John Michael Vlach (1948–2022)

John Michael Vlach, who made major contributions as an author, editor, and curator to folklife scholarship with illustrious studies of traditional architecture, craft, and art, died on October 30, 2022, in Washington, DC. He was also an educational leader who, as founding director of the graduate program in folklife at George Washington University (GW), inspired many budding folklorists. Not one to shy away from controversy, he boldly cut against the academic grain with his research and leadership, and his masterful studies of material folk culture changed the ways that people think about the historic African American experience—and American life in general.John was born on June 21, 1948, in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Billie Katherine Kauiokamo'onohu Wond and Richard Reed Vlach, of Hawaiian and Czech backgrounds, respectively. A structural engineer working on maritime bridges and piers, Richard moved his family during John's youth first to Alaska and then to various locations in California until ultimately settling in Berkeley. John attended the University of California, Davis, and while still an undergraduate, served as a research assistant to anthropology professor Daniel J. Crowley, who specialized in sub-Saharan African and Caribbean folklife. Afflicted with polio, Crowley relied on John's help with field research in Togo, Senegal, Mali, Liberia, Haute-Volta (now Burkina Faso), République du Dahomey (now Benin), Niger, Cote d'Ivoire, and The Gambia. John gained additional valuable experience on the African continent with a study abroad semester in Ghana. After obtaining a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1970, John moved on for his graduate studies to Indiana University, Bloomington, where he focused on folklife and material culture studies with Africanist Roy Sieber and folklorists Warren Roberts and Henry Glassie.At Indiana University, John continued his work on the African diaspora with a dissertation (co-chaired by Roberts and Glassie) on the West African roots of the shotgun house, whose transmission he was the first to trace from West Africa, through Haiti, into New Orleans, and up the Mississippi River. John received his PhD from Indiana University in 1975, and articles drawn from his groundbreaking dissertation were published the next year to many accolades. He had already made a name for himself by mobilizing his student colleagues to draw attention to African folklore with a volume he edited for Folklore Forum titled “Studies in Yoruba Folklore,” to which he contributed “The Functions of Proverbs in Yoruba Folktales” (1973). The title indicates his ethnographic interest in functionalism, to which he added queries into cultural diffusion within the African diaspora that resulted in another article for Folklore Forum on folktale diffusion across the Sahara. In 1972, he published his first material culture study in Pioneer America on a saddlebag log house in Indiana. He branched out into American children's folklore with a functional analysis of the newly identified American genre of “anti-legends” drawn from local fieldwork in an article for Indiana Folklore (1971). Setting a future path in the interdisciplinary field of American Studies as well, he won, with co-author and classmate Howard Marshall, the American Folklore Society's award for best article by a student for the publication of the diffusionist study “Toward a Folklife Approach to American Dialects” in the prestigious journal American Speech (1973).John had a short stint in 1975–1976 as Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland before moving to the Anthropology Department of the University of Texas, Austin. Fresh out of the gate, John launched into a major exhibition and book for the Cleveland Museum of Art titled The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts (1978) with examples of historic buildings, pottery, basketry, and metalwork. The exhibition turned heads as it toured around the country, providing, in John's own words, a “revisionist portrait of black America” that underscored the living African cultural legacy in American life (Vlach 1990:vii). He followed this broad historic material culture survey with a contemporary behavioristic study of a living African American artist in Charleston Blacksmith: The Work of Philip Simmons (1981). John continued the African American experiential theme with new research in Texas that was at the core of By the Work of Their Hands: Studies in Afro-American Folklife (1991). In the book and countless illustrated public presentations, he drew out the artistry and agency that African Americans had historically displayed on the landscape and in the everyday objects they created. Emerging in his impressive body of material culture studies was a social ecological approach that—more than reconstructing a historic-geographic genealogy of house and craft types, as was current in scholarship then—documented and analyzed the social and material connections of residents with special attention to racial and ethnic inequities and the ways that these relationships were enacted and influenced by physical surroundings. This historical inquiry of social ecology often led John to comment on the continuities of the past into the present.John came back east in 1982 to lead the new folklife program at George Washington University with the title of Professor of American Studies and Anthropology. In this position, he established in the nation's capital a conspicuous niche in the folkloristic profession with education and resources centered on material culture and public heritage. In addition to directing the program, he served the department dutifully at different times as the chair of American Studies and as its director of graduate and undergraduate studies. He was a highly sought-after consultant and panelist for many organizations in and outside of the nation's capital, including national endowments for the arts and humanities. As a DC resident, John had a sharp scholarly eye for local landscapes and hidden histories, evident in his published explorations of the African American cultural legacy in the District of Columbia. He enjoyed giving tours of the alley dwellings on “the Hill” and served on the District of Columbia's Historic Preservation Review Board. He also was a featured resident scholar in the Overbeck Capitol Hill History Project1 and served as an advisor to the National Council for the Traditional Arts. In 1996, John was one of the youngest scholars, up to that point, elected to the Fellows of the American Folklore Society. He also served the profession with his appointment as the Journal of American Folklore's exhibitions and events review editor, editorial board member of Southern Cultures, and as a charter member of the editorial board of Material Culture.John's work on folk art included the reinterpretation of early American painting in Plain Painters: Making Sense of American Folk Art (1988). In this controversial book, John dauntlessly took on the art world that was stuck on aesthetic, class-based definitions of folk art, in another broad revisionist project to theorize the folkloristic criteria of community and tradition in folk art. The project led to a collaboration with me on Folk Art and Art Worlds (1986, 1992) that drew on essays from the Washington Meeting on Folk Art organized by the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. In our work together, I witnessed firsthand the brilliant mind and profound insights that John possessed. I also gained a lifelong friend and saw up close his generous, caring, and gregarious personality about which students, colleagues, and collaborators wax eloquent.John was especially expert in architecture, and he should be recognized as a shaper of the emerging field of vernacular architecture studies. Most notably, he participated in research of architectural patterns, visual media, and the African diaspora, in journeys to uncover the overlooked cultural landscape and social ecology of slavery in the United States. The result was the path-breaking books Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (1993) and The Planter's Prospect: Privilege and Slavery in Plantation Paintings (2002). These books built upon his architectural field research in the African diaspora and his historical sensitivity to cultural representation as well as social reality. In his crisply written and abundantly illustrated volumes and multiple exhibitions, he confronted head-on the stark social inequities of American life. Through his folkloristic studies and community work, he engaged the public to make a difference in perceptions of race and ethnicity.Another indication of his role in molding the field of vernacular architecture studies was the editing, with architectural historian Dell Upton, of Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture (Upton and Vlach 1986), a landmark textbook that was widely adopted in college courses. It encouraged analytical viewing as well as writing about the cultural landscape. It made the case thatApropos of that documentary strategy, his final book Barns (2003) received the Fred Kniffen Book Award from the Vernacular Architecture Forum for an outstanding publication on North American material culture. The book used photographs from the Library of Congress to rethink the cultural significance of the humble workaday structure in the United States. He shared this interest in visual evidence with his life partner Beverly W. Brannan, senior curator of photography at the Library of Congress, and the two of them energized, and loved, each other.John retired from GW in 2013 when early-onset Alzheimer's disease made it difficult for him to continue teaching classes, writing scholarship, and presenting at conferences, all of which he loved to do. He was heartened, however, to receive that year the Henry Glassie Award from the Vernacular Architecture Forum for lifetime scholarly achievement in vernacular architecture studies. Thinking of future workers in the field, particularly in the US South, he arranged to have his papers archived at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, which has a folklore program.2 George Washington University honored John and his friend and American Studies colleague James Horton for “their extraordinary research and teaching legacies” by naming the Horton-Vlach Fund in recognition of their contributions and to support faculty and student research. George Washington University's Office of Alumni Relations organized a celebration of John's career on February 28, 2013, with 50 of John's former students and colleagues honoring him.3 Testimonials attested to the way that John helped them see as never before the profundity of the folk material world and appreciate the importance of the African diaspora. Students he mentored have taken up positions of leadership in which they advance learning and social action inspired by John's scholarship, congeniality, and humanity.