“Folk art is a slippery term that can lead the unwary into a scholarly semantic quagmire from which there can seem to be no escape,” writes curator Gerald W.R. Ward in the introduction to the catalogue for the exhibition New Hampshire Folk Art: By the People, For the People, previously at Discover Portsmouth, operated by the Portsmouth Historical Society.“Primitive, naïve, popular, vernacular, ethnic, outsider, rural, and many other terms have been used to describe or modify folk art,” Ward continues. “For many people, to quote a famous New Englander, ‘it is what it is.’”