State Fairs : Growing American Craft

Your ticket to the best state fair crafts—from Choctaw basketry to sculpted butter cows—with more than 100 amazing images of American craft art!

A Dolly Parton crop art portrait. Size-96 cowboy boots. A quilt incorporating the jean outfits of a farmer and his son. This book features more than 100 photos of extraordinary and unconventional crafts from state and tribal fairs, including needlework, basketry, ceramics, crop art, butter sculpture, Nordic Rosemaling, and Spanish Colonial embroidery. In essays that explore the history of crafting at state fairs from the 1840s to present day, contributors reflect on:

• The way fairgrounds connect people through craft

• How the fair provided a public platform for women’s achievements
• The significance of Indigenous fairs

• 4-H and youth participation

• The relationship between fairs and studio craft
• Crafts in unexpected places, including tractor and machine halls, horticulture and dairy displays, rodeos, and horse races

From kitschy to tender, the highlighted crafts and the local and regional traditions behind them create a vibrant portrait of American culture. Come one, come all! State Fairs has a little something for everyone.

MARY SAVIG is the Lloyd Herman Curator of Craft at the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Renwick Gallery. She is co-curator of the 2022 exhibition "Subversive, Skilled, Sublime: Fiber Art by Women at the Smithsonian American Art Museum" and curator of the Renwick's 50th anniversary exhibition, "This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World" (2022). SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM holds one of the world's largest and most inclusive collections of art, from the colonial period to the present, made in the United States.