Edward Hicks has become an exemplar of American folk art for his visionary landscapes filled with life. His earthy realism is far more sophisticated than his status would suggest. Warm colors and well-rounded figures all but pop out of the canvas, even as faces remain emblematic and the construction in depth more than a little awkward. It is still the country you only wish you knew.
Peaceable Kingdom, his most popular painting, embodies that wish, and more than sixty versions survive. Well-dressed Americans, adults and children, share the scene with wide-eyed animals, with equal claims to nature, culture, and an emerging nation. Still another painting extends its harmony to black and white America as well, but prospects were hardly peaceable, and the Civil War was only fourteen years away. The American Folk Art Museum gives it pride of place in “Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Absence in the Early American North,” through March 24. 
The museum also brings the story up to date with five recent and contemporary African Americans, as “Marvels of My Own Inventiveness.” Drawing on its enormous collection, it aims to make presences and absences alike difficult to overlook.
Hicks aimed for much the same. He lived among Quakers and others opposed to slavery, and his painting describes a community in which blacks work the land as autonomous beings. This kingdom was in truth a republic and not a distant utopia, but within reach. Now that outsider art is finding an audience, in galleries and collections, it helps to remember that it had one all along. Folk art always belonged to the community—and quilting or glazing to those who knew and admired craft. For Hicks, that community could still return.
Not that Hicks was naïve about the future or, for that matter, about art. His community had developed its own rifts, and more than one version of Peaceable Kingdom shows a majestic tree riven as well, as a warning. The Folk Art Museum, too, intends a warning. Slaves and free blacks alike are a presence in American history that many would just as soon overlook, while legal and other restrictions enforced their absence. The same story applies today. Still, “Unnamed Figures” paints a pretty upbeat picture.
It includes black faces, like a fully realized couple by William Matthew Prior in 1843. It includes black presences in landscape. Can you spot them, and just what are they doing? For whom are they doing it at that? Longer, narrower landscapes once hung high above furniture or a door. They served their purpose in the home, but they make anyone, black or white, that much harder to spot.
It includes black artists, like Joshua Johnson, a successful portrait painter. Did you notice that he has white sitters almost every time? His one black sitter was family, painted not for the market, but for their sake and his own. Ammi Phillips is another rarity, a woman in early American art with a white, middle-class following. Did you notice that two of her portraits include a strip of cotton and (lord help us) a watermelon? 
In each case, you have to supply what is absent and why.
Still, this is not a game of “Where’s African American Waldo?” Blackness itself becomes visible. Another black artist, Moses Williams, renders it in profile silhouettes. Early photos turn to blacks as well, and the museum throws in more recent photos of the descendants of slaves as well. They breach the show’s limits, but they reinforce that presences still matter. The museum also recovers a well-worn headstone, its name crying out to be read.
The museum makes room for well over a hundred works, on top of the room for “Marvels.” (It does not feel crowded.) It has other media as well, such as a powder horn and embroidery. If women could find a voice in textiles, like the Gee’s Bend weavers in the Deep South, why not blacks? It has minstrel shows in works on paper and a diorama as surreal as a Joseph Cornell box. But then where would racial tensions be without embarrassing stereotypes?
The show makes a point of the ubiquity of those tensions, by skipping right past the South. It sticks to New England and the mid-Atlantic states, including Joseph Shoemaker Russell with a black storekeeper in Philadelphia and Francis Guy in a Brooklyn winter. It benefits from folk art’s near indifference to traditional distinctions like landscape and genre painting. A view of a house by Rufus Hathaway in 1795 opens onto an active port in Massachusetts. Just what is folk art anyway? You never know these days, but this once it speaks for true outsiders in the peaceable kingdom.
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