Folk Bikes: Our Mission

Our mission here at folk bikes is to document with photographs and text those bikes that are no longer boring and indistinguishable from 100s and 1000s of other identical, mass produced bikes. These are bikes that are unique due to the effects of aging, rarity, customization, or applied folk art. We call these bikes "folk bikes" borrowing from the use of the term folk, as in folk art, to suggest the role of individual folk (people and not companies and corporations) who personalize and change mass-produced bicycles. Similarly, a 30-year-old stock Schwinn that is weathered and dented and now utterly unique due to the ravages of time, is also welcome, representitive of the role of nature in "customizing" a bike so that it becomes a unique object. We are not bike snobs and any little thing can make a bike unique, even a mass-produced Schwinn or contemporary mountain bike. Thus, we strive to find those bikes that embody the odd, the unique, the weathered, and the creatively bastardized. Please help us by submiting your own local discoveries to r-baird@uiuc.edu.

best

Robert

to start us off, one of my own rides, a Schwinn Le Tour, with Prairie Farms milk cart held on with plastic ties