard-Working Hoboes
By Lisa Hix — Despite the ever-widening wealth gap, most of us continue to grasp at the American Dream, which promises financial security in exchange for hard work. In fact, for many workers in today's economy, attaining middle-class status is exactly that—a dream—while digital technologies have pushed enormous numbers of steady-paycheck employees into the unpredictable “gig economy,” where contracts are the norm. “If you broke the Hobo Code of Ethics, you would be punished by other hoboes.” Roughly...
Homespun Beauty: Jim Linderman on Folk Art’s Authentic Appeal
By Maribeth Keane and Bonnie Monte — My interest in 20th-century American self-taught art came about after I had gone through a million other things—from stamps to bootleg records to books about who killed JFK. I had been at CBS News in New York City for about 8 or 10 years, and I was kind of burned out from working too hard and drinking too much. So I just stopped doing both for a while. It was 1981, and the art scene was exploding. The most entertaining thing to do in New York at the time was to go gallery hopping....
Looking at Tramp Art with Author Clifford Wallach
By Maribeth Keane — My first book, "Tramp Art, One Notch at a Time", was self-published in 1998. At the time we started to do the book, it was just assumed that tramp art was made by tramps, but as we were examining the pieces, we started to see that it was more complicated than that. We started to find histories and biographies of some of the makers, and we started to move away from the idea of the tramp maker, this anonymous person walking through the countryside, making tramp art in exchange for food and...