A number of approaches to creativity research cite the importance of material actors, including the ongoing roles of artifacts produced by creative work. The present chapter addresses some of these concerns, as well as the indefinite temporal, geographic, and material boundaries of contexts, through a case study on the Book of Arithmetic Problems of Johannes Whisler in the collection of the American Folk Art Museum, in New York. This chapter explores the path of the book from its original context, an early nineteenth-century Pennsylvania German community, to its eventual placement in an elite museum collection in the late twentieth century. Creativity is expressed as an open system, in which the artifact transforms and is transformed within a meshwork of contexts. For this case, the chapter describes the emergence of “folk art” as a category developed by a cosmopolitan elite in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the recognition of fraktur (Pennsylvania German manuscript arts) as folk art; and the history of Johannes Whisler’s cyphering book and its rediscovery. This is followed by an analysis of the facets of contextuality running through these histories and the conclusion that temporal, geographic, and material distance and emptiness are relevant aspects of context.