About the artist
1889–1985, lived and worked in Waverly, Virginia
Miles Burkholder Carpenter’s droll, elegant wood sculptures are among the most accomplished and popular examples of twentieth-century American folk carving. It is a fitting achievement, given his surname and the fact that he spent many of his formative years working with wood, albeit on a larger scale, in his father’s sawmill. Informed by a youth spent in two areas steeped in traditional arts––Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and Tidewater, Virginia––Carpenter’s diverse practice incorporates both time-honored techniques and a keen comic eye for the condition of contemporary modernity. Born in 1889 in Brownstown, Pennsylvania, a deeply traditional Pennsylvania Dutch community, the artist moved with his family to Waverly, Virginia, in 1901, where he remained for the remainder of his life. After working at his father’s mill, Carpenter struck out on his own at age twenty-three, first with his own lumber business (and forays into summer theater), and beginning in 1955, as the proprietor of a roadside ice, beverage, and produce market.
Although he began making small carvings in the 1940s, Carpenter dedicated himself more seriously to his art in the 1960s, first in entrepreneurial spirit, to create sly signage for his store, and then in profound sadness, following his wife’s death in 1966. Many of his pieces stood in the flatbed of his truck next to his store (a building that still stands as a museum in honor of the artist and in celebration of peanuts, the most famous local crop). His subjects range from signature watermelon wedges to farm animals and fantastic creatures to portraits of family members and “Indians” to appropriated advertising and pop cultural imagery. Always evident in his artwork is the playful sense of humor that likewise suffuses his 1982 autobiography Cutting the Mustard. Carpenter’s sculptures came to the attention of the mainstream art world in 1972, and, since then, his bestiary of wooden fauna (and folks) has come to be highly regarded, featured in the Smithsonian Museum of American Art and other notable collections.
—Brendan Greaves
Bibliography
Common Ground/Uncommon Vision: The Michael and Julie Hall Collection of American Folk Art. Milwaukee, WI: Milwaukee Art Museum, 1993.
Hartigan, Lynda. Made with Passion: The Hemphill Folk Art Collection in the National Museum of American Art. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990.
Hemphill, Herbert W., Jr., and Julia Weissman. Twentieth-Century American Folk Art and Artists. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1974.
Horwitz, Elinor Lander. Contemporary American Folk Artists. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1975.
Miles B. Carpenter. Richmond, VA: Hand Workshop, 1989.
Miles Carpenter: A Second Century. Radford, VA: Radford University, 1990.
Miles Carpenter: The Woodcarver from Waverly. Richmond, VA: Anderson Gallery, Virginia Commonwealth University, 1985.
One Hundred Miles: The 100th Anniversary of Miles Carpenter. Waverly, VA: The Miles B. Carpenter Museum, 1989.
Outside the Mainstream: Folk Art in Our Time. Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 1988.
The Ties that Bind: Folk Art in Contemporary American Culture. Cincinnati, OH: The Contemporary Art Center, 1986.
A Time to Reap: Late-Blooming Folk Artists. South Orange, NJ: Seton Hall University/Museum of American Folk Art, 1985.
Transmitters: The Isolate Artist in America. Philadelphia: Philadelphia College of Art, 1981.
Tree of Life: The Inaugural Exhibition of the American Visionary Art Museum. Baltimore: American Visionary Art Museum, 1996.
Yelen, Alice Rae. Passionate Visions of the American South: Self-Taught Artists from 1940 to the Present. New Orleans: New Orleans Museum of Art in association with University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 1994.