By Helen Mosher
On first inspection, the enormous cheval glass in one corner of the Peebles Gallery appears to be an ornate carving with incredible texture and detail. Indeed, the piece took more than eight years for David Fox to carve from solid blocks of wood.
The mirror is one of several pieces in the museum’s Tramp Art exhibit, which is on display at the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Museum through Nov. 30.
And it’s a good example of why “Tramp Art,” as the technique was named in the 20th century, might be a bit of a misnomer. Northern European immigrants, having settled into working life in America, passed their leisure time creating Tramp Art – often from discarded shipping crates and cigar boxes — as a hobby in their living rooms or workshops. That’s a pretty far cry from itinerants who would have to pack these pieces up and carry them around.
The notch-carved borders and stacked layers give Tramp Art its distinctive texture.
“It looks very intricate and geometric when you look at the finished project,” says Tara Chicirda, curator of the exhibit. “But they are taking small, thin pieces of wood, cutting them into geometric shapes, layering them, and chip-carving the edges.”
Fastening the layers with decorative nails also added more dimension to the finished project – usually a keepsake box or a frame, or possibly a wall pocket, a child’s toy or a piece of doll furniture.
Cigars were tremendously popular during the late 1800s and early 1900s, and discarded cigar boxes were the primary source of wood for the craft. They were often made of quality woods such as mahogany or cedrela, sometimes known as Spanish cedar.
“Legally, they couldn’t reuse cigar boxes for cigars, so cigar stores just had piles of these things,” Chicirda explains. “You could just go and take them.” Packing crates were another popular source of salvaged wood—while you can’t see the back of the mirror on exhibit, Chicirda noted that the mirror glass itself was mounted on part of a packing crate.
“This was an early form of recycling,” she says. “They would also incorporate little knobs, tacks, pieces of mirror and other things they would find around the house, and they’d use stains and paints to add color.”
And, she says, part of the appeal was in its simplicity. “All you really needed was a penknife and a hammer.”
Tramp Art techniques most likely originated in Germany and Scandinavia and evolved into a pastime pursuit that fathers would teach their sons during the 19th century. Several magazines of that time published “how-to” articles that helped broaden the craft’s appeal.
Tramp art woodwork finds a nifty analog in a similar textile art popular among the women of that era: Crazy Quilts. The unusual shapes, fabrics and decorative stitching of crazy quilts “creates the same busy effect of lots of things going on,” Chicirda notes. “It was the aesthetic of the period.”
Tramp Art, like quilting, involves recycling raw materials, cutting them into new shapes, and assembling them into a new, useful-but-decorative item, frequently made as a gift. “It might be a jewelry box for a woman or a toy for a child,” Chicirda says. “Some of the folks were very prolific— one York, Pa., maker who numbered and signed his work made 101 boxes by 1917.”
Others were rather inventive. Among the other pieces in the collection is a wagon toy that is a feat of engineering. As the toy moves, so does the driver—as well as the stowaway snake in the back of the wagon. “When it pops up, it terrorizes the poor driver,” says Chicirda, pointing to the short video loop that shows the sneaky viper at work.
“Tramp Art is a wonderful expression of the time period in which it was made and the people who made it,” she says. “While some pieces clearly follow a pattern, others seem completely whimsical, with just the imagination and creativity of the man who was carving it.”
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