‘An Opinionated Guide to Folk Art’ by Farah Abdessamad. 160pp, hardback, 129 x 180mm. Hoxton Mini Press, 2025.

The best art isn’t just created in art schools. Scratched into cave walls, molded in clay, embroidered onto clothing, sketched in the margins, painted on scrap cardboard in time snatched after work, perhaps in secret. Art is not only made inside academies and institutions by people with money and training, though sometimes the canon suggests otherwise. From an intricate ceramic pipe to the world’s largest quilt, this opinionated guide reveals 67 of history’s most important works of art created by so-called everyday ‘folk’. As a whole, they challenge our preconceptions about what constitutes art, how it should be made and who should make it.

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