Much of the work in “Ancestry & Innovation: African American Art from the American Folk Art Museum,” now on display at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, was created by poverty-bound Southerners who rarely, if ever, examined art in an institutional setting.

Yet the Dixon’s austere, chapel-like galleries are the perfect environment for this vibrant collection of quilts, sculptures and paintings.

In recent years, several Memphis museums have embraced and elevated folk art, following the example set by cultural trendsetters such as New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art.

“Ancestry & Innovation” combines the spirituality of “Coming Home! Self-Taught Artists, the Bible and the American South,” exhibited at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis in 2004, and the modernist exuberance at the heart of “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend,” on display at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in 2005.

In several instances — South Carolina painter Henry Doyle, Louisiana painter Clementine Hunter and Alabama quilter Leola Pettway — artists from all three shows overlap.

“It comes in waves,” Brooke Anderson, director and curator of the New York City-based Contemporary Center of the American Folk Art Museum, says of the current interest in naïve art forms. “Over the last 100 years, there have been many times in art history when this work has been very well-received,” she says, explaining that staging a folk-art exhibit at a fine-art museum is hardly a novel event in the contemporary art world.

Kevin Sharp, the Dixon’s director, describes the art in this show as “works created from the detritus of everyday life, which has been transformed into heroic, monumental objects.”

Bessemer, Ala., artist Thornton Dial ’s monolithic “The Man Rode Past His Barn to Another New Day” is a looming three-dimensional canvas constructed from paint-coated fabric and fence wire. The primitive work crosses the boundary from physical to metaphysical, harnessing time and space to shape an allegory for all mankind.

Directly across the room, ocher enamel paint, carpet scraps and carved symbols combine to form “Lion of Africa,” an eye-popping jungle scene crafted by Thornton Dial Jr.

Only the nine quilts — hand-sewn by Mississippi Delta-based artists like Pearlie Posey and Pecolia Warner and their Alabama counterparts, Mozell Benson, Nora McKeon Ezell, and Dennis Jones — command more space, vibrating with a kaleidoscopic intensity that peaks with Pettway’s transcendent “Star of Bethlehem with Satellite Stars Quilt.”

The oversized components of this exhibit are balanced by smaller, but no less powerful work, such as Clementine Hunter’s “Playing Cards,” a portrait of women at an outdoor card game rendered in vivid primary hues.

Louisiana artist David Butler’s flock of painted tin creations are skillfully hung away from the wall, so that each piece has a shadowy twin, while Sam Doyle’s “I’ll Go Down,” a reworking of the crucifixion on a slatted window frame, is an exercise in graphic perspective.

With additional African-inspired artistry, exemplified here by “Mother Oatman,” a found object sculpture created by New Jersey artist Kevin Sampson, and “The Last Frontier,” a wooden assemblage by Detroit, Mich.-based sculptor Willie LeRoy Elliot, “Ancestry & Innovation” serves as a textbook survey of African-American folk art.

Stacy Hollander, the American Folk Art Museum’s senior curator and director of exhibitions, says the staff at the American Folk Art Museum is approached on a daily basis by self-described folk artists and families that own treasured samples of hand-hewn, high quality work. “This is what we’re all about,” she says, “bringing recognition to art made in unorthodox circumstances.”

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“Ancestry & Innovation: African American Art from the American Folk Art Museum” is on display at Dixon Gallery and Gardens through Oct. 12.

Sunday

Dance performance at 2 p.m. by New Ballet Ensemble, exploring the lineage of hip-hop dance and tracing its roots to Africa and tribal traditions. Free with admission.

Saturday, Aug. 23

“Reduce, Reuse, Recycle Workshop” will offer children an opportunity to create art using recyclable materials. Children are welcome to bring any recycled supplies to use.

Event is 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.. for ages 8-12. Reservations required. Cost is $10 for members, $12 nonmembers. Go to Dixon.org.