Art - Overview

The National Museum of American History is not an art museum. But works of art fill its collections and testify to the vital place of art in everyday American life. The ceramics collections hold hundreds of examples of American and European art glass and pottery. Fashion sketches, illustrations, and prints are part of the costume collections. Donations from ethnic and cultural communities include many homemade religious ornaments, paintings, and figures. The Harry T Peters "America on Stone" collection alone comprises some 1,700 color prints of scenes from the 1800s. The National Quilt Collection is art on fabric. And the tools of artists and artisans are part of the Museum's collections, too, in the form of printing plates, woodblock tools, photographic equipment, and potters' stamps, kilns, and wheels.
"Art - Overview" showing 1 items.
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Division of Community Life Dissertation Series: Lange, Yvonne: "Santos: The Household Wooden Saints of Puerto Rico," 1975
- Notes
- "Santos" is a term used in Latin America to describe the locally made wooden sculptured representations of the Roman Catholic celestial hierarchy. In the nineteenth century this form of folk art developed in the central highlands of Puerto Rico. These cheerful images were deeply revered by the peasant farmers as the embodiment of an invisible and powerful presence which brought sympathetic feeling and fellowship to the community
- Summary
- One copy in four volumes (872 pp.) of the typescript of Lange's dissertation "Santos: The Household Wooden Saints of Puerto Rico (1975)" by Yvonne Lange. The dissertation, written for the Ph.D. in Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania, attempts to analyse the phenomenon of the "santos" by describing its major features and to explain its existence through the historical, socio-economic, and religious factors that influenced it. This work is illustrated with photographic prints, most of which were taken by the author, mounted on text pages. Some of the santos described and illustrated are from Smithsonian collections, including the Teodoro Vidal Collection
- Cite as
- Division of Community Life Dissertation Series: Lange, Yvonne, Santos: The Household Wooden Saints of Puerto Rico (1975), AC NMAH
- Date
- 1975
- author
- Lange, Yvonne (Director Emerita, Museum of International Folk Art) 1918-2003
- collector
- Community Life, Div. of, NMAH, SI
- Subject
- Vidal, Teodoro
- Data Source
- Archives Center - NMAH

