Over 1,000 pieces of folk art to be sold by Slotin Auction, Apr. 30-May 1 A weekend sale featuring over 1,000 lots of folk art in a wide array of genres will be held April 30-May 1 by Slotin Auction at the Historic Buford Hall in Buford, Ga., located just north of Atlanta.
News-Antique.com - Apr 12,2011 - (BUFORD, Ga.) – A weekend sale featuring over 1,000 lots of folk art in a wide array of genres will be held April 30-May 1 by Slotin Auction at the Historic Buford Hall, located just north of Atlanta. Featured will be many pieces from the lifetime collection of Salvatore Scalora, director of the Atrium Gallery and the William Benton Museum at the University of Connecticut.
The auction will provide bidders with an eclectic and exciting mix of offerings: outsider and self-taught art, Southern folk pottery, American paintings and portraits, quilts, weather vanes, samplers, Americana carvings, shooting gallery targets, trade signs, tramp art, vernacular photography, Haitian works, African art, religious art, erotica, Jewish art, antique and anonymous works, and some incredible new discoveries. Slotin Auction specializes in bringing the strange, the unusual and the vanishing America to auction.
“We’re calling this our Spring Masterpiece Sale, with the theme being Changing Faces of American Folk Art,” said Steve Slotin of Slotin Auction, based in Buford. “Folk art, while deeply rooted in history and the American experience, is evolving, like any other art form, and this sale will reflect emerging trends. We’re really mixing things up. This will be one great sale.”
Salvatore Scalora was born in Italy into a large family of peasant farmers who emigrated to the United States. Salvatore was the only one of eight children to attend high school, then he went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Art Institute of Chicago. While there, he and a friend, Clay Morrison, developed a deep love and appreciation for the world of folk art. Clay passed away a few years ago and, at his request, his collection was sold through Slotin Auction as a benefit for the School of Art in Chicago.
As is the case with many early self-taught art enthusiasts, Mr. Scalora not only collected folk art, he made frequent trips to his folk artist heroes, at first with Clay Morrison and later his wife. Trekking into often rural and forbidding terrain, he broke bread and befriended giants in the field such as Edgar Tolson, S.L. Jones, Lanier Meaders, William Dawson, Minnie Black, Noah Kinney, Carl McKenzie, Denzil Goodpaster and others. The earliest of collectors often covet these quirky meetings with the artists as much as the art treasures they bring home.
“I was consumed with these amazing artists as I ventured out to experience their folk art
environments,” Mr. Scalora said. “As we visited our old folk artist friends, and sought out new ones, it became evident that there was so much wisdom in the folk artists’ lives and in their art. They led mostly ordinary, productive lives, but were drawn into this new creative life later on.”
Some expected top lots of the auction follow, with accompanying high and low estimates.
Works by Bill Traylor are always in high demand, and this sale will feature several fine examples, including a signed ink on cardboard work titled Drinking Man With Owl and Two
