The Action in Folk Art : Trends: Often dismissed as “tourist” fare, crafts are commanding attention--and higher prices.

Ann Ulvestad retreats to her Park La Brea-area kitchen when she has a lot of thinking to do. That’s where she keeps some of here favorite pieces of Latin-American folk art: a woodcarving of a purple mermaid with bright-orange hair and a brightly colored 3 1/2-foot Tree of Life candelabra painted with biblical and mythical figures.

“I enjoy being surrounded by things that are pleasing to the eye,” said Ulvestad, an actress and writer who guesses that she owns about 100 smiling papier-mache skeletons. “I’m particularly interested in Day of the Dead figures because, for me, when I first saw them, they were very life-affirming. I saw them as dead people who are very alive, singing and dancing and so on.”

Lawrence Gipe and wife Lauren Lesko collect a different type of folk art--painted lacquer-ware, retablos (wall hangings that are saints painted on a sheet of tin, which often comes from a discarded oil can) and ex-votos (paintings of miracles, also on a sheet of tin). They have 13 retablos hanging in their Silver Lake living room.

“Both of us are artists,” Gipe said. “There’s so much irony and so much cynicism in the field that we work in that the non-ironic nature of retablos appeals to us. They reflect an incredible system of belief. Our home is a very sincere place and a very comforting place, and these retablos are just as sincere and comforting. And they’re beautiful paintings also.”

Ulvestad, Gipe and Lesko are not alone in their admiration of such “artworks.” As leaders of the local folk arts and crafts community attest, folk art--a broad classification that can include museum-quality artworks and pieces that are often dismissed as only “tourist art”--is rapidly gaining popularity.

And the L.A. market for it is bright. The Craft and Folk Art Museum on Wilshire Boulevard is increasing its space from 2,000 to 55,000 square feet. Expanding local shops that specialize in the articles report that prices for some types of folk artworks have doubled and tripled in just the last couple of years.

Other area museums and art galleries also show folk art. The Southwest Museum’s renowned collection of American Indian arts includes Indian baskets, textiles, and Hopi kachina dolls that museum officials classify as folk art. And a current show at Barnsdall Art Park’s Junior Arts Center Gallery, “Cats, Coyotes and Other Critters,” includes 36 woodcarvings by prominent Oaxacan folk artist Manuel Jiminez. His animals are displayed alongside works by more mainstream contemporary artists such as Harry Fonseca and William Wegman.

While most of the more popular folk arts and crafts are made by unknown crafts people in remote Mexican and Central-American villages, several artists, such as Jiminez, potter Josefina Aguilar and Mexico City artist Pedro Linares, who makes papier-mache skeleton figures, have risen to prominence.

“We have a few Jiminez pieces in our collection,” said Patrick H. Ela, executive director of the Craft and Folk Art Museum. “Pieces that used to be $80 a few years ago are now going for $1,000 or $2,000.”

The prices for such collectibles are far, far lower than the astronomical sums commanded for fine art. Works by even modern and contemporary masters now regularly sell in the seven-figure range.

Folk collectibles include a potpourri of items, some of the most popular of which are woodcarvings of animals such as the jaguar, masks replicating those once used in tribal ceremonies, miniature carvings and tin figures, cast-iron switchplates, ceramic bowls and figures, and carvings of various saints, called santos .

Much folk arts and crafts come out of traditional religious and family celebrations and ceremonies. One of the predominant celebrations is the Day of the Dead, Dia de Los Muertos, the Nov. 2 Mexican holiday that celebrates the reunification of dead friends and family members with the living. The dead are usually represented by smiling skeletons, called calaveras, who engage in a variety of activities ranging from dancing to boxing to even ironing.

“We have a tremendous market for Day of the Dead figures,” said Nancy Oshima, general manager of the Soap Plant on Melrose Avenue. “People usually shy away from images of death, but it’s becoming more accepted. People see it as a part of life now.”

There are any number of reasons for the increased interest in folk arts and crafts, not the least of which is that the work has become just downright trendy .

“You can find Mexican folk art at Bullock’s now, and 10 years ago you would never have seen it at a place like that,” said Peggy Byrnes, co-owner of Sonrisa, a folk art shop on Melrose Avenue. “It used to be a very select group that collected folk art, but not any more.”

“There’s that whole notion of grabbing something, collecting it before it’s gone,” said curator Laurie Beth Kalb of the Craft and Folk Art Museum. “That’s a collecting notion of the 20th Century, that the art is going to just go away. But folk art isn’t dying.”

“We’ve had a 50% increase in (sales of) Mexican folk art in the last year,” said the Soap Plant’s Oshima, who also works with the store’s upstairs folk art gallery called La Luz de Jesus. “Prices of woodcarvings have nearly doubled in the last year.”

In Pasadena, business is going so well for the popular Folk Tree on South Fair Oaks that owner Rocky Behr this summer opened a second store near the original.

Also recently expanded is Federico Jimenez’s Federico shop in Santa Monica, which specializes in Mexican and American Indian folk art.

Both Jimenez and the Folk Tree’s Behr credited “Santa Fe Style,” a 1986 decorating book by Christine Mather and Sharon Woods, as a big force behind the current folk-art craze. The book helped to make folk-art items such as santos popular as interior decorating accessories, Behr said.

Although Jimenez noted that folk-art prices have tripled in the last year, the affordability of most pieces (The Folk Tree has items ranging from 10 cents to $4,000, for instance) was an element cited by several folk-art aficionados. The works are affordable for beginning collectors.

The Craft and Folk Art Museum’s Kalb, however, cautioned that very little sold in most shops under the guise of folk art is actually museum-quality art.

“What Sonrisa and Folk Tree have is really tourist art, although it’s based on folk art,” said Kalb, who is completing her Ph.D. in folklore and folklife at the University of Pennsylvania. “As a museum, the distinctions that we make are that folk art is communally based.

“It comes from and speaks to a tradition; some form understood by a group of people. . . . Tourist art has to do with the consumer’s taste. It’s a category of pieces that’s made for us and that we evaluate on our own terms, not according to the maker’s criteria.”

While agreeing that many items in shops are indeed tourist art, Kalb’s counterpart at the Southwest Museum, Curator of Folklore Michael Heisly, stressed that tourist art “is not some kind of awful contamination. It’s merely part of the artists’ total social context, and (commercial buyers) are part of the universe of buyers.”

At the Craft and Folk Art Museum, a $12-million campaign to build a 55,000-square-foot home on Wilshire Boulevard and Curson Avenue is well under way. The new space, expected to open in 1992, will replace the museum’s 2,000-square-foot space on the same site. In the interim period, the museum--which has been closed since June 30--will take over 10,000 square feet on the fourth floor of the May Co. at Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue. The first exhibition in its temporary space, “Hands On! Objects Created in Our Time,” is scheduled to open Nov. 22.

Other American museums dedicated to the folk arts include San Francisco’s Craft and Folk Art Museum, La Jolla’s Mingei Museum of World Folk Art, Santa Fe’s Museum of International Folk Art and New York’s Museum of American Folk Art. Other institutions, such as San Francisco’s Mexican Museum, the San Antonio Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the Center for Southern Folklore in Oxford, Miss., and the Oakland Museum, employ folk art curators or present fairly frequent folk-art shows.

“In the last decade, there’s been substantive increases in interest in folk art, from everyone from collectors and scholars to the guy off the street,” said Charlene Cerny, director of the Santa Fe museum. “But as for institutions, there’s only a few of us.”

“It’s important for Los Angeles to have a credible folk-art institution because there are so many different cultural groups and language groups in Los Angeles. There’s a rising consciousness of knowing about multicultural diversity,” said the Craft and Folk Art Museum’s Ela.

The Wilshire Boulevard museum has about 1,800 Mexican, Japanese, Indian, American and other cultures’ folk items in its collection and hopes to increase its emphasis on collecting with the new building.

Sonrisa’s Byrnes suggested that the popularity of folk arts and crafts may be because the colorful pieces fill a spiritual need that is seldom met in large metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles.

“I think (folk art) bridges the gap between the inner world and the material world,” she said. “Religion is the other thing that speaks to that and a lot of us don’t practice that, so what’s left is art.

“It focuses on great myths: death, resurrection, birth. It’s about those issues that religion once dealt with, issues with a universal appeal.”