MOREHEAD --

That Thursday night last month at the Kentucky Folk Art Center, there were as many people in jeans and sweatshirts as in suits and ties queuing up at a buffet that offered deli roast beef and spinach-camembert mousse. Off to one side was a bucket of Rolling Rock on ice that more than held its own with bottles of an Australian chardonnay.
In the midst of it all stood the reason for the soiree: Minnie Adkins, the grande dame of American folk art, who has almost as many of her famous blue rooster carvings in galleries, private collections and museums as Calder has mobiles.

For close to a quarter-century, Adkins, the grandmother from Happy Gizzard Hollow in Elliott County, has whittled her way to fame and a certain amount of fortune -- depending on how you measure that -- with her menagerie of horses, anteaters, bears and possums that have yet to lose their appeal as the quintessence of self-taught art.
It's art that was created out of necessity. Simply, Adkins started carving and selling her art as a way to make money for her family.

Yet the accolades that her work has garnered from scholars and collectors after almost three decades have done much to curb the predilection to pigeonhole creativity according to an artistic hierarchy.
In the eyes of Jay Williams, curator at the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Ga., that's a significant win for the art world.

The Morris, a museum begun in 1992 to promote and preserve Southern art, has one of Adkins' carvings of a horse.
"It has the same kind of elegance and design that you see in classic modern art," he said. "When you have artists whose design and subject matter come out of the combination of personal experience and imagination, it has the greatest sense of authenticity.

That is what Minnie Adkins is doing.
"Her work to me is evidence of the artificiality of the line that people tend to draw between works by unschooled artists and those with formal training."
He said people don't even know whether to call it folk art, visionary art or art by non- formally schooled artists.

"The fact that people don't know what to call it, it must be a fairly artificial distinction."
Whatever it's called, galleries from Georgia to Hannibal, Mo., to as far as British Columbia carry work by Adkins, who regularly gets commissions from dealers and collectors wanting specific pieces.

"Since I have got to making foxes, possums, bears and pigs, as soon as I get one made, it's sold," said Adkins, who turned 73 last week.
Adkins' signature work is a big blue rooster, one of which stands outside the folk art center. But her most famous carving is a series of Noah's arks, about 3 feet long and made of half logs, with a collection of 24 animals and eight figurines.

"At one time, I went into Wal-Mart, and there was one of those Noah's arks on a calendar. I got so excited and told the girl at the checkout that I made that," Adkins told the Herald-Leader in 2005. "She looked at me like I was as nutty as a fruitcake.

"
Often the roosters, Noah's arks and the rest of Adkins' carved-wood menagerie are seriously collected, with some pieces fetching as much as $5,000. A great many of the works in the folk art center's Adkins retrospective come from the private collection of the late Richard Edgeworth, a retired British Airways flight attendant who donated the majority of his Adkins collection -- 91 pieces, valued at $23,000 -- to the center before his death in February.
Part of the appeal of some of Adkins' work is that its design defies the usual conception of folk art as cutesy craft objects.

Four years ago, Anne Bullard and her sister-in-law Kay Garth opened the online gallery Southern Visionary Art from their homes in Pensacola, Fla., and the pair have found that an Adkins horse has wide buyer appeal.
"It has a sleek, modern look.

It just appeals to a lot of different people," Bullard said. "You can take that horse and put it in a very modern house, and it is just beautiful for the lines. It just transfers to a lot of different homes.

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Adkins had been selling her art for about 10 years when she got a call from Marcia Weber, owner of Marcia Weber Art Objects in Montgomery, Ala. Weber had seen some of Adkins' animals at a traveling exhibit in Huntsville and wanted to meet Adkins.
"I instantly became a fan of hers.

I love her whimsical nature," Weber said. "Her style is a signature in itself. .

.. You know that's a Minnie Adkins.

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After getting lost a half-dozen times, Weber found her way to the artist's door and was promptly served vegetable soup and monkey bread. The next day, Weber went back to Alabama with an Adkins fox, a deeper understanding of folk artists and an idea of what Adkins' real legacy might be.
"It's about making ends meet, but it is more than that.

It is that creative spirit that is bubbling out of them like a wellspring," Weber said. "That lady is so generous and open and giving. That sweet, sweet spirit definitely comes through in her art.

That, I think, is what is going to be remembered."
It seemed as much like a neighborhood block party as an upscale art gallery opening for a living legend.