Henry Glassie: Field work

Henry Glassie: Field Work from Director Pat Collins is a portrait of the celebrated folklorist and ethnologist Henry Glassie. Inspired by and featuring Glassie – ‘Field Work’, is an immersive and meditative film set among the rituals and rhythms of working artists in Brazil, Turkey, North Carolina and Ireland. The film displays the director’s trademark eye for details and the process of the artist’s work is awe-inspiring. Glassie’s subject is folklore and art but his deep abiding love for the people who create it resonates throughout the film. “I don’t study people” Glassie says, “I stand with people and I study the things they create.” Artists like the sculptor Edival Rosas from Salvador in Brazil describe their practice as one where body and spirit are integrated, where in Glassie’s words the creative act brings “a momentary fulfilment of what it is to be human”.

Henry Glassie, College Professor Emeritus at Indiana University, has received many awards for his work, including the Chicago Folklore Prize, the Haney Prize in the Social Sciences, the Cummings Award of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, the Kniffen and Douglas awards of the Pioneer America Society, the Nigerian Studies Association Book Prize, and formal recognition for his contributions from the ministries of culture of Turkey and Bangladesh. Three of his works have been named among the notable books of the year by The New York Times. 

In 2010, he was given the American Folklore Society’s award for a lifetime of scholarly achievement. He received the prestigious Charles Homer Haskins Prize of the American Council of Learned Societies in 2011; the award honors a “scholarly career of distinctive importance,” and Glassie is the first folklorist to be so honored. Glassie has lectured throughout the United States and Canada, and in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Malta, Turkey, Israel, Kuwait, India, Bangladesh, China, and Japan. He is the author of Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States, Folk Housing in Middle Virginia, All Silver and No Brass, Irish Folk History, Passing the Time in Ballymenone, Irish Folktales, The Spirit of Folk Art, Turkish Traditional Art Today, Art and Life in Bangladesh, Material Culture, The Potter’s Art, Vernacular Architecture, The Stars of Ballymenone, Prince Twins Seven-Seven: His Art, His Life in Nigeria, His Exile in America, and Daniel Johnston: A Portrait of the Artist as a Potter in North Carolina. He is also the co-author of Ola Belle Reed and Southern Mountain Music on the Mason-Dixon Lineand Sacred Art: Catholic Saints and Candomblé Gods in Modern Brazil.